The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-century Britain

by Andrew Wawn

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Summary

In many ways the Victorians invented the the term `viking', in its modern incarnation, is first recorded just thirty years before the young Princess Victoria's coronation, yet within fifty years it featured in the titlesof dozens of poems, plays, prize essays, published lectures, and parlour songs. Old Icelandic Edda and saga were used to legitimise everything from buccaneering Victorian mercantilism and imperial expansion to jury trial and women's rights, and regional consciousness flourished with the rediscovery of the viking contribution to local legend and place names. This is the first book-length treatment of the Victorians' fascination with the Old North. Walter Scott, William Morris, Edward Elgar and Rudyard Kipling appear alongside amateur enthusiasts from Lerwick to the Isle of Wight; the material examined, published and unpublished, includes novels, poems, lectures, periodicals, saga-stead travel, philology, art and music. Andrew Wawn draws this wide range of source material together to give a comprehensive account of the construction and translation of the viking age in nineteenth-century Britain.ANDREW WAWN is Professor of Anglo-Icelandic Studies at the University of Leeds. Fascinating and impressively scholarly... As Wawn points out, the Victorians not only more or less invented the Vikings as we know them, but also developed this creation into what amounted to a national obsession. TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

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