Northern memories and the English Middle Ages

Tim William Machan

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526145376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book provocatively argues that much of what English writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remembered about medieval English geography, history, religion and literature, they remembered by means of medieval and modern Scandinavia. These memories, in turn, figured in something even broader. Protestant and fundamentally monarchical, the Nordic countries constituted a politically kindred spirit in contrast with France, Italy and Spain. Along with the so-called Celtic fringe and overseas colonies, Scandinavia became one of the external reference points for the forging of the United Kingdom. Subject to the continual refashioning of memory, the region became at once an image of Britain's noble past and an affirmation of its current global status, rendering trips there rides on a time machine.

1

The spectacle of history

Memory is a dynamic process. It connects something from the past (whether an object, event, text, or idea) with some later individuals or institutions. The subjects and forms of memories therefore vary not only by time and location but also by their origins; memories can arise from strictly personal interest, but they also can be rooted in politics, ideology, ethnicity, national identity, and other social impetuses. The one constant in this dynamic process is the fact that the result of memory is the creation of some kind of community across time. Performative rather than simply reproductive, Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney point out, memory ‘is as much a matter of acting out a relationship to the past from a particular point in the present as it is a matter of preserving and retrieving earlier stories’.¹

This is a book about what I have called northern memories, a purposefully capacious expression in which ‘memories’ is meant to capture the multivalence of the kinds of things being remembered as well as of the ways in which these memories took shape. Equally capacious is ‘northern’, which all at once suggests something produced in the north, directed at it, or associated with it. Many of the works I discuss imply still another sense: ‘north’ as an imaginative construct that connotes a set of cultural values as well as a physical space. Inevitably, north is also a relational term, to the extent that what is north depends on where the observer – the one doing the remembering – literally and figuratively stands. ‘Middle Ages’ may denote a specific (if still relational) time period between the antique and early modern epochs, but the conjunction ‘and’ is likewise purposefully accommodating. For the memories I talk about are variously descended from the medieval period, inspired by it, and constitutive of the modern as well as the medieval. Even the adjective ‘English’ conveys some capaciousness, defining the Middle Ages as they took place in England, as they were imagined to have taken place there, and as they relate to England’s larger post-medieval concerns. All this means that the northern memories I discuss are less individual than collective – broadly shared cultural memories that, in their dynamics, fashion a present in the process of recalling a past.

Of course, the dynamic conjunction of Scandinavia with Britain predates even the medieval period. Migrants from what is typically called the North-west branch of the Germanic people inhabited both regions – in Britain beginning with the implosion of the Roman Empire and in Scandinavia much earlier – and they brought with them at least some common beliefs and practices. In early medieval Britain, such commonality was enforced, if also transformed, when Danish and Norwegian Vikings first raided, then settled, and eventually conquered their very distant Anglo-Saxon kin. Word borrowings, place-names, and folk traditions, especially in the Midlands and north of England, attest to the extensiveness of such contact. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, following the Norman Conquest and the cessation of migration from Scandinavia, the nature of this contact had changed considerably. No longer raiders or colonisers, descendants of the original Vikings had become English-speaking farmers and traders, living alongside descendants of the Anglo-Saxons and like them subservient to England’s kings with increasing ambitions to assert the political integrity of England as a nation. It is no exaggeration to say, then, that the whole of the English Middle Ages cannot be understood apart from the Scandinavian influence on it.

Studies of art, language, literature, kingship, and politics have explored this influence in compelling if sometimes narrow detail. Elaine Treharne, for instance, describes the eleventh and twelfth centuries as a period in which the native English worked to resist what she calls the trauma of the Norman Conquest by fashioning a continuation of narrowly Anglo-Scandinavian traditions.² And focusing on the early modern period’s interest in the pre-Conquest era, John Niles and Rebecca Brackmann independently emphasise the specifically English motivations and means for crafting a sense of Anglo-Saxon England.³ Indeed, Allen Frantzen described a ‘desire for origins’ that animated the work of early modern critics like Matthew Parker and motivated an inwardly focused antiquarian project in which, for modern scholars, Scandinavia’s formative role is often only ancillary.⁴ While such approaches illuminate the role of English texts and ideas in the post-medieval re-creation of the Middle Ages, they also largely bypass the Nordic world’s material and conceptual contributions to this re-creation. When medieval Scandinavia has figured in the memorialisation of the English Middle Ages, the emphasis typically has been on literary connections, especially on English writings composed since the late-eighteenth century.⁵

Within this familiar critical context, the present book seeks to do something much less familiar. It concerns how English writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries remembered Scandinavia, especially Iceland and Norway; how by remembering Scandinavia and its people they furthered contemporary sentiments not simply about that region but about the emerging global role of Great Britain; and how they often did so by selectively collapsing the contemporary world and the Middle Ages, providing memories of both in the process. More than simply a literary issue, I will argue, the construction of an Anglo-Scandinavian memory served as an organising principle for cultural politics, providing ways to read past and present alike as testaments to British exceptionalism. Put another way, much of what English critics of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries remembered about medieval English geography, history, religion, and literature, they remembered by means of Iceland, Norway, and, to lesser extents, Denmark and Sweden. And these memories, in turn, figure in something even broader, for they play a foundational (if under-appreciated) role in the fashioning of the United Kingdom, which accounts for the historical framework I follow: post-medieval and prior to what Reinhart Koselleck and others have characterised as the nineteenth-century emergence of a new kind of memory, one that turned away from understanding history as foremost an instructor of moral and political lessons.⁶

My topic, then, is essentially how Anglo-Scandinavian memories functioned between Robert Fabyan’s early-sixteenth-century Chronicles and the Victorian British Empire. With a timeframe as well as a topic as broad as these, I want to turn now to several specific contexts that underwrite my selectivity and thesis. Specifically, I want to develop some relevant historical medieval connections between Britain and Scandinavia; the ways in which medieval and modern commentators have represented these connections; and, within the frame of historical imagination and memory studies in general, my own approaches and objectives, as well as the scope and structure of this book.

The medieval Middle Ages

Some time around the year 1500 BCE, Indo-European peoples moved into what is now Germany and north-west Europe. Between the years 1000 and 500 BCE, during the Northern Bronze Age, subgroups of these peoples continued moving north and began to inhabit modern-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, where they evidently intermingled with indigenous peoples. According to the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon historian Bede, other large subgroups – the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes – began to arrive in Britain in the fifth century CE, coming specifically from areas that are now in north-west Germany and southern Denmark. All of which means that in a significantly qualified way the English and Nordic peoples were originally the same, although even an assertion as broad and vague as this can only be conjectural. Physical and documentary evidence may tell us with certainty some things about medieval Scandinavia and Britain, for instance, but such certainty is not possible for the prehistorical period, for which the material remains are far more limited. Since the earliest extant written accounts of the area are by first- and second-century Roman historians, in fact, we have very little first-hand information from any pre-medieval groups.

While Continental emigrants to Britain initially maintained intermittent contact with their counterparts in both western and northern Europe,⁷ by the seventh century they largely had remade their new homeland, fashioning seven politically distinct kingdoms and driving away or assimilating with the indigenous Celtic peoples as well as the remnants of the Roman occupation that had begun in the first century. At this same time, following their long northern separation from the rest of what we know as the Germanic peoples, the Nordic groups had developed their own social, cultural, and technological organisations to such an extent that by the eighth century, shortly after Bede’s death in 735, they could organise trading missions and raiding activities that transformed the entire European political landscape. The British Isles, even though they had been settled by descendants of shared Germanic ancestors, were no exception. In 793, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,

terrible portents came about over the land of Northumbria, and miserably frightened the people: these were immense flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine immediately followed theses signs; and a little after that in the same year on 8 January the raiding of heathen men miserably devastated God’s church in Lindisfarne by looting and slaughter.⁸

In addition to raids like this, direct if none the less limited interactions among Britain and the Nordic regions continued throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, and there is evidence of mercantile activity between Britain and Iceland in particular. Within Britain itself, scattered Nordic place-names and the influence of the early Nordic language (Old Norse) on English suggest extensive contact between the Anglo-Saxon and Norse peoples that eventually went far beyond looting and slaughter. Towns like Thirsk and Whitby dot the landscape of central and northern England in particular, for instance, while common words like ‘sky’, ‘eggs’, and even ‘they’ – all borrowed from Old Norse – attest to the intimacy and stability of the relations between these two groups from the Germanic family. Around 886 King Alfred the Great and the Danish Viking Guthrum agreed to a treaty that defined a large part of the English Midlands as being subject not to English but to Danish law and thereby furthered developing Anglo-Scandinavian social connections. This stability certainly did not last: first the Anglo-Saxons and then the Norse used military force to assert political supremacy. But the presence of various Nordic peoples in the Danelaw did influence Great Britain’s languages and social practices to such an extent that at times in the tenth and eleventh centuries distinctions among the Norse and English peoples are not easily drawn.

According to the thirteenth-century Gunnlaugs saga Ormstungu (The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue), the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon king Ethelred understood Old Norse well enough to comprehend its use in skaldic poetry, a distinctively Norse and sometimes gratuitously obscure verse form.⁹ The continued presence of Norse colonies in Britain certainly makes this possible, but even more provocatively, despite the fact that the Norse and English long had been separated from their common Germanic roots, there is reason to believe that Old Norse and Old English may have been close enough in grammatical structure to allow for mutual intelligibility among speakers of both languages. Since at the very least the languages shared a great deal of lexicon, word-formation, and word-order, some late medieval developments in English grammar could reflect the impact of non-native speakers attempting to approximate the grammar of a closely related language.¹⁰

But even if this were the case, a distinct Scandinavian language persisted in England. Ascending to the English throne in 1016, the Danish Viking Cnut the Great ruled until 1035, during which time his court emerged as one of the leading centres for the production of skaldic verse. In a different vein, the earliest versions of some of the Eddic poems found in the Codex Regius (a late thirteenth-century manuscript containing mythological and heroic poems), which utilise an alliterative metre different from the one used in skaldic verse, may have been composed not in Norway or Iceland but in the Hebrides, Orkneys, and Shetlands.¹¹ Even the Norman Conquest did not completely erase the presence of Scandinavian languages in Great Britain. One persisted in the old Danelaw into at least the twelfth century, and, in a form called Norn, several centuries longer in the Shetland and Orkney islands.¹²

Even so, following the Conquest English-Scandinavian interactions became increasingly attenuated. Later medieval English missionaries certainly brought English books to Iceland, where England was sometimes regarded as a centre of learning. Ælfric’s De Falsis Diis clearly underlies one Icelandic homily,¹³ and Kari Ellen Gade has cited Ælfric’s Grammar as a potential source for Olaf Thordarson’s mid-thirteenth-century Málskrúðsfr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The spectacle of history
• 2 Modern travel, medieval places
• 3 Ethnography and heritage
• 4 An open-air museum
• 5 Stories that make things real
• 6 Narrative, memory, meaning
• Bibliography
• Index