Abstract
Robert Rix discusses the interest in eighteenth-century and romantic-period Britain in the legends surrounding Odin, the chief deity of the ancient Norse pantheon. As Rix observes, there had been, since the Middle Ages, a persistent attempt to interpret Odin as an historical figure from Asia who conquered the north of Europe, bringing with him a new language and the art of poetry. Rix’s account of how English writers took seriously the Odin migration idea not only explores a largely unstudied aspect of Anglo-Nordic cultural exchange but also provides a new perspective on the ongoing critical debate deriving ultimately from Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) about the uses of the East as an ‘Other’ and the ways in which that ‘Other’ was implicated in definitions of English literature.
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Notes
- 1.
A full account of the project is available in Thor Heyerdahl and Per Lillieström, Jakten på Odin: På sporet av vår fortid (Oslo: J. M. Stenersens Forlag, 2001). Heyerdahl achieved the status of Norwegian national hero after his Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, when he sailed 5,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean in a hand-built raft, in order to prove that ancient peoples were capable of making long sea voyages.
- 2.
Exceptions to this neglect include my own ‘Oriental Odin: Tracing the East in Northern Culture and Literature’, History of European Ideas 36/2 (2010), pp. 47–60, from which some of the research presented in this article derives.
- 3.
Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda: Tales from Norse Mythology, trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2006), pp. 7–9; and Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway, trans. Lee Hollander (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), pp. 6–7. The perceived similarity between the Norse plural and the geonym ‘Asia’ is a false etymology, as æsir is related to the Old Norse ās, which means ‘divinity’.
- 4.
Anthony Faulkes ‘Pagan Sympathy: Attitudes to Heathendom in the Prologue to Snorra Edda’, in Edda: A Collection of Essays, eds. R. J. Glendinning and H. Bessason (Winnipeg, Man.: University of Manitoba Press, 1983), pp. 284–5.
- 5.
For a list of translations of Snorri and historical works that discuss him, see Annette Lassen, Odin på kristent pergament: En teksthistorisk studie (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2011), p. 24.
- 6.
Peter Friederich Suhm, Om Odin og den hedniske gudelære og gudstieneste udi Norden (Copenhagen, 1771).
- 7.
- 8.
Mallet’s books, which became key reference works for a century-and-a-half, were: Introduction à l’histoire du Danemarch (1755, second edition 1763), a history of the Old North; and Monuments de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes, et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves (1756), a translation of Scandinavian legends and Norse literature into a major modern European language for the first time. Citation is from the English edition: Northern Antiquities: or, A Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion and Laws of the Ancient Danes, and Other Northern Nations; Including Those of Our Own Saxon Ancestors, trans. T. Percy, 2 vols. (London: T. Carnan and Co., 1770), vol. 1, pp. 70–1.
- 9.
See Robert Rix, The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination: Ethnicity, Legend, and Literature (New York: Routledge 2015), pp. 152–80.
- 10.
Thomas Percy, ‘Preface’, in Five Pieces of Runic Poetry Translated from the Islandic Language (London, 1763), p. viii.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
‘Extracts from Mr. Gibbon’s Journal’, in The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon: With Memoirs of His Life, 7 vols., ed. John Lord Sheffield (Basel, 1797), vol. 2, pp. 274–7.
- 13.
See, for instance, Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, from the Earlier Teutonic and Scandinavian Romances, eds. Robert Jamieson, Sir Walter Scott, and Henry William Weber (Edinburgh, 1814), p. 228.
- 14.
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (London, 1840), p. 30.
- 15.
Ibid., pp. 26, 28, 42 and 44.
- 16.
Ibid., p. 54.
- 17.
William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, on the Principles of a Religious Deist, 3rd edition revised, 2 vols. (London, 1758), vol. 2, p. 466.
- 18.
Joseph Sterling, Dissertation, in Poems (Dublin, 1782), p. 30.
- 19.
Edward Ives, A Voyage from England to India, in the Year MDCCLIV (London, 1773), pp. 62–3. The Scandinavians’ alleged drinking out of human skulls is a mistranslation for the practice of using drinking horns made from animal bone.
- 20.
William Jones, ‘The Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindus. Delivered 2 February, 1786‘. The Works, 13 vols. (London, 1807), vol. 3, p. 37.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Frank Sayers, Poetical Works (London, 1830), p. 128; Rasmus Rask, A Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue, trans. B. Thorpe (Copenhagen, 1830), pp. xxxii–xxxiii.
- 23.
Eugène Burnouf, Introduction à l’historie du Buddhisme indien (Paris: Impr. royale, 1844), p. 70. A number of commentators have boggled at the identification of these two figures. For a summary list of the obvious differences between Buddhism and Odin’s religion, see review of Research on the Tenets and Doctrines of the Jeynes and Boodhists, in The Asiatic Journal (December, 1827), pp. 737–8.
- 24.
Magnus Björnstjerna, The Theogony of the Hindoos; With Their Systems of Philosophy (London, 1844), pp. 105–111.
- 25.
For a discussion of ‘speculative etymology’, see Dick Geeraerts, ‘Semantics’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics, ed. Keith Allan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 556–557.
- 26.
William Balfour Winning, A Manual of Comparative Philology, in which the Affinity of the Indo-European Languages is Illustrated (London, 1838), pp. 112–17.
- 27.
Ghulam Husain Khan, ‘Letter to William Armstrong’ (separate pagination), in A Translation of the Sëir Mutaqharin; or, View of Modern Times, Being an History of India, from the Year 1118 to the Year 1195, 2 vols. (Calcutta, [1790]), vol. 1, pp. 35ff.
- 28.
Georges Dumézil, Les dieux des Germains: Essai sur la formation de la religion scandinave (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1959), p. 62. For a critical review of Dumézil’s work, see Else Mundal, ‘Theories, Explanatory Models and Terminology. Possibilities and Problems in Research on Old Norse Mythology’, in Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives. Origins, Changes, and Interactions, eds. Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert and Catharina Raudvere (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006), pp. 285–8.
- 29.
James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han, or, the Central and Western Rajpoot States of India, 2 vols. (London, 1829–1832; reprinted New Delhi, Asian Educational Service, 2001), vol. 1, pp. 483–4.
- 30.
‘Of Heroic Virtue’, in The Works of Sir William Temple, 4 vols. (London, 1757), vol. 3, pp. 357–8.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 305.
- 32.
In An Introduction to the History of England, 3rd edition (London, 1708), p. 44, Temple had written that ‘The Saxons were one branch of those Gothic Nations, which swarming from the Northern Hive, had, under the conduct of Odin, possessed themselves anciently of all those mighty tracts of Land that surround the Baltick Sea’.
- 33.
‘Of Heroic Virtue’, in Works, vol. 3, p. 355.
- 34.
Most notably, the Danish antiquary Thomas Bartholin’s patriotic history Antiquitatum Danicarum de causis contemptæ a Danis adhuc gentilibus mortis [Danish Antiquities on the Pagan Danes’ Disdain of Death] (Copenhagen, 1689).
- 35.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude: or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind (text of 1805), revised edition, Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), Book 1, ll. 185–9.
- 36.
Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), p. 61.
- 37.
Robert Lovell, and Robert Southey, Poems, Containing The Retrospect, Odes, Elegies, Sonnets, &c. by Robert Lovell, and Robert Southey (London, 1795), pp. 97–102.
- 38.
King Gustaf III, Oden och Frigga, in Skrifter, i politiska och vittra ämnen; tillika med dess brefvexling, 7 vols. (Stockholm: C. Delén, 1806), vol. 2, p. 314.
- 39.
George Richards, Advertisement to Odin, in Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1804), p. 12.
- 40.
William Drummond, Odin: A Poem in Eight Books and Two Parts (London, 1817).
- 41.
William Herbert, Attila. King of the Huns (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1838), p. 520. See also notes on pp. 70, 76, 108, 472.
- 42.
Joseph Cottle, ‘Preface’, Alfred: An Epic Poem (London, 1800), p. iv. The plot of the first Book takes place in ninth-century Denmark, where Prince Ivar has returned from England to enlist men for an invasion with the purpose of avenging the murder of his father Regner Lodbrog.
- 43.
Marilyn Butler, Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrents in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry and Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 15–16.
- 44.
‘Scald’, Encyclopaedia Londinensis, vol. 22 (London, 1827), p. 730.
- 45.
John Husbands, A Miscellany of Poems by Several Hands (Oxford, 1731) preface: no pagination (p. 35).
- 46.
Alexander Pope, Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of Books and Men: Collected from the Conversation of Mr. Pope and Other Eminent Persons of His Time, eds. J. Spence and S. W. Singer (London, 1820), p. 140.
- 47.
For a discussion of Mallet’s changing approach to Scandinavian poetry, see Margaret Clunies-Ross and Lars Lönnroth, ‘Den fornnordiske musan’, in Myter om det nordiska: Mellem romantik og politik, eds. Catherina Raudvere, Anders Andrén and Kristina Jennbert (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2001), p. 38.
- 48.
Mallet, Northern Antiquities, vol. 1, p. 394.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
In this case, it was the biblical Orient: The Song of Solomon, Newly Translated from the Original Hebrew: With a Commentary and Annotations [by Thomas Percy] (London, 1764), pp. viii, xxxii–xxxiii.
- 51.
Percy, ‘Preface’, in Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, p. viii.
- 52.
Sir Alexander Croke, The Progress of Idolatry (London, 1841), note on p. 269.
- 53.
‘An Essay on the Origin of Scottish Poetry’, in John Pinkerton (ed.), Ancient Scotish [sic] Poems, never before in print. But now published from the MS. collections of Sir Richard Maitland […] Comprising pieces written from about 1420 till 1586 (London, 1786), p. xxxvii.
- 54.
Icelandic Poetry , or The Edda of Saemund, trans. Amos Cottle (Bristol, 1797), p. xiv.
- 55.
Rasmus Rask, A Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue: With a Praxis, trans. B. Thorpe (Copenhagen, 1830), p. xxxii. As a source for the comparison, Rask relies on William Jones’s Grammar of the Persian Language (1771).
- 56.
Ibid.
- 57.
The climatic theory could be applied to all human psychologies, virtues, and productions, as the Royal Society member William Falconer’s Remarks on the Influence of Climate (1781) set out to argue. This theoretical paradigm competed with stadial theory, whose supporters (such as Rousseau and the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers Adam Fergusson and Lord Kames) held that all societies would progress through the same preset stages of development, including a progression in literary sensibility from wild to mannered diction.
- 58.
The Spectator, 160 (3 September 1711), p. 212.
- 59.
William Jones, ‘On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations’ (1772), in Poetical Works, 2 vols. (London, 1810), vol. 2, p. 209.
- 60.
Letter to Mrs Montagu of 30 September 1772, in An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie […] Including Many of His Original Letters, ed. William Forbes (Edinburgh, 1806), pp. 234–5. Beattie lists a number of other causes for why Eastern diction is bombastic, and even hints that it may be a feature of all primitive nations.
- 61.
Richard Polwhele, Historical Views of Devonshire, vol. 1 (London, 1793), pp. 169–170. To historicise this argument, Polwhele referred to the theory the English antiquarian Aylett Sammes had proposed a century earlier: Celtic Britain was originally a Phoenician colony. The year before, Polwhele edited a collection of Poems Chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwall (1792), which contains several translations and imitations of both Norse and Ossianic poetry
- 62.
S. T. Coleridge, ‘Historical Sketch of the Manners and Religion of the Ancient Germans’, The Watchman, No. 3 (1796), reprinted in Essays on His Own Times, vol. 1 (London: W. Pickering, 1850), pp. 133–4.
- 63.
Vicesimus Knox, ‘Conjectures on the Difference between Oriental and Septentrional Poetry’, in Essays Moral and Literary, new edition, vol. 2 (London, 1782), pp. 330–333.
- 64.
Encyclopaedia Londinensis, ed. John Wilkes (London, 1819), vol. 16, p. 487.
- 65.
Anon., ‘Conybeare’s Illustrations of Anglo Saxon Poetry (1826)’, in The London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, 500 (August, 1826), p. 536.
- 66.
The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India and Its Dependencies 24/144 (1827), pp. 701–3.
- 67.
Romantic is found contrasted with classical in several sources. For a full discussion, see Hans Eichner (ed.), ‘Romantic’ and Its Cognates (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972).
- 68.
Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (London, 1762), pp. 4, 55.
- 69.
John M. Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 5.
- 70.
See Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century ([1964] London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 14.
- 71.
See Richard Hole’s comments in Arthur: Or the Northern Enchantment. A Poetical Romance in Seven Books (London, 1789), pp. vii, xii, xv.
- 72.
Temple, ‘Of Poetry’, in Works, vol. 3, p. 416.
- 73.
Thomas Percy, ‘On Ancient Metrical Romances &c’, in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of our Earlier Poets, Together with Some Few of Later Date (London, 1765), pp. xiii–xiv.
- 74.
Letter of 23 April 1764, in The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Evan Evans, ed. Aneirin Lewis (Louisiana State University Press, 1957), p. 88.
- 75.
Alok Yadav, ‘Nationalism and Eighteenth-Century British Literature’, Literature Compass 1 (2004), pp. 1–14 (accessed 3 July 2015).
- 76.
Thomas Warton, Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser (London, 1762), p. 64
- 77.
Thomas Warton, Dissertation I: Of the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe, in The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, 3 vols. (London, 1774–1781), vol. 1 [pp. xxii–xl]. The dissertation is not paginated, so page numbers will be indicated in brackets.
- 78.
Ibid. [p. ii].
- 79.
For Warton’s use of the term, see ibid. [pp. xxiii, xxxix, xxxvii].
- 80.
Ibid. [pp. xxviii–xxix].
- 81.
Ibid. [p. xxxiii].
- 82.
The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Evan Evans, ed. Aneirin Lewis (Louisiana State University Press, 1957), pp. 33–34.
- 83.
Warton, Dissertation I [p. xxiii].
- 84.
Ibid. [p. xxvi].
- 85.
For these accusations, see David A. Pailin, Attitudes to Other Religions: Comparative Religion in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 91–7.
- 86.
Warton, Dissertation I [p. lv].
- 87.
Percy, ‘Preface’, in Reliques, vol. 1, p. 8.
- 88.
Jonathan Kramnick, ‘The Making of the English Canon’, PMLA 112/5 (1997), pp. 1087–1101.
- 89.
Thomas Warton, Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser (London, 1754), p. 225.
- 90.
Thomas Warton, Dissertation II: On the Introduction of Learning into England, in History of English Poetry, vol. 1 [p. cxxxviii].
- 91.
Warton, Dissertation I [p. vi].
- 92.
Andrea Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus: Regeln deutsch-morgenländischer Imagination im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 178, 180–184.
- 93.
Heyerdahl and Lillieström, Jakten på Odin, p. 289 [‘Snorre er til å stole på’].
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Rix, R. (2017). ‘The North’ and ‘the East’: The Odin Migration Theory. In: Duffy, C. (eds) Romantic Norths. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51246-4_7
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