Northern Memories and the English Middle Ages by Tim William Machan (review)

Tim William Machan’s latest book explores Scandinavia’s impact on English national self-consciousness between the sixteenth and the late nineteenth century, with brief forays into earlier and later periods. Although the viking-era stage of this long-lived relationship has been studied often, much less has been written about its early modern and modern phases. Northern Memories fills this gap while contributing to ongoing and wide-ranging conversations about the modern afterlife of the medieval that have been enriched recently by Ian Wood, Geraldine Heng, Cord J. Whitaker, Donna Beth Ellard, Catherine Karkov, Matthew X. Vernon, and Miri Rubin, among others.

The first chapter, “The Spectacle of History,” adumbrates the central claims of the book while laying out its theoretical foundations. Adapting recent anthropology to broad discussions of Old English and Old Icelandic literary texts that variously foreground Anglo-Scandinavian contact, Machan shows how cultural memory actively created meaning rather than passively preserved information. Before 1066, English poets and annalists defined the Scandinavian presence in England in terms that heightened England’s sense of its own identity, yet that presence effectively ceased to mean after the Normans arrived in force. Largely forgotten in the later medieval period, a culturally useful idea of Scandinavia returned to loom large in the English imaginary only after the Protestant Reformation constructed the threat of a hostile Catholic South. This insight, compelling enough on its own, is all the more persuasive because it never morphs into an unsustainable claim that early modern England had embryonic imperialistic designs on Scandinavia. Despite its vast chronological purview, the first chapter, like the monograph as a whole, remains alert to specific historical circumstances and the agendas of individual writers. “Shared tropes” of language, ethnicity, landscape, and national character are shown to recur unprogrammatically, coalescing into a “cultural meme” (17) that figured Scandinavia as a primitive, culturally pure but economically stagnant version of England. The chapter concludes with a timely discussion of politically loaded terms such as “English,” “British,” and “Anglo-Saxon” and situates their meanings within the ideologically charged nature of the ethnography traced in the book.

Defying linear chronology (as was promised in the opening chapter), Chapter 2, “Modern Travel, Medieval Places,” posits a long tradition of broadly defined travel writing from Homer to Margery Kempe as the backdrop of much later English voyaging to Iceland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. Insular curiosity about these lands is shown to have spiked in the eighteenth century and surged in the nineteenth, when Mary Wollstonecraft, Edward Landor, Daniel Clarke, William Morris, and others explored perceived affinities between their own country and Scandinavia while also pointedly remarking—sometimes disdainfully—on important distinctions between them. From these visitors, towns and rural settlements elicited very different kinds of response. Whereas the perceived squalor of the former instilled a sense of cultural distance, the rugged majesty of the latter inspired awe, fueled Romantic longing for the sublime (already fed by growing English knowledge of the Icelandic sagas), and generated feelings of ethnic kinship. The chapter convincingly argues that, in the aggregate, modern travelers’ experiences of Scandinavia influenced English ideas of what the medieval must have looked, sounded, and even smelled like.

The third chapter, “Ethnography and Heritage,” demonstrates the longevity and idiosyncrasy of the aforementioned supposition of ethnic kinship. To this end, Machan explores the uses to which Snorri Sturluson was put by seventeenth-century English scholars such as Daniel Lang-horne, Aylett Sammes, and Robert Sheringham, who, from their different disciplinary standpoints, celebrated the Odin of the Prose Edda as the authentic hero and avatar of primordial northern European migration. Having thus been conscripted into England’s own early history, the Nordic god was used to adorn Stuart-era economic expansion and papaphobia. Machan details how a naturalized Odin contributed to a cultural mindset that eventually, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enabled some English writers to regard the viking invasions of...