Northern Antiquities: Retrieving the Memory of the Pre-Modern North in Eighteenth-century Britain

Description

In eighteenth-century Britain, the premodern North was a source of poetic inspiration. Abounding with sublime aesthetics and ideals of a northern European heritage, mediated material from the Eddas found its way into poetry and art - from the poems of Thomas Gray to Blake’s illustrations. For the British eighteenth-century reader, few texts had as much influence on perceptions of this ancient history as Northern Antiquities, published in London 1770. Translated by Bishop Thomas Percy from Swiss historian Paul-Henri Mallet’s work, itself a commission by the Danish crown, this trans-national product is continuously referred to by eighteenth-century poets and antiquarians alike. It is out of this book, then, that the pre-modern North began to take shape in eighteenth-century Britain.

In its portrayal of northern ancient history, the past is centred around a loss of living memory. We cannot merely rely on written history, Percy/Mallet writes, as it does not relay the true “spirit” of the culture; instead, bridging the oral tradition now lost, “we must endeavour … to raise up before us those ancient Poets who were the Theologues of our forefathers” (vol.2. xiii-xiv). In order to reanimate this cultural memory, a plethora of various ‘monuments’ of the past were consulted. Writing around a perceived Northern European amnesia, Northern Antiquities sought to revive the past by handling fragmented remains as monuments of memory lost. In this paper, I discuss the possibility of articulating the antiquarian vision of the Pre-modern North found in Northern Antiquities as a mode of what would today be called ‘memory work’.

Period	2021 Aug 4
Event title	IASS 2021: Memory Culture in Scandinavian Studies
Event type	Conference
Location	Vilnius, LithuaniaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International