Remembering Classical Scandinavia in Britain, 1760–1830

Remembering Classical Scandinavia in Britain, 1760–1830 explores the use of Scandinavian themes in British culture in the decades around 1800. It offers new paradigms for how cultural texts engage with the classical Scandinavian past, historiographically and thematically. The classical Scandinavian past was the subject of intense interest during the period but often also coupled with a sense that this past was on the point of being forgotten. Taking my point of departure in this tension between remembering and forgetting, I explore how a representative selection of cultural texts from different genres and media engages with the classical Scandinavian past as a cultural memory. In doing so, I draw, in part, on the work of other scholars who have suggested that theoretical perspectives from memory studies can provide a fruitful alternative to the new historicist methodologies that have recently dominated scholarly discussions of the eighteenth century and Romantic period. Structured around a series of vignettes, Remembering Classical Scandinavia in Britain, 1760–1830 offers thematic analyses of the figure of Odin, of stone circles, of antiquities and thingness, and of the figure of the scald. It identifies necromancy as an important motif and as a metaphor for historiographical processes in British cultural texts about classical Scandinavia, helping to conceptualise how artefacts from the past could be forged into new memories of ethno-cultural identity.