10 - Ruling the Waves: Saxons, Vikings, and the Sea in the Formation of an Anglo-British Identity in the Nineteenth Century

Summary

When the Danish Princess Alexandra arrived in Britain in 1863 to marry Albert Edward, the prince of Wales, she was welcomed in verse by Alfred Austin, the future poet laureate, with the promise that the nautical expertise of her ‘Viking’ ancestors would make her a welcome presence in her new home. For much of the nineteenth century, England’s relationship with the sea was essential to two projects which were central to national identity. One was the justification of British colonialism. The other was the need to cement what Linda Colley has termed an ‘Anglo-British’ identity by culturally consolidating the political unions of Scotland and Ireland with England. As part of both projects, interest focused on England’s relationship with the sea in the medieval period: a heritage which was made to stand proxy for the early history of the British navy. In particular, the British navy was claimed to be Saxon in origin. However, a rival claim also arose in the peripheral areas of Britain: that the country owed its nautical prowess to the influx of ‘Viking’ blood that had resulted from Norse invasions. This chapter will consider the relationship between those competing assertions, and their relevance to British national identities during the Victorian era.

Several different Saxon and Viking leaders from the period between the fifth and the eleventh centuries were celebrated in the nineteenth century as venerable founders of the British navy. However, one Saxon monarch was credited above all other figures with this achievement – and in the dozens of Victorian narratives about his reign it is easiest to observe the ways in which competing Viking and Saxon claims interacted. King Alfred the Great enjoyed something of a ‘cult’ in England during the nineteenth century, and as a national icon was credited with the foundation of just about everything from trial-by-jury to Oxford University. His alleged foundation of the British navy, however, perhaps contributed more than any other single claim to the monarch’s popularity. In his 1836 epic poem Alfred the Great, G. L. Newnham Collingwood opined:

Not for other cause

Does England dearer hold her Alfred’s name,

Than that he first gave to the island-queen

Dominion o’er the waters.