What use did English writers from the early modern period through the nineteenth century make of the Nordic past? In his unusual study, Northern Memories and the English Middle Ages, Tim Machan answers that question. Rather than working chronologically or through a source study model, Machan ranges “back and forth across four centuries of texts, often juxtaposing works written in several different languages and separated by decades and even centuries” (17). His goal is to show how “disparate writers from disparate social circumstances—without necessarily any direct knowledge of one another's works—can replicate and so circulate a persistent group of images, ideas, topics, words, and activities that relate at once to medieval Britain and the modern Scandinavian world” (16). Throughout, Machan aptly describes the “collective impact of replicated tropes” in the literature as “rides on a time machine to the British medieval past” (29). Drawing on a wide range of travel, ethnographic, scientific, and literary works by British visitors to northern regions, he identifies the “persistence, independent imitation, and reproduction of Nordic tropes,” which, together, shaped a “memory” of an Anglo-Nordic past against which to judge the British present (15). Two facts are foundational to the argument: first, Scandinavia writ large, like England, was both Protestant and monarchical, commonalities that validated the idea of shared ethnicity; and second, British writers, lacking their own body of mythological, historical, and literary materials, drew on the Nordic corpus and on shared religious and political foundations. In chapter 1, “The Spectacle of History,” Machan lays out his approach, and addresses the complicated problem of terminology for the areas on which he focuses. The next four chapters focus, respectively, on natural history, ethnography, moral assessments, and literature; and in the final chapter Machan “situates Nordic inspiration for the English Middle Ages within the larger context of the contingencies of memory” (20).
In chapter 2, “Natural History (Modern Travel, Medieval Places),” Machan examines travelers’ descriptions of Scandinavian flora, fauna, topography, and climate. In comparing its grand landscapes, natural wonders, and rural simplicity with modern Britain's “industrialisation, urban growth, and social complexity,” writers see in Scandinavia both Britain's past and its more resourceful present (41). In chapter 3, “Ethnography and Heritage,” Machan traces tropes that forge ethnographic and historical connections between British and Scandinavian settlers. Central to this discussion is British reworking of Snorri Sturluson's version of the migration story. In British accounts Odin's courageous leadership, resistance to imperial Rome, and commitment to freedom models shared Gothic and Nordic identity and allegiance to democracy. From such imagined shared origins, the accounts suggest, the Norse retained the primitive innocence of their noble beginnings; the British demonstrated the “global and cultural supremacy latent” in those shared origins (66). Scandinavia's unique representation as a living history museum, a “virtual trip through time,” where visitors could “talk with people in period costumes, eat period foods, watch period handicrafts being made, buy souvenirs, and walk through a carefully preserved period landscape” is the subject of chapter 4, “An Open Air Museum” (88). While the simplicity and primitivism encountered by visitors were imagined as fundamental aspects of British character, poor hygiene, indolence, and immorality showed the Nordic peoples to have remained, in essence, medieval, while the British had become a global, imperial power. Literature featured prominently in this museum-like approach to Scandinavia, serving, Machan explains, as a vehicle “for topics and images that reproduced longstanding, pervasive ways of framing Scandinavian ethnography and historiography” (116). Thus, in chapter 5, “Stories that Make Things Real,” he explores the unsystematic replication of tropes and images in the literature that created, from Norse evidence, an Anglo-Scandinavian cultural heritage. Lacking the Edda's mythological record and the sagas’ descriptions of daily life, English writers appropriated these materials, reconstructing a supposed lost Anglo-Saxon culture and locating a lost medieval world in saga sites.
In the final chapter, “Narrative, Memory, Meaning,” Machan argues that these recycled tropes created a usable past of contrasting images of Scandinavia—a land of resources, terror, and glory; a noble people who were also ignorant and backward; a language much like English but not worth learning. The images were malleable and reproducible in the service of such differing purposes as Nazi totalitarianism and J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy worlds. A case in point is the kraken, which Machan traces from its seventeenth-century origins through the many contradictory accounts, to its current place as a “meme, a circulating piece of popular culture” open to individual use (161). Machan includes statistics on four centuries of British tourism to Scandinavia and introduces a large body of published accounts by both well- and lesser-known figures, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Morris, George Mackenzie, Robert Molesworth, and William Slingsby.
Machan's quasi big data approach is initially unnerving and disconcerting. Is evidence drawn from such a variety of works from such diverse genres and periods truly representative, and can one meaningfully generalize from it? On balance, yes. The repetition of tropes he identifies in this sweeping body of work is undeniably compelling, and the differences between British and Nordic accounts included in each chapter are striking. Scandinavian writers, for example, tended to show tepid interest in Britain, portrayed the North as “culturally self-determined” and historically significant rather than as part of an Anglo-Nordic ancestry, and understood Odin to be mythological, not historical (70). Where British writers sought medieval similarities with the northern regions, Nordic writers saw differences. The north, Machan concludes, was less a place than an idea shaped by British visitors and writers for their own purposes. His cautionary conclusion is that the more narratives exist, the more unresolvable the differences between them, the more we cannot agree on one true narrative, then the more any single narrative might be true. It is an unsettling observation and raises disturbing questions about the power of a body of narratives (and tropes) across time. If Northern Memories can feel, at times, repetitive, and the range of evidence, unwieldy, perhaps this is also the point. Repetition can result in what looks like, but is not, truth.
