The Viking Revival

Page 2 of 6

• 1. The Viking image
• 2. The Victorians
• 3. Frithiof's Saga
• 4. Vikings as role models
• 5. Modern-day Vikings
• 6. Find out more
• Print entire article

The Victorians

These emerging Viking enthusiasts knew no barriers of class or geography across the English-speaking world. We find a wealthy American matriarch in Rhode Island, commissioning stained glass windows celebrating the Norse discovery of America - designed for her new mansion by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones; or we come across a stout citizen of Middlesex, assigning an exotic Old Norse mythological name to his modest suburban residence; or a Lincolnshire vicar, earnestly tracing local rural songs back to pagan Danelaw traditions.

'... the entire Hanoverian royal family was related to Ragnarr Hairy-Breeches ...'

Queen Victoria's court did not go untouched by these northerly cultural breezes. There were claims that Victoria was descended from Óõinn that the entire Hanoverian royal family was related to Ragnarr Hairy-Breeches, a mighty Viking chief; and that King Haraldr Bluetooth was an ancestor of the Danish-born Princess of Wales. The Queen's principal physician, Sir Henry Holland, was a trail-blazing Iceland explorer, and under his influence a native Icelandic scholar was received at court, where he recited an eddic-style Icelandic poem. The poet claimed it was the first such performance by an Icelandic 'skald' since Gunnlaugr Wormtongue visited King Æthelred the Unready in the 11th century.

We learn, too, that Victoria's principal organist at St George's Chapel at Windsor set to music songs from The Pirate, Sir Walter Scott's haunting novel of 1821, about the still powerful Viking voices and values in the post-medieval Orkney and Shetland Isles. Earlier, one of the then Princess Victoria's chaplains at Windsor, the Reverend William Strong, had dedicated his translation of Bishop Esaias Tegnér's Frithiof's Saga (of 1834), 'a [Viking-Age] Scandinavian Legend of Royal Love', to the young Princess, 'a living impersonation of the graces and attractions, of the inflexible rectitude and fine sensibility, of the conscious dignity and patriotic devotion ...ascribed by the fiction to the Royal Maiden of Norway'.

NextPrevious

Published: 2001-10-01