Introduction: ‘The country of our ancestors’

Summary

In October 1788, the Scottish traveller Andrew Swinton (1746–1817) sailed in ‘dreary weather’ around Skagens Odde, the ‘low land forming the north point of Jutland’. This, Swinton writes, is ‘the Country of our Ancestors’, ‘the ancient Cimbrica Chersonesus, from which issued that hive of people called the Angles, who conquered England, and gave their name to our country’. Swinton’s history and geography are a little out. Almost twenty years earlier, in Northern Antiquities (1770), the English antiquarian Thomas Percy (1729–1811) affirmed the theory of Paul Henri Mallet (1730–1807), professor of belles lettres at Copenhagen University, that the ‘Danes’ who had settled England in the fifth century CE comprised ‘a considerable number of Jutes’, from northern Jutland, as well as Angles, from the southern part of the peninsula. Historical and geographical vagaries notwithstanding, then, when Swinton described Denmark as ‘the country of our ancestors’ he was, broadly speaking, correct according to the knowledge of his time. ‘Although this people were not yet known by the name of Danes,’ Percy had written, ‘it is evident, that at least two thirds of the conquerors of Great Britain came from Denmark.’ What might be less apparent to a reader today, however, is the extent to which Swinton, in describing Jutland as ‘the country of our ancestors’, was participating in a burgeoning and multifaceted discourse about Britain and Denmark which gathered force in the latter decades of the eighteenth century. That discourse, which operated across a wide range of different areas of enquiry and genres of cultural productivity, is my subject in this book.

British antiquarian interest in classical Scandinavian culture during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has, by now, been well documented in both anglophone and Nordic scholarship, although important work in that area continues to be done. The contribution of this so-called ‘Antiquarian Revival’ to the emergence of new, ‘Romantic’ themes and modes in British and Danish poetry is also, by now, relatively familiar to scholars of those two national literatures. As Hildor Arnold Barton observes, ‘Nordic antiquity exercised a powerful enchantment’ for late eighteenth-century readers and writers saturated by Classical themes and Neoclassical forms. British writing about contemporary Denmark, however, constitutes a substantial, significant and hitherto largely neglected component of the cultural history of Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.