The Politics of Norse Medievalism in the British Press during the First World War

Summary

The Norse-Germanic branch of medievalism in Britain during the First World War has been strangely neglected in both literary-cultural and historical scholarship. Several studies have addressed that period’s rampant “military medievalism,” considering the conscription of the Arthurian Middle Ages, crusade motifs, and medieval historical figures such as Joan of Arc and Henry V to “do their bit” in the war effort. Ulrich Müller’s observation that “The Middle Ages and Medievalism have much to do with modern ideologies” in the Second World War is equally applicable to the First World War. Between 1914 and 1918, Britain and Germany diversely engaged with the strand of military medievalism that borrowed and assembled ideological permutations from Norse mythology (and its German appropriations, especially Wagner’s). British political utilizations of such material, which had been more limited and fragmentary in the nineteenth century, expanded precipitously in the early twentieth with the impetus of an unprecedented global conflict. Germany’s simultaneous deployment of the same motifs further galvanized the production of propagandistic materials that assimilated figures and tropes from the medieval Icelandic (Old Norse) Eddas. Political medievalism, and not least the weaponization of Norse myth in a high-stakes “war of words” that accompanied the physical conflict, played a large role in directing public opinion on the ethical positioning of the major players in the Great War. This study will explore how the plurality of uses of Norse myth in the wartime British and German press diverged (and occasionally converged), especially focusing on how Britain used Norse motifs across media to contrast the Entente and Central Powers, portraying itself as morally superior while vilifying or reproving their opponent’s policies, actions, and national character.

Before the turbulence of the 1910s, the so-called “long nineteenth century” (1789–1914) was a time of major artistic, academic, and socio-political growth in Britain and Germany that witnessed increasingly diversified forms and contexts for medievalism in general and Norse medievalism in particular. The medieval revival (with its accompanying studies of folklore and mythology) stimulated concurrent socio-cultural developments and more variegated uses of medieval and mythic material in both nations, which became politicized at different rates.