Postscript

Summary

The history of how the terrors of Scandinavia became a recognisable reference in British literary Gothic production has lacked focused attention from critics. Therefore, the purpose of the present book has been to analyse how mythology and superstition from Nordic/Scandinavian sources were utilised to provide a new archive of terror. That much of the material was sourced from or inspired by authentic texts raises important questions about how cultural appropriation and dialogue with the past shape literary traditions, and how ideas, themes and motifs travel across borders and time periods to shape the artistic and intellectual landscape in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries. I offer my findings as a contribution to the understanding of cultural and literary reinvigoration in the period.

Before the emergence of Gothic literature as a fashionable mode of writing, the idea of Britain as part of an ethno-Gothic cultural zone already played a significant role in history writing. The Norse tradition held the most comprehensive archive of pre-Christian beliefs associated with this tradition, followed by the remnants of superstition and the fairy ways recorded in folk ballads. This notion of cultural legacy was reinforced by the fact that the British Isles had been comprehensively settled by Scandinavians – the meaning of which was in the process of being reinterpreted for British culture. It has been a key argument throughout that what became recognised as ‘Scandinavian’ terror was more than just substituting one abject ‘Other’ for another. While British writers could gloat at the wayward phantasms and delusions, as they could with, for example, Catholic excesses, Scandinavian texts and practices were accepted as a window to the pre-Christian beliefs of the Gothic/Germanic ancestors, which included the Anglo-Saxons. As a cultural response to the Celtic Ossian poems, ancient Scandinavian poetry was seen not primarily as a flirtation with foreign ideas but as a recovery of a native voice.

I have proposed that an important catalyst for promoting Norse terror was the response it was believed to provide to the more sentimental Ossian literature, which became a sensation in the 1760s. Norse terror was an intervention favouring what was promoted as a daring and masculine ethno-Gothic heritage.