| Paper 1328-b | Vikings, Victorians, and the Anti-Slavery Cause: Anna Gurney's The Norsemen
(Language: English)
Helen Elizabeth Brookman, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge
Index terms: Language and Literature - Comparative, Language and Literature - Scandinavian, Medievalism and Antiquarianism, Women's Studies |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
Many academics, politicians, educators, and social commentators have worried and written about what the public does (or more usually doesn't) know about their past. However, the amount of serious academic research which has been done that explores what the 'public understanding of the past' is remains extremely scarce. This paper will give some of the findings from a series of focus group interviews conducted between October 2008 and June 2009 at the Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds. These groups explored how 20 undergraduate students understand their medieval past, and how contemporary popular culture affects those understandings.
Paper -b:
In 1844, Anna Gurney - scholar of Old English and Old Norse - published a vigorous and combative poem entitled The Norsemen. Andrew Wawn describes the poem as a rallying cry for British strength against European tyranny; 'For long-boat heroics', he writes, 'read gun-boat diplomacy'. I will argue that Gurney's poem contains instead a progressive anti-slavery message and will examine Gurney's role as a female, Quaker-taught, abolitionist interpreter of a Viking past that was often perceived in the 19th century as masculine, martial, and formative of national and imperial institutions. The Norsemen thus demonstrates one unexplored way of invoking the Victorianized Viking.
Paper -c:
Alan and Barbara Lupack’s anthology, Arthurian Literature by Women (1999), uncovers a wide range of Arthurian writing by women since 1850, yet the scope of their volume suggests (with the notable exception of Marie de France) that little was written by women on the subject of King Arthur and the Matter of Britain prior to the Victorian period. Alternatively, this paper will argue that it is in the Romantic period that the poetic antecedents for the later eruption in women’s Arthurian literature can be found. The popularity of Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shalott’ and the work of the Pre-Raphaelites undoubtedly revolutionised the accessibility of the Arthurian myth for women writers and artists, but a more primitive, investigative, and scholarly interrogation of Arthurian material can be seen half a century earlier, in the work of female Romantic poets.
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