The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination: Ethnicity, Legend, and Literature

225 Pages·2015·0.82 MB·English

by  Robert Rix

The Barbarian North in the
Medieval Imagination
This book examines the sustained interest in legends of the pagan and
peripheral North, tracing and analyzing the use of an ‘out-of-Scandinavia’
legend (Scandinavia as an ancestral homeland) in a wide range of medieval
texts from all over Europe, with a focus on the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The
pagan North was an imaginative region, which attracted a number of con-
flicting interpretations. To Christian Europe, the pagan North was an abject
Other, but it also symbolized a place from which ancestral strength and
energy was derived. Robert W. Rix maps how these discourses informed
‘national’ legends of ancestral origins, showing how an ‘out-of-Scandinavia’
legend can be found in works by several familiar writers, including Jor-
danes, Bede, ‘Fredegar’, Paul the Deacon, Freculph, and Æthelweard. The
book investigates how legends of northern warriors were first created in
classical texts and since re-calibrated to fit different medieval understand-
ings of identity and ethnicity. Among other things, the ‘out-of-Scandinavia’
tale was exploited to promote a legacy of ‘barbarian’ vigour that could
withstand the negative cultural effects of Roman civilization. This volume
employs a variety of perspectives cutting across the disciplines of poetry,
history, rhetoric, linguistics, and archaeology. After years of intense critical
interest in medieval attitudes towards the classical world, Africa, and the
East, this first book-length study of ‘the North’ will inspire new debates and
re-positionings in medieval studies.
Robert W. Rix is Associate Professor in the Department of English, G ermanic
and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the
author of the book, William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity
(2007), and is chief editor of Romantik – Journal for the Study of Romanti-
cisms. In recent years, Rix has written a number of articles on the use of Norse
mythology in British fiction, and he has published an anthology on Norse
tradition in English poetry.
Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture
Edited by George Ferzoco, University of Bristol
Carolyn Muessig, University of Bristol
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Men, Women and Saints in Late Middle Ages
Medieval Europe Edited by Stephen J. Harris and
Edited by Samantha J. E. Riches Bryon L. Grigsby
and Sarah Salih
8 Medieval Monstrosity and the
2 The Invention of Saintliness Female Body
Edited by Anneke Sarah Alison Miller
B. Mulder-Bakker
9 Representations of Eve in
3 Tolkien the Medievalist Antiquity and the English
Edited by Jane Chance Middle Ages
John Flood
4 Julian of Norwich
Visionary or Mystic? 10 Crying in the Middle Ages:
Kevin J. McGill Tears of History
Edited by Elina Gertsman
5 Disability in Medieval Europe
Thinking About Physical 11 The Barbarian North in the
Impairment in the High Middle Medieval Imagination
Ages, c.1100–c.1400 Ethnicity, Legend, and
Irina Metzler Literature
Robert W. Rix
6 Envisaging Heaven in the
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Edited by Carolyn Muessig and
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The Barbarian North in the
Medieval Imagination
Ethnicity, Legend, and Literature
Robert W. Rix
First published 2015
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
The right of Robert W. Rix to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Rix, Robert, 1970-
The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination : Ethnicity, Legend, and Literature /
Robert Rix.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Literature, Medieval—History and criticism. 2. Scandinavia—In literature.
3. Europe, Northern—In literature. 4. Legends—Europe, Northern—History
and criticism. I. Title.
PN671.R59 2014
809'.02—dc23 201402427
ISBN: 978-1-138-82086-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-74362-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
Contents
Abbreviations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Ethnogenesis and the ‘Out-of-Scandinavia’ Legend 12
2 The Goths and the Legend of Scandza 28
3 Ethnic History and the Origin of Nations 50
4 Ancestral Rhetoric in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of
the English People 80
5 Northumbrian Angels in Rome: Religion, Race and
Politics in the Anecdote of St. Gregory 116
6 Scandinavian Ancestors in Anglo-Saxon Texts 152
7 Danes and Geatas: Heroes of the Legendary North 181
Index 211
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Abbreviations and Editions
Get. The Gothic History of Jordanes, trans. Charles Christopher
Mierow. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1915.
HE Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans.
Bertrand Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979.
MGH Monumenta Germaniae historica.
PL Patrologia Latina Database, a complete electronic version of the
first edition of Jacques-Paul Migne’s Patrologia Latina. 1844–1855
and 1862–1865.
All quotations from the Old English text of Beowulf are from Klaeber’s
Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. R. D. Fulk, R. E. Bjork, and J. D.
Niles, 4th edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.
Throughout this book, translations from Latin and Old English are my own,
unless otherwise attributed. References to primary texts are given both by
section number and, when applicable, page number (indicated by ‘p.’).
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Acknowledgements
I want to thank Robert Rintoull for proofreading the manuscript and Jørgen
Wildt Hansen for linguistic advice. But special thanks must go to Mary-Ann
McKerchar for her tireless efforts reading and commenting on the manu-
script. I have benefitted from the response given by one of the anonymous
reviewers, who provided me with some excellent ideas to help focus the
work. The abovementioned have helped iron out a number of flaws, and
any remaining mistakes are entirely my own. Lastly, but by no means least, I
want to thank my wife Line and my son David for support and forbearance
over the years. The book is dedicated to Birthe Olsen (1942–2012), whom
we lost too early.
Chapter Five has previously been published, in a slightly different form,
in Journal of Medieval History, 38.1 (2012): 257–277. The material is
reprinted by permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis Group.