The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-century Britain

In many ways the Victorians invented the Viking: the term, in its modern incarnation, is first recorded just 30 years before the young Princess Victoria's coronation, yet within 50 years it featured in the titles of dozens of poems, plays, prize essays, published lectures and parlour songs. This text discusses the Victorian fascination with the Old North; in it, Walter Scott, William Morris, Edward Elgar and Rudyard Kipling appear alongside amateur enthusiasts from Lerwick to the Isle of Wight. The material examined includes novels, poems, lectures, periodicals, philology, art and music. Andrew Warn draws this wide range of source material together to give a comprehensive account of the construction and translation of the Viking age in 19th-century Britain.