The Vikings And The Victorians

Andrew Wawn draws together a wide range of source material, including novels, poems, lectures and periodicals, to give a comprehensive account of the construction and translation of the Viking age in 19th century Britain.

In the nineteenth century the writers, artists and antiquarians of the Lake District began enthusiastically to study the literature and culture of the Vikings, and to trace many of the region's distinctive features back to the Norse settlements. The Vikings and Victorian Lakeland offers the first-ever detailed examination of the study of the Vikings and their culture in the Lake District, in the period c. 1850- 1930. It does this by concentrating - by no means exclusively, however - on the life and work of W.G. Collingwood, and it is the first book to be written about this important and influential figure, acclaimed by Grevel Lindop as the man who 'almost single-handedly transformed the historical and archaeological understanding of the Lake District'.

Victorian medievalism physically transformed the streets of Britain It lay at the root of new laws and social policies It changed religious practices It deeply coloured national identities And it inspired art literature and music that remains influential to this day Sometimes driven by nostalgia but also often progressive and futurefacing this widereaching movement which reached its peak during the reign of Queen Victoria looked back to a range of different peoples and historical periods spanning a thousand years in order to inspire and vindicate cultural political and social change Medievalism was pervasive in Victorian literature with texts ranging from translated sagas to pseudomedieval devotional verse to tripledecker novels It became a dominant architectural mode transforming the English landscape with 75% of new churches built on a 'Gothic' rather than a classical model as well as museums railway stations town halls and pumping stations It was appealed to by both Whigs and Tories But it also permeated domestic life influencing the popularity of beards the naming of children and the design of homes and furniture This landmark study is an attempt to draw together for the first time every major aspect of Victorian medievalism and to examine the phenomenon from the perspective of the many disciplines to which it is relevant including intellectual history religious studies social history literary history art history and architecture Bringing together the expertise of 39 experts from different subject areas it reveals the pervasiveness and multifaceted character of the movement in the nineteenth century and explains its continuing legacy today

The Victorians and English Dialect tells the story of the Victorians' discovery of English dialect, and of the revaluation of local language that was brought about by the new, historical philology of the nineteenth century. Regional dialects came to be seen not as corrupt or pernicious, but rather as venerable and precious. The book examines the work of the ground-breaking collectors of the 1840s and 1850s, who first alerted their contemporaries to the importance of local dialect - and also to the perils that threatened it with extinction. Tracing the connection between dialect and literature, in the flourishing of dialect poetry and the foregrounding of regional voices in Victorian fiction. It goes on to explain how the antiquity of regional dialects cast light on the national past - the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, and Vikings - and how dialect study was also at the heart of the discovery of local folklore and oral culture: old words, old customs, old beliefs. And it tells the story of the three great monuments of Victorian dialect study that marked the apogee of regional philology: the 80 publications of the English Dialect Society (1873-96), an organization run by a committee of journalists and local historians in Manchester; the nationwide survey of The Existing Phonology of English Dialects (1889), which listened in on local speech in market squares and third-class railway carriages; and the multi-volume English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905), which collected all the previous labours together, and made an enduring record of Victorian dialect.

Factual and fanciful tales of the Nordic warriors known as Vikings have proven irresistible to filmmakers for nearly a century. Diverse, prominent actors from Kirk Douglas, Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier to Tim Robbins and John Cleese, and noted directors, including Richard Fleischer, Clive Donner and Terry Jones, have all lent their talents to Viking-related films. These fourteen essays on films dealing with the Viking era discuss American, British and European productions. Analyzed in detail are such films as The Vikings (1958), The Long Ships (1964), Alfred the Great (1969), Erik the Viking (1989) and Outlander (2008), as well as two comic-strip adaptations, the 1954 and 1989 films of Prince Valiant and the animated Asterix and the Vikings (2006). A comprehensive filmography is also included.

This book studies the rise and nature of historicist approaches to life, race, character, language, political economy, and empire. Arguing that Victorians understood life and society as developing historically in a way that made history central to public culture, it will appeal to those interested in Victorian Britain, historiography, and intellectual history.

The Vikings Reimagined explores the changing perception of Norse and Viking cultures across different cultural forms, and the complex legacy of the Vikings in the present day. Bringing together experts in literature, history and heritage engagement, this highly interdisciplinary collection aims to reconsider the impact of the discipline of Old Norse Viking Studies outside the academy and to broaden our understanding of the ways in which the material and textual remains of the Viking Age are given new meanings in the present. The diverse collection draws attention to the many roles that the Vikings play across contemporary culture: from the importance of Viking tourism, to the role of Norse sub-cultures in the formation of local and international identities. Together these collected essays challenge the academy to rethink its engagement with popular reiterations of the Vikings and to reassess the position afforded to ‘reception’ within the discipline.