Manchester University Press
1 Vinland on the brain
Abstract
When the adventurer Richard Burton coined the phrase ‘Iceland on the Brain’, he meant the near obsession that many British travellers had with Iceland, its sagas and poems, and natural landscape. A similar brain fever has focused on the brief Viking settlements in North America. Its earliest cases can be diagnosed about two centuries ago, and its symptoms have included poems, novels, travel books, translations, inscriptions, artefacts, archaeological digs, legislation, films, comics, video games, statues, restaurants, music camps, racism, and even a theme park. Having gripped Canada, the United States, and South America, the fever now has spread across the globe. Variously attached to the whimsical, the socio-political and the downright toxic, the condition may not so much have infected individuals as been actively sought out and embraced by them. It is almost as if Vinland has become a kind of free-floating yet powerful signifier.
Abstract
When the adventurer Richard Burton coined the phrase ‘Iceland on the Brain’, he meant the near obsession that many British travellers had with Iceland, its sagas and poems, and natural landscape. A similar brain fever has focused on the brief Viking settlements in North America. Its earliest cases can be diagnosed about two centuries ago, and its symptoms have included poems, novels, travel books, translations, inscriptions, artefacts, archaeological digs, legislation, films, comics, video games, statues, restaurants, music camps, racism, and even a theme park. Having gripped Canada, the United States, and South America, the fever now has spread across the globe. Variously attached to the whimsical, the socio-political and the downright toxic, the condition may not so much have infected individuals as been actively sought out and embraced by them. It is almost as if Vinland has become a kind of free-floating yet powerful signifier.
Chapters in this book
- Front matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures and tables vii
- Notes on contributors viii
- Preface and acknowledgements xii
-
Introduction
- 1 Vinland on the brain 3
-
Part I: Imagination and ideology
- 2 Journeys to the centre of the mind 27
- 3 The ‘Viking tower’ in Newport, Rhode Island 45
- 4 Critiquing Columbus with the Vinland sagas 61
- 5 Vinland and white nationalism 77
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Part II: Landscapes and cultural memory
- 6 Migration of a North Atlantic seascape 101
- 7 Norwegian-American ‘missions of education’ and Old Norse literature 122
- 8 Americans in Sagaland 137
- 9 The good sense to lose America 160
-
Part III: Recasting the past
- 10 Spectral Vikings in nineteenth-century American poetry 181
- 11 ‘Who is this upstart Hitler?’ 198
- 12 ‘There’s no going back’ 215
- 13 Old Norse in the New World 236
- Bibliography 252
- Index 282
Chapters in this book
- Front matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures and tables vii
- Notes on contributors viii
- Preface and acknowledgements xii
-
Introduction
- 1 Vinland on the brain 3
-
Part I: Imagination and ideology
- 2 Journeys to the centre of the mind 27
- 3 The ‘Viking tower’ in Newport, Rhode Island 45
- 4 Critiquing Columbus with the Vinland sagas 61
- 5 Vinland and white nationalism 77
-
Part II: Landscapes and cultural memory
- 6 Migration of a North Atlantic seascape 101
- 7 Norwegian-American ‘missions of education’ and Old Norse literature 122
- 8 Americans in Sagaland 137
- 9 The good sense to lose America 160
-
Part III: Recasting the past
- 10 Spectral Vikings in nineteenth-century American poetry 181
- 11 ‘Who is this upstart Hitler?’ 198
- 12 ‘There’s no going back’ 215
- 13 Old Norse in the New World 236
- Bibliography 252
- Index 282
