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Nostalgia, medievalism and the Vínland voyages

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Abstract

This essay examines the varied forms of nostalgia for an idyllic land found and lost, according to accounts of voyages to lands west of Greenland in the Old Norse Grænlendinga saga (The Saga of the Greenlanders) and Eiríks saga rauða (The Saga of Eric the Red) and their retelling in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in American and British literature. Whereas American poets celebrated an ideal of Viking heroism and nostalgia for the moment of ‘discovery’ as the basis of a myth of national foundation, British fiction of the same period is infused with regret at the failure of a promising venture that speaks to anxieties about empire. For both American and British writers, the ‘medievalism of nostalgia’ is less for an imagined ideal of the medieval than for the potential of a medieval venture to shape the history of the modern world.

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Notes

  1. For a discussion of the publication, promotion and early reception of the volume, see Barnes (2001, 44–58); Wawn (2002, 193–196).

  2. Icelandic names are given in anglicized form throughout.

  3. ‘No one can go there by water … for those rivers flow with so strong a current, with such a rush and such waves that no boat can sail against them’ (Moseley, 1983, 185).

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  1. Department of English, University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Geraldine Barnes

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  1. Geraldine Barnes
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Barnes, G. Nostalgia, medievalism and the Vínland voyages. Postmedieval 2, 141–154 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2011.2

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