‘Sheaves from Sagaland’: Island Medievalism and the Norse North Atlantic in British Writing (1860-Present)

This thesis examines the encounter between British readers of the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas and the islands of the North Atlantic where those narratives are set. In particular, it focuses on writing produced between the mid-nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries, and takes a special interest in the authors’ perceptions of the relationship between space and time in these archipelagos. Although this project is grounded in literary criticism, it draws on a number of interdisciplinary fields such as Old Norse Studies, Medievalism Studies, and Island Studies.

This thesis begins with a form of literary tourism known as ‘saga pilgrimage’. This was a phenomenon which began in the nineteenth century, and which saw ardent readers of the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas sailing north in the hopes of glimpsing something of the medieval Saga Age. Although these ‘saga pilgrims’ have received some scholarly attention, it has hitherto focused on Iceland and, predominantly, the nineteenth century. In this study, the treatment of Iceland by these literary pilgrims is put into dialogue with British writers’ responses to the Faroe Islands and Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In doing so, I offer the first readings to describe British ‘Old Northernism’ in the Faroes during the inter-war years and World War Two, as well as the use of Norse Greenland by contemporary writers to reflect on the climate crisis.

After an introduction which outlines current scholarship on Old Norse medievalism, theories of temporality, and Island Studies, my three chapters each take as their focus one of the potential ‘Saga Lands’. Chapter 1 examines visitors to Iceland from outside the height of saga pilgrimage; Chapter 2 then turns to the Faroes and its forgotten significance to Britain in the early-twentieth century; while Chapter 3 focuses on Greenland and on disruptions in narratives of medieval continuity.