Thursday, October 21, 2004

Still working through some literary histories and these two bits of information caught me eye:

William Cartwright, one of the "Tribe of Ben" poets, has a poem which makes reference to or is about Woden. I saw a snippet of the poem quoted as an epigraph and want to follow up on it.

Emerson's Self-Reliance makes reference to both Thor and Odin.

While I knew that the 18th and 19th-Century interest in Scandinavian is much greater than usually acknowledged (see most literary histories treatment of Thomas Gray's Old Norse poems, for instance. If they're even mentioned, they're usually written off as "an interest in the exotic" when, really, Gray was quite interested in the Northern influence on English through both the Anglo-Saxons and the Danelaw). But now that I've finally gotten around to reading Andrew Wawn's The Victorians and the Vikings, I've realized just how extensive this interest was and just how much contemporary scholars don't understand or know what to make of it (usually, they seem to ignore it).

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