The Dragon and The Raven: Saxons, Danes and the problem of defining national character in Victorian England

Abstract

This article focuses upon images of Danes and Saxons in the large body (100+) of British literary texts and the great quantity of artwork that was produced during the long 19th century as part of the Victorian cult of the Saxon king Alfred. It investigates how images of Danes as an exotic or dangerous Other in 19th-century ‘Alfredian’ texts might complicate simple readings of those works as triumphally progressive and linear visions of history, suggesting instead the existence of cultural anxieties about the stability of British union and the hybridity of the English population. It investigates whether there is a case for reading negative images of Guthrum as a means of displacing onto the Danish nation those worrying negative qualities associated generally with northern nations in the 19th century; thus facilitating a less problematic idealisation of the Saxon Alfred. Conversely, it also considers to what extent positive images of Guthrum complicate or challenge Victorian claims about a distinct Saxon ‘type’ which was supposed identical with an imagined English character. This article challenges readings of Victorian Anglo-Saxonism as a wholly negative cultural phenomenon (associated with racial supremacy, cultural intolerance, and the rise of fascism) suggesting instead that in Alfredian texts it is possible to observe not a simplistic nationalism, but rather the newly-forged nation ‘Great Britain’ gradually coming to terms with its own hybridity and developing a more complex sense of national identity, so that half a century before the first world war, Anglo-Saxonism was already developing in more culturally inclusive directions.