This is a guest post by Robert William, author of Nordic Terrors: Scandinavian Superstition in British Gothic Literature
Sipping coffee in a street café in Copenhagen on a radiant August day, I found myself surrounded by laughter, the hum of people enjoying the city and tourists buzzing with joy. The British paper I was reading had an article about ‘Nordic Exceptionalism’, that is, the concept that the Nordic countries have extraordinarily high levels of trust and low crime rates – in addition to their high quality of life and social welfare. In fact, Denmark is consistently among the top countries in global happiness surveys. This contrasted sharply with the picture of Denmark I had just been writing about while preparing the manuscript for Nordic Terrors: Scandinavian Superstition in British Gothic Literature. The day I am talking about, 7 August, stood out to me because it is the date Matthew Gregory Lewis chose for the annual sacrifice in his Gothic play One O’Clock! or, The Knight and the Wood Daemon (1811). A Faustian drama that depicts demonic forces at work in the Danish state.
My book is about Gothic texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which the victims certainly don’t derive any happiness from the litany of supernatural crimes committed against them. At this time, relatively few British travellers had visited Scandinavia (at least not venturing outside the capitals). Those who visited the countryside often thought it idyllic but also saw the rural people as remarkably backwards. Matthew Gregory Lewis first capitalised on the idea that Denmark was steeped in superstition as a place of dark terror. One example of this is in his infamous novel, The Monk (1796), where one of his characters tells of how the Danish woods are ‘haunted by a malignant power, called “the Erl- or Oak-King”’, who appears as ‘an old Man of majestic figure, with a golden Crown and long white beard’, and whose ‘principal amusement is to entice young Children from their Parents, and as soon as He gets them into his Cave, He tears them into a thousand pieces’.
In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature, Scandinavia emerged as a setting for Gothic terror. Nordic Terrors: Scandinavian Superstition in British Gothic Literature examines the cultural significance of Nordic settings and references in the popular literature of terror. Nordic superstition can sometimes serve the same purpose as Catholicism in Gothic literature, allowing authors to critique fantastical beliefs and delusions. However, Nordic lore did more than just replace trite Gothic formulas; it played a significant role in the narrative of writing Britain’s past. British writers saw themselves as rooted in a Norse-Germanic past, represented by Norse legends and wayward folklore beliefs. This was what Britain had left behind as a modern nation. Yet the past lingered just below the surface of civilised society’s veneer, threatening to disrupt the present. Furthermore, the Norse forefathers’ fearless confrontation with death – embodied by the ghosts encountered in tombs – served as a testament to the bravery and boldness of the race. In this way, Nordic Gothic served as a platform for the nation to confront its superstitious fears while also celebrating the resilient spirit of its ancestral heritage. The notion of the Nordic countries (notably Denmark) as places of superstitious terror was a convenient construct, drawing on a relatively limited selection of translations from Icelandic and Danish traditions that filtered into English. The commercial book market was crucial in fostering this Nordic imaginary, embedding it within the fashion for Gothic. British writers seized the opportunity to explore a new terrain of fear, presenting readers with intriguing new settings.
The book deals with how ethnic past and present intertwine in Gothic literature, how the Other can be part of one’s identity, and how ideas of superstition inspired writers across borders to redefine national narratives. On 7th August 2023, I found it intriguing that this beautiful autumn day in Scandinavia was once a date associated with the literary movement of Nordic terror.