On the Origins of the Gothic Novel: From Old Norse to Otranto

This observation by Robert W. Rix (2011: 1) accurately assesses what may be considered a significant oversight in studies of the Gothic novel. Whilst it is well known that the ethnic meaning of ‘Gothic’ originally referred to invasive, eastern Germanic, pagan tribes of the third to the sixth centuries AD (Sowerby, 2000: 15–26), there remains a disconnect between Gothicism as the legacy of Old Norse literature and the use of the term ‘Gothic’ to mean a category of fantastical literature. This essay, then, seeks to complement Rix’s study by, in certain areas, adding more detail about the gradual emergence of Old Norse literature as a significant presence on the European literary scene. The initial focus will be on those formations (often malformations) and interpretations of Old Norse literature as it came gradually to light from the sixteenth century onwards, and how the Nordic Revival impacted on what is widely considered to be the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97). As will be argued, although Walpole was ambivalent in his opinions on the growing influence of Nordic antiquity in the latter half of the eighteenth century, it is quite clear that it played an important role in stimulating his ‘Gothicised’ imagination, not least due to his close association with the poet Thomas Gray (1716–71), an unabashed enthusiast for the Old North.

anonymous collection of over thirty poems, many of which were preserved from oral tradition, and The Prose Edda, a systematised account of Old Norse mythology set down in the early thirteenth century by the Icelander Snorri Sturluson (1178/9-1241). As Iceland had converted to Christianity over two hundred years earlier, Snorri's edda takes particular care not to offend biblical orthodoxy, so providing a euhemerised introduction which explains the error of Norse paganism in terms of naïve Scandinavians mistaking northward migrating descendants of heroes of the Trojan wars for gods. The second area includes medieval histories, such as Adam of Bremen's late eleventh-century Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum (Deeds of the Bishops of the Hamburg Church), Saxo Grammaticus's late twelfth-/early thirteenth-century Gesta Danorum (The History of the Danes) and Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, an early thirteenth-century history of the kings of Norway. Explicit disapprobation of pre-Christian practices is most apparent in the histories by Adam and Saxo. The third and by far the largest area is the Icelandic sagas, which range from the seemingly historical to the wildly imaginative.
The sagas also preserved the majority of skaldic poetry, an occasional verse-form using a highly complex metre. Whilst Old Norse manuscripts continued to come to light from the Renaissance onwards, it was the interpretations placed on them and the various medieval histories by patriotic Scandinavian scholars that characterised their early reception history.
Initially, there were three main problems for the Scandinavians in their efforts to reclaim their respective country's pre-Christian history. Firstly, there was the widespread perception elsewhere in Europe that Scandinavia was a cultural backwater, one where Christianity was late in arriving and where Greco-Roman Classicism had had little impact and, so, had left the European north culturally impoverished. Endorsing this view was Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), whose influential Lives of the Artists (1524) included a 'philippic against the Gothic style' which denounced north European medieval architecture as barbaric compared to the Classical Revival of his own time (Pearsall 2001, 2). Secondly, as was the case with Snorri Sturluson's edda, any attempt to recover the pagan past needed to be reconciled with biblical history, hence the continued need for euhemerisation. Thirdly, political relations between the Dano-Norwegian coalition, which included Iceland as a Danish colony, and Sweden were very strained. The, perhaps inevitable, consequence of these problems was that interpretations placed upon the Scandinavian past were invariably convoluted and typically determined to belittle their political opponents. Ethnographic insults and counter-insults were aimed across the Baltic inlets throughout the early recovery period.
In sixteenth-century Denmark, two printed editions of Saxo's Gesta Danorum, one in the original Latin and one in Danish translation, formed the basis of Danish insights into their early ancestors but, for further insight, the Danes needed to look to Iceland and its vast store medieval manuscripts. The most influential Icelander on future Danish and Icelandic scholars was Arngrímur Jónsson (1568-1648), who referred to Old Norse as 'Old Gothic'. Arngrímur used Icelandic saga sources to write a now lost history of the Danish kings, and perturbed by the poor reports Iceland had received from visitors, wrote the chauvinistic Brevis commentarius de Islandia (Defence of Iceland) and Crymogaea (On Iceland). Given such efforts by learned Icelanders, the Danes would always be better informed than the Swedes and, as a result, somewhat more sober in the significances they attached to manuscript evidence. Lacking such resources, the Swedes were largely dependent on Adam of Bremen's unflattering history of their pagan past, which they combined with early Roman histories, notably Tacitus's firstcentury, often approving, history of the Germanic tribes, Germania, and Jordanes's sixthcentury history of the Gothic tribes, Getica, which they construed as meaning exclusively Swedish tribes. The main significance of Swedish interpretations of their past lies in the impact they had on Danish scholars, whose responses were typically belligerent and not a little Magog had taken his tribe to Sweden before the destruction of the Tower of Babel, the upshot being that the Goths spoke the language of God and had therefore succeeded in spreading civilised values across Ancient Greece on through to the birth of Christ. It was these divinely ordained virtues that had enabled the Goths to triumph over the Roman legions, as recounted in Jordanes's Getica. Moreover, claimed Johannes, the surviving evidence of the ur-language of the Goths is Gothic script, otherwise known as runes, which, on the one hand, he wrongly asserted to be uniquely Swedish, and on the other, implied them to be a common form of manuscript writing. This extraordinary theory was one that Olaus Magnus not only fully endorsed but also used to remind enemies of the Swedes, i.e. the Danes, how unwise it would be 'to join battle with the elements themselves' (Johannesson 1991, 189  Rudbeck argued that Sweden was the cradle of civilisation named by Plato as 'Atlantis' and that the Swedish language was inherited from Adam and was, therefore, the forerunner of Hebrew. The logic of this, insisted Rudbeck, is that Greek and Roman mythology had originated in Atlantian Sweden. The proof for Rudbeck is to be found in the eddas, which, in painstaking detail, he interpreted as an allegorical code, one that Plato had cleverly remodeled. So it is, for example, that when Plato refers to elephants, what is actually being signified are Swedish wolves (Malm 1994, 12).
Thomas Bartholin's response to Rudbeck was to ignore any distinction between the Swedish and the Danish past and refer to all Scandinavians as Danes. As for Rudbeck's Nonetheless, here again, while the Swedes were obliged to resort to extravagant theorising in order to assert their ancestral superiority over their Scandinavian neighbours, the Danes had the benefit of far greater manuscript resources.
As had been the case with Ole Worm, Bartholin was highly dependent on the Icelanders in order to substantiate his views. In Bartholin's case, it was his highly industrious assistant Despite the tendency toward patriotically overwrought 'medievalisms' from both the Swedes and the Danes, the wealth of manuscript information they collectively gathered together and translated, both into Latin and their native tongues, gave many scholars and literary artists throughout Europe access to the Old Norse legacy. During the early eighteenth century, with theories of a Rudbeckian nature now largely dismissed, less nationalist and better informed studies emerged in both Denmark and Sweden, although euhemerisation continued to be regarded as essential when it came to any discussion of the origins of Norse paganism. If nothing else, Pope's ridicule does, at the very least, suggest that Worm's work was of sufficiently high profile to be worth an eminent English satirist's attention. Yet, while the impact of Scandinavian efforts to rehabilitate their past remained merely latent in England, matters were about to change and when they did so, the outcome was nothing short of dramatic.

Mallet's Histoire de Dannemarc and Macpherson's Ossianic poetry
Underlying the Romantic Revival were three interrelated oppositions: northern or, more precisely, Germanic Europe versus Latinate southern Europe; Protestantism versus Catholicism; and the medieval versus the Classical. At the heart of these matters were issues concerning ethnic, religious and national identity, which, for Protestant countries, entailed  Macpherson's sincerity, Walpole and Gray were very much of their time.
In conclusion, the significant extent to which matters runic and Ossianic were on Walpole's literary horizons when he wrote The Castle of Otranto seems undeniable. With this in mind, a plot involving a descent into secret chambers, the hostile presence of ghosts and giants, and the indefatigable, noble and manly hero seeking justice amid moribund Gothic 'gloomth', as Walpole was wont to call it, might well have been taken from the Icelandic eddas.
Moreover, as Rix convincingly points out, that oversized sword that exhausted so many at So deeply embedded and fashionable did the Old Northern worldview become that, by the end of the nineteenth century, Bram Stoker presents the Viking biological heritage as a worrying trait in respect of his most famous Gothic villain but as an admirable one in respect of his stalwart heroes. So it is that Dracula boasts of his descent from Icelandic 'Berserkers' (Auerbach and Skal, eds. 1997, Ch. 3, 34), in other words, those like Angantýr, while Quincy Morris is praised as 'a moral Viking' (Auerbach and Skal, eds. 1997, Ch. 13, 156), a gentlemanly Ragnar Lodbrok, maybe. Stoker's view that the Vikings had endowed their descendants with formidable doughtiness is again apparent his The Gates of Life (1908). 5 In this, the tellingly named young Harold An Wolf is lectured at length by his parson father, a man proud of his 'Gothic though the Dutch' ancestry (p. 32) and a keen student of Icelandic sagas: 'There never was, my boy, such philosophy making for victory as that held by our Vikings. It taught that whoever was never wounded was never happy.
It was not enough to be victorious. The fighter should contend against such odds that complete immunity was impossible … Why, their strength, and endurance, and resolution, perfected by their life of constant hardihood and stress, became so ingrained in their race, that to this day, a thousand years after they themselves have passed away, their descendants have some of their fine qualities.' (p. 33) As Stoker was born and raised in Clontarf, which, as previously noted, was the early eleventhcentury scene of what, in effect, was the last gasp of Viking belligerence on Irish soil and the setting for the widely anthologised 'The Fatal Sisters', for example, Volume 2 of Matthew Lewis's The Tales of Wonder of 1801, 6 it likely that Viking fervour was instilled in him from an early age. Nonetheless, Stoker was far from unique among his contemporaries in this respect and few of his readers would have failed to appreciate what was being signified by his 5 The Gates of Life is the US title of Stoker's The Man, which was initially published in the UK 1905. The full text of The Gates of Life can be found at https://archive.org/stream/gateslife00stokgoog#page/n42/mode/2up/search/Northern Accessed 25 th November, 2014. references to Viking machismo. In certain respects, the Nordic past and Gothic fantasies had become tantamount to synonymous.
While Rix's study makes useful progress in reconnecting Gothicism with the Gothic novel, it is hoped that this survey of the emergence of Gothicism as a key presence in English literature helps by providing even more context. It nevertheless remains the case that opportunities for further research into the Gothicism of the Gothic are worthy of investigation.