This chapter excavates the revisionary literary imaginings of Britain's Danish settlers and its former pagan religion of Odin. One mainstream view of the Viking attackers on churches and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is epitomised in the Oxford antiquarian Francis Wise's comment from the 1750s that ‘the Danes perpetuated such a scene of villainy as is scarce to be parallel’d in the stories of the most savage nations’. In texts published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, several authors sought to reposition the Scandinavian element of British history. Through an analysis of select works by Wordsworth, Walter Scott and Ann Radcliffe, the chapter reveals how specific texts generated imaginative spaces to rethink and recontextualise the inheritances left by Scandinavian interlopers and settlers. The central contention is that authors presented the old antagonists in new guises as part of a historical trajectory, forging a more inclusive conception of British national identity. Through readings and contextualisation of key texts, I will demonstrate how fictional characters of Scandinavian origin come to symbolise Britain's progression towards social cohesion and a shared Christian faith. In other words, we find a recognition of the role of the ancient Danes in shaping the modern nation.

Revisiting Britain's ‘Others’

Against the backdrop of war and unrest in the 1790s, the spectre of past atrocities committed against the Danes is reflected in an often overlooked poem by William Wordsworth, first published in Lyrical Ballads (1800) entitled ‘A Fragment’ (later retitled ‘The Danish Boy. A Fragment’). The poem is a vignette of a ghost, a Danish boy, whose singing can sometimes be heard in a moorland dell. He can be seen as a ‘Spirit of noon-day’, almost like ‘a form of flesh and blood’, dressed in his ‘regal vest of fur […] In colour like a raven's wing’. As Wordsworth would later recall, the stanzas were initially meant ‘to introduce a Ballad upon the Story of a Danish Prince who had fled from Battle, and, for the sake of the valuables about him, was murdered by the Inhabitant of a Cottage in which he had taken refuge’. The killing of a prince who had deliberately abandoned war is an injustice, and this seems to explain why he has become a ghost haunting the landscape.