'Resolved into ashes’: Norse Medievalism and Cremation in 19th-Century Britain

What did it mean to be cremated in nineteen-century Britain? With Henry Thompson’s publication of ‘Treatment of the Body After Death’ in 1874, cremation as a modern practice came to the fore of public discourse. Images of overflowing graveyards, contaminated water and cholera outbreaks were popular reference points for the public health crises of the nineteenth-century industrialization. Cremation was proposed as a solution to said concerns and the ensuing debates were situated in overlapping fields of public health discussions, religious debates, colonial discourse, and, central to this paper’s argument, the rising discipline of Viking archaeology and its literary receptions. Like the plurality inherent to cremation discussions, Norse medievalism in nineteenth-century Britain stood at the intersections of multiple movements, interests, and crises, such as those of philological and national identities, colonialism and changing attitudes towards death and commemoration. It was often argued in nineteenth-century Britain that the success of the empire might be traced to a supposed inheritance of spirit and vigor from Norse invaders. What, then, did it mean to be cremated in Victorian Britain when the most popular image of the so-called ‘Viking funeral’ is a funeral pyre? This paper will begin with an overview of interactions between Norse medievalism and cremation debates in both the periodical press and in cremation literature of the 1870s. Then, using William Morris’s epic poem Sigurd the Volsung as the primary case study, supported by his prose translation of Völsunga saga and his translations of eddic poetry, this paper argues that contemporary cremation concerns of the 1870s dictate essential changes in this literary pillar of Norse medievalism and then proposes the possibility that such cremation concerns can be found elsewhere in works of Norse medievalism of the 1870s. 
 
Maggie Pavleszek is in the third year of her PhD in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her thesis interrogates portrayals of Viking death and Norse funerary practice in the Victorian imagination. Her research combines the themes of Old Norse reception studies, archaeology in literature and Victorian death studies.