Robert Southey (1774–1843)

1.        Robert Southey is considered to be one of the major Romantic poets. He held office as Poet Laureate from 1813 to his death. Southey had a life-long interest in Norse poetry. On several occasions, he seems to have planned a long poem on a Norse theme. [1]  Southey is known for his epics, among which Joan of Arc (1796), Thalaba (1801) and Madoc (1805) are the best known. Thalaba is an “Oriental” fantasy, in the preface to which Southey tells us that he was inspired to poetic experiment by the use of irregular verse and mythological subject matter in Frank Sayers’s Dramatic Sketches of the Ancient Northern Mythology (1790). [2]  In the Romantic period, both Norse and Arab literature were investigated for their richness of fantastic imagery in the attempt to create a space for the construction of a literary tradition independent of classical letters.

2.        The two poems “Race of Odin” and “Death of Odin” are based on the theory that Odin was a historical chieftain who had been deified. Through a false etymology, Odin’s Æsir (the word used in Norse mythology about the family of the gods) were interpreted as “Asia-men”, who had travelled from beyond Europe’s borders to a new settlement in Scandinavia. This historicizing and euhemerist theory was known through the works of Snorri Sturluson, the Icelandic historian, poet and politician. It is found in the prologue to the Prose Edda and with variations in Ynglinga saga (which makes up the first part of Heimskringla) (both from the 1220s). Snorri speaks of Odin’s flight from military aggression in his homeland (either Troy or the Black Sea), presumably alluding to the Roman imperial advances under Pompey. If we square this with verifiable history, Odin’s migration can be placed in the first century BC. We know from historical texts that Mithridates VI, Rome’s most formidable antagonist in the East, had to yield to Pompey.

3.        The idea of Odin’ Æsir as a retinue of migrating Asians was intensely discussed (and believed as historical fact) in the eighteenth century. [3]  William Wordsworth thought Mithridates and Odin were the same person, when he considered using the legend as a theme for an epic. [4]  The idea of Odin as a chieftain migrating from the East was also the foundation of George Richards Odin. A Drama (1804), taking the form of Greek tragedy, and William Drummond’s high-flown verses in Odin. A Poem(1817).

4.        Southey’s poems fall within his radical period and have anti-establishment connotations. He turned to conservatism in later years, as did fellow poet-radicals Wordsworth and Coleridge. Southey probably sees Odin’s desire to revenge himself on imperial Rome as applicable to the fight against the state terrorism of the 1790s. To be sure, a similar theme is taken up in the dedicatory epistle (see below), which Southey contributed to Amos Cottle’s translation of the Poetic Edda. In a passage (not included below) from the poem, Southey names revolutionary heroes forced to flee their homelands due to political persecution: the French Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834), the English Joseph Priestly (1733–1804) and the Polish-Lithuanian Andrzej Tadeusz Kościuszko (1748–1817), who are all celebrated as “Persecuted men! … sufferers in the cause/ Of Truth and Freedom!”

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“To A. S. Cottle from Robert Southey” (1797)

1.        Robert Southey’s dedicatory poem to Amos Cottle was prefixed to the latter’s English translation of the Poetic Edda, which was entitled Icelandic Poetry, or The Edda of Saemund (1797). Amos’s brother, Joseph, later gave an explanation of how this work was produced.

A young friend of my brother’s wanted more information respecting the Scandinavian Mythology than he could obtain from English books, and during one of Amos’s long Cambridge vacations, he kindly undertook to translate literally for his friend the whole of the Edda of Sæmond, with the notes. Soon after he had commenced the work, Mr Southey (between whom and my brother there existed reciprocal respect), seeing his engagement advised him rather to make verse the vehicle of his translation in the free manner of Gray’s “Descent of Odin,” one of the poems. This advice was adopted and was the origin of my brother’s translation of the “Edda of Sæmond”. [23] 

2.        The poem takes metaphors from the Norse tradition to serve a radical agenda. Southey sees Gothic bloodiness as part of a primitive but sincere creed, while he condemns the hypocrisy of Christian priests, who in the past have pretended to benevolence; their prayers constitute “a bloodier hate than ever rose/ At Odin’s altar”. It is impossible not to read this as connected with Southey’s deeply felt antipathies against the Roman Church, since he levels precisely such criticisms of hypocrisy against Papal wars in his anti-Catholic diatribe Letters Written during a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal, published the same year. [24]  In the extract given below, Southey praises Norse fortitude and bravery, as well as the moving force of the poetry. He also praises the Scandinavian landscape, described in Mary Wollstonecraft’s recently published Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), to which he refers in a later footnote.

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