In the nineteenth century the writers, artists and antiquarians of the Lake District began enthusiastically to study the literature and culture of the Vikings, and to trace many of the region’s distinctive features back to the Norse settlements. This enthusiasm for Lakeland’s Viking origins expressed itself in scholarship and fiction, in painting and sculpture, in saga-translations and travels to Iceland, and in many other forms; and this regional movement formed part of a wider national interest in the Vikings and their literature, an interest fuelled variously by philology, politics, and historicism. The leading figure in the study of the Vikings in Lakeland was the artist and author William Gershom Collingwood (1854-1932), but other contributors ranged from Thomas De Quincey and Canon Rawnsley to Beatrix Potter and Arthur Ransome. In terms of both scholarly and popular awareness the ‘Norse medievalism’ of Collingwood and his contemporaries still shapes the ways in which we view both the impact of the Vikings in England and the Lake District’s particular history and inheritance.

The Vikings and Victorian Lakeland offers the first-ever detailed examination of the study of the Vikings and their culture in the Lake District, in the period c. 1850- 1930. It does this by concentrating – by no means exclusively, however – on the life and work of W.G. Collingwood, and it is the first book to be written about this important and influential figure, acclaimed by Grevel Lindop as the man who ‘almost single-handedly transformed the historical and archaeological understanding of the Lake District’.

Matthew Townend is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of York. His previous books include Language and History in Viking Age England (2002).

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