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of gratitude, an expression that still occurs in a common table prayer, into an affirmation of gendered social roles that well-suits Victorian sensibility: meals become the responsibility of women, who become ladies and not just females. Of greater consequence, Slingsby claims, ‘As I have stayed at all sorts of farm-houses and with many of the Norse gentry and merchants, I have got to know and I hope to appreciate fully the characteristics and sterling good qualities of a race to which I am proud to believe that we are nearer akin than to any other in Europe.’ 10
At the opening of his 1836 Adventures in the North of Europe , Edward Landor makes a perhaps surprising admission. ‘Quite aware that in the well-trampled field of literature I had no chance of making an impression as a sober, plodding traveller’, he says, ‘I imagined that by creating a more interesting wanderer … who should follow the path I myself had pursued, I might, perhaps, win over a few readers who would have taken no pleasure in a mere matter-of-fact, laborious narrative.’ 1 For Landor, his journey to Scandinavia and the experiences he had there were
historiography, layering multiple times and perspectives to demonstrate the fundamental instability and idiosyncrasy of interpretation. First, I will provide a brief account of Bryher's life – given her relative obscurity outside of historical studies of modernism – in which I will pay special attention to her relationship with H.D., the modernist poet and ‘since 1919 [Bryher's] companion, sometime lover, and always friend’, 4 and the French bookseller Adrienne Monnier, to whom the novel is dedicated. H.D. and Monnier represent
Indo-European language families, Hickes derives Old English, Old High German, and Old Norse (which he calls Cimbrica) from Gothic, and he even provides a tree diagram to illustrate these connections and the development of Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish from Cimbrica. ‘You can see therefore’, he advises his reader, ‘what a great affinity there is among many languages, and how with a little effort, with the aid of ancient writers, it is possible to learn or at least understand the excellent languages of northern Europe.’ In the fashion of the times, Hickes
-historical relationship to Beowulf that reveals a queerness at the heart of literary modernism, leveraged through a kitschy plaster bulldog named Beowulf in a novel of the same title by Bryher. Bryher's Beowulf does not, Buchanan argues, directly adapt or correspond to the Old English poem of the same name but rather performs a kind of ‘historical palimpsest’, returning us to an analysis of the women in the Old English Beowulf and the gendering of intimacy in the poem and its afterlives. A knot in the bed sheets of literary history and an important contribution to queer studies