‘The North’ and ‘the East’: The Odin Migration Theory

Abstract

Robert Rix discusses the interest in eighteenth-century and romantic-period Britain in the legends surrounding Odin, the chief deity of the ancient Norse pantheon. As Rix observes, there had been, since the Middle Ages, a persistent attempt to interpret Odin as an historical figure from Asia who conquered the north of Europe, bringing with him a new language and the art of poetry. Rix’s account of how English writers took seriously the Odin migration idea not only explores a largely unstudied aspect of Anglo-Nordic cultural exchange but also provides a new perspective on the ongoing critical debate deriving ultimately from Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) about the uses of the East as an ‘Other’ and the ways in which that ‘Other’ was implicated in definitions of English literature.