Victorian Imag(in)ing of the Pagan Pyre: Frank Dicksee's <i>Funeral of a Viking</i>

Abstract

Victorians drew on imagery of Druid and Viking funeral pyres as a way of exploring alternative narratives of death and burial, generating a collective attention to what happened to a body after death. I set Frank Dicksee’s oil painting, Funeral of a Viking (1893), against the background of the emergent cremation movement and accounts of the neo-Druid William Price, a proponent for the legalization of cremation in the 1880s, in order to glimpse the work performed by the visualization of the ritualized burning of human beings in the pagan past. Fire produces metamorphosis in the objects it encounters, and Dicksee’s portrayal underscores the notion of a clearly delineated human body transforming into amorphous flame. Moreover, the Viking dissolves into pigment itself, mere aesthetic effect taking the place of a recognizable figure. In fictional accounts such as Paul Du Chaillu’s novel Ivar the Viking (1893), the pyre as a narrative tool similarly forced attention to the body as dematerializing thing and to the language articulating this dissipation. I suggest that the Victorian fascination with pagan fire-death allowed for alternate visions of form–matter relationships that in turn might produce new aesthetic possibilities. As the Christian world insisted on the resurrection of the body in a way that clung fiercely to tangibility and bounded form even in the face of belief in the immortality of the saved soul, the modern moment might be seen, in contrast, as characterized by an embrace of an aesthetic of dissolving form or formlessness.