This book explores the reception and creation of memories of an Anglo-Scandinavian medieval past between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. A key premise is that “Memory is a dynamic process” (p. 1) and is performative rather than merely reproductive, leading to “the creation of some kind of community across time” (p. 1). Machan argues that the English Middle Ages have been, and need to be, understood in relation to Scandinavia (p. 2). Memories of this relationship were passed down from the medieval period and later inspired the creation of new “memories” articulating a distinctive perspective on the “emerging global role of Great Britain” (p. 3). Evoking Scandinavia was a way of remembering the medieval English past: much of what writers “remembered about medieval English geography, history, religion, and literature, they remembered by means of Iceland, Norway, and, to lesser extents, Denmark and Sweden” (p. 3).Having established the book's main claims, the opening chapter surveys English-Scandinavian relations in the medieval period itself and in medieval texts. The rest of the book is not organized chronologically, but instead repeatedly revisits a series of tropes relating to four main topics: natural history, ethnography, moral assessments, and literature. The book in this way resembles a series of variations on a set of related themes.Chapter two is concerned with the striking number of travel narratives devoted to Scandinavia and Iceland in the period 1600–1900. Machan considers well-known travelers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and William Morris alongside many more obscure writers. He argues that Norway and Iceland offered British visitors a kind of time travel, taking them back to what their own land had been like before its rise to global superpower status: “encountering the north could be a way for British travelers in particular to encounter themselves” (p. 28). Observing the inadequacies of city life in Oslo and Reykjavik enhanced travelers’ sense of the splendors of British cities. The Nordic countryside, on the other hand, offered natural wonders that could not be experienced in Britain. Alongside scientific interest in these natural phenomena, the medieval Icelandic sagas provided a literary stimulus to visit Iceland and determined what readers wanted to see there. By offering a mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar, Scandinavia and Iceland sharpened travelers’ understanding of their own past and present: “What was discovered in the process was Britain as much as Scandinavia” (p. 45).Chapter three charts the development of ideas of the English and Scandinavians as (originally) a single people. This history is linked to evolving ideas about the common linguistic origins of English and the Scandinavian languages. The chapter includes an interesting analysis of the importance of Odin to a sense of ethnic identity in England, and a telling comparison with contemporary Scandinavian writings about the god. The chapter concludes by observing that British and Nordic writers differed in their use of the past to define the present: British writers sought similarities between England and Scandinavia, whereas Nordic writers ignored Britain or “saw only differences” (p. 81).The next chapter develops the idea that Scandinavia represented an open-air museum that enabled British travelers to visit their own past, providing a kind of homecoming tinged with painful recognition of the simplicity that had been lost in Britain and the ambiguous consequences of modernization in Scandinavia. Other topics touched on here include the importance of the Norse past to some regional identities in England and the way a shared Protestant faith became a “ubiquitous trope in accounts of Anglo-Scandinavian ethnicity” (p. 95).Chapter five is devoted to language and literature, revisiting earlier themes to demonstrate how “the English encounter with Scandinavia involved the active fashioning of what was being remembered” (p. 117). Attention is paid to George Hickes's pioneering philological work and to intriguing claims by some nineteenth-century British travelers in Scandinavia that the local languages were similar enough to English to enable comprehension. Turning to literature, Machan explores the use of Norse mythological texts from the seventeenth century onwards, noting the influential role of Thomas Percy in their Anglophone dissemination. The book then reaches a little beyond its period to relate the issues discussed to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) with its debt to “the recycled Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages” (p. 130). The chapter ends with further reflections on the role of Icelandic sagas in inspiring travel to Iceland and includes thoughtful commentary on William Morris's saga translations.The concluding chapter again steps beyond 1900 to consider Tolkien's views on the relationship between English and Norse cultures and his opposition to the use Nazis made of a Nordic past. After briefly considering the place of Old Norse in Anglophone higher education and global interest in Norse mythology, Machan reads accounts of the kraken as figuring the workings of memory: “There may not be real krakens in the oceans, but that does not make them any less real as cultural icons, in the past or today” (p. 162). Finally, Machan concludes that “any definition of the reality of the English Middle Ages cannot but evolve from what the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages came to mean” (p. 162).As Machan several times points out, the period 1600–1900 saw the successive creation of the modern states of Great Britain and the United Kingdom, a process entwined with the kind of national remembering examined in this book. Given that context, it is regrettable that Machan does not distinguish more rigorously between England/English and Britain/British in his analysis. For example, the Nordic peoples are said to have influenced “Great Britain's languages,” so that in the tenth and eleventh centuries “distinctions between the Norse and English peoples are not easily drawn” (p. 5): this obscures the fact that Norse was far less influential on Cornish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh than on English, and passes from a statement about Britain as a whole to a conclusion about only the English. A passage in the Icelandic Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu claiming that before the Norman Conquest the language in “England” was the same as that in Norway and Denmark is offered as evidence of a belief that “Britain” and Iceland shared a language (p. 8). On p. 14 the “so-called Celtic fringe” is said to be an “external reference point” for the forging of a British nation, but Celtic-speaking parts of Scotland and Wales were and are part of—not “external” to—Great Britain.In Chapter three it is not clear how the proposition that “early modern British people could be understood to remain fundamentally Nordic” (p. 53) can have been true of all the peoples of Britain. Indeed, Machan claims that this was the case “despite the sustained presence of several neighbouring Brythonic groups” (ignoring non-Brythonic Gaelic). However, “Brythonic groups” were British people: they had been on the island since before the arrival of English-speakers and by the period referred to here they were part of the modern British state, not its “neighbours.” A brief reference to English colonization of other parts of Britain on p. 150 seems to me to oversimplify the process by which a British state and British identity were created.Machan does address the question of “what to call the regions” with which he is concerned (p. 18), rightly pointing out that modern distinctions do not necessarily coincide with those made in earlier periods. But noting that although most of the Anglophone writers he will discuss wrote during the formation of Great Britain and the United Kingdom they “lived in England proper” (p. 18) seems to undermine the very distinction it is trying to make by implying that there is after all an (improper) sense in which England can mean the same as Britain. Machan argues that the name “England” does not evoke the historical reality or the developing commitment to a colonial and imperial Britain found in his writers (p. 18), but his consequent preference for referring to the “English” people but to “Britain” as a place is not consistent with the historical (and contemporary) reality that England was and is only part of Britain.Some of the writers discussed in this book certainly themselves failed to distinguish carefully between England and Britain. Greater insight might, however, have been achieved by interrogating their imprecision rather than accepting it. Indeed, one might expect a book about memory and national identity to be particularly sensitive to the way such usage erases the memory of non-English peoples in the archipelago. The writer outside Machan's period to whom he occasionally turns for illuminating comparisons might have provided a model here: Tolkien had a very robust sense of the distinction between England/English and Britain/British.Other traditions about the past during this period (such as the prominent Arthurian strand in nineteenth-century culture) paid much more attention to the non-Anglo-Scandinavian elements in Britain's (real or imagined) medieval history. In Chapter five there is brief recognition of “other views of the Middle Ages and its relevance to the present, ones that do not depend on Nordic mediation; Anglo-Celtic dynamics for example produced their own powerful cultural memory” (pp. 115–16). The opportunity is not, however, taken to explore the relative importance of these competing perspectives or how people reconciled such different narratives.Despite its tendency to equate part and whole, this book is a valuable contribution to scholarship on English medievalism and the influence and reception of Nordic history, culture, and literature. It is full of interesting material and offers new perspectives on familiar texts alongside insightful discussion of less well-known material. Machan deploys impressive scholarship across all relevant languages and commands detailed knowledge of primary texts from the well-known to the now largely forgotten. The notes to each chapter extensively document relevant scholarship, and the author's deep learning is presented with eloquence and lucidity. The book's thesis is thought-provoking and readers will find much to stimulate them.