Nostalgia, medievalism and the Vinland voyages

This essay examines the varied forms of nostalgia for an idyllic land found and lost, according to accounts of voyages to lands west of Greenland in the Old Norse Groenlendinga saga (The Saga of the Greenlanders) and Eiriks saga rauoa (The Saga of Eric the Red) and their retelling in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in American and British literature. Whereas American poets celebrated an ideal of Viking heroism and nostalgia for the moment of 'discovery' as the basis of a myth of national foundation, British fiction of the same period is infused with regret at the failure of a promising venture that speaks to anxieties about empire. For both American and British writers, the 'medievalism of nostalgia' is less for an imagined ideal of the medieval than for the potential of a medieval venture to shape the history of the modern world.