Abstract: “Valuable Paper and Priceless Information: The Society of Antiquaries of London and Anglo-Nordic Exchanges”
When the Icelandic-Danish antiquary Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín left London in 1791, after a five-year stay in England, he took with him the transcriptions he had made of what is now known as the Beowulf manuscript. For British antiquaries, whose practices of gift-giving and knowledge exchange have been studied by scholars like Rosemary Sweet and Noah Heringman, Thorkelín’s actions broke unspoken rules; the Scottish antiquary George Paton even described the relocation of the transcriptions as theft. When searching the minutes of the Society of Antiquaries of London for records of Nordic visitors and correspondence, more cases of cultural missteps between British and Nordic antiquaries concerning transactions of information and material appear, each telling its own story of what was considered valuable and worthless in British antiquarian circles in the Romantic period.
In this paper, I look at exchanges between British and Nordic antiquaries in terms of value. I ask whether variations of the negotiations and diversifications of value that scholars like Mary Poovey and James Thompson have identified in other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary genres can be seen in these exchanges. My investigation of what kind of information economy that British antiquaries seem to promote in their communication with Nordic colleagues draws particularly on Sweet’s description of British antiquarian society as a gift-giving economy that objected to the exchange of artefacts or knowledge for financial compensation. I argue that in antiquarian transnational communication and value exchange between Britain and the Nordic countries, the value given to a gift-based and open information economy is negotiated by national desires to find and define a northern European heritage.
Whilst I centre the paper on minutes from the Society of Antiquaries of London, I relate the negotiations of value in this material to other portrayals of the Nordic countries in the Romantic age. In British translations of ancient Nordic poetry, like Amos Simon Cottle’s Icelandic Poetry, or The Edda of Saemund (1797), antiquarian value judgements and transnational communication appear in the preference given to textual authority over oral tradition. Further, cases of Anglo-Nordic exchanges found in the minutes of the Society of Antiquaries of London form a contextual background to experiences of ancient history and transactions told by British travellers to the Nordic countries, such as in Joseph Banks’s catalogue of books brought from Iceland and given to the British Museum (recorded 1778), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), and Edward Daniel Clarke’s Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa (1819–1824). Reading these texts through attitudes towards transnational exchanges expressed by the Society of Antiquaries of London can illustrate the influence of antiquarian culture in other literary genres and in British encounters with other European cultures.
Bio: Lund University, Sweden
Jorunn Joiner is an affiliated researcher and temporary lecturer at Lund University, Sweden. She completed her PhD in 2024. Her thesis brings together memory studies and Romanticism to study the portrayal of Norse themes in British cultural texts from the decades around 1800. Reading the mediation of the past as a form of memory work, she focuses on the ways in which the past was seen to necromantically revive in the period as a cultural memory for British ethno-cultural identities. Her other research interests include contemporary media and medievalism, including the portrayal of landscape, Romanticism, and Norse history in video games.