REPRESENTATIONS OF LAPLAND IN BRITISH ROMANTIC LITERATURE: TOWARD ETHNOGRAPHICAL DISSEMINATION?

• Main Author: BRIAND MAXIME
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: Федеральное государственное автономное образовательное учреждение высшего профессионального образования Северо-Восточный федеральный университет им. М.К. Аммосова 2016
• Subjects: BRITISH ROMANTICISM,S. T. COLERIDGE,LAPLAND,KNUDLEEM,ARCTIC MYTHOLOGY; Arctic; Macpherson; Lapponia; Lapland
• Online Access: http://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/representations-of-lapland-in-british-romantic-literature-toward-ethnographical-dissemination; http://cyberleninka.ru/article_covers/16965464.png

Romantic representations of Lapland were chiefly the joint product of the eighteenth century primitivist and sublime theory, notably responsible for the ossianic revival initiated by Scottish antiquarian James Macpherson in the 1760s. Still unknown to many, the mythical Gaelic bard Ossian and his poems set off all over Europe a real “Celtomania” that eventually earned him later the very distinctive title of “Homer of the North”, whose cultural significance far outstretched the bounds of the Scottish Highlands. As a matter of fact, sporadic literary allusions to Lapland and the Samí had already been made by that time through the publication and successive rewriting or imitations of two Lappish ballads. Subsequently entitled “Orra Moor” and “The Reindeer song,” they were presented as genuine specimen of Lappish poetry first communicated by a native named Olaus Matthias to German humanist Johannes Scheffer who included them in his history of the Samí, Lapponia (1673). This rather contrasted with a dogmatic Christian approach of Arctic religions and mythologies in terms of superstition directly connected with an only half-suppressed European belief in witchcraft still prevailing as a popular referential medium. The proposed aim of this paper would be to study the process of what might be termed “ethnographical dissemination”, as resulting from the influence of Arctic travel writing upon Romantic poetry as in the Lappish episode of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Destiny of Nations”(1796/1817).