Northern noble savages? Edward Daniel Clarke and British primitivist narratives on Scotland and Scandinavia, c.1760-1822

• Main Authors: Andersson Burnett, Linda Carin Cecilia, Burnett, Linda Carin Cecilia Andersson
• Other Authors: Ahnert, Thomas, Manning, Susan, Newby, Andrew, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), George Scott Travelling scholarship, Strathmartine Trust
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: The University of Edinburgh 2012
• Subjects: primitivism; noble savage; Scandinavia; Scotland; travel literature; natural history; Clarke; Edward Daniel; 1769-1822; Traveller; sami; Lapland
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6410

This thesis analyses a growing metropolitan British fascination with northern Scandinavia and Scotland towards the end of the eighteenth century. These two northern regions underwent a dramatic transformation, from being places people avoided to being realms writers considered worthy of visiting, observing and narrating. This thesis examines the importance of the primitivist discourse of northern noble savagery in that transformation. While encounters with the ‘noble savage’ were largely associated with the extra-European world, the fascination with the north was in observing Europe’s very own native examples of the breed. The Highlanders and Islanders of Scotland and the northern Scandinavians, the Sami people in particular, were often romanticised in this context. Despite the Sami being celebrated in British fiction and natural-history works at the time, there has been, in contrast with Scandinavia’s ‘Vikings’, little scholarly attention given to them in a British context. The origin and function of the northern-noble-savage discourse is anchorerd in naturalhistory texts. This study emphasises the importance of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), who travelled in Lapland in 1732, in constructing idealised depictions of the Sami. Linnaeus also provided a model of domestic exploration in which naturalists produced inventories of regions and their inhabitants previously relatively unmapped by the state. Although the image of the northern savage often bore little resemblance to reality, it had real application and effect. Such imagery allowed allegedly backward regions to be incorporated into the national narrative, and through this the national community sought to benefit from these peripheries and their communities. The thesis also studies the consequences of actual encounters between metropolitan observers and the local populations of these northern regions. The travelogues of the celebrated natural historian and traveller Edward Daniel Clarke (1769-1822), who sojourned in Scotland and Scandinavia ...