The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are Read Online Free PDF

holding on to the bear until he reached Denmark, Audun
     made a solid fortune in money which he could use for anything. A man no longer
     skirts the abyss in the far north and lives in fear of monsters; instead, he does
     business with them for cash.
    The story is the folktale of a man and a
     bear, but it also signals a moment when the world becomes recognizable, if not
     downright modern: money, travel, trade, ambition. But of course we choose what we
     want to recognize.
    That is why the reality of this hidden
     past matters so much. It involves whole peoples’ ideas about who they are, how
     they think, where they come from and why they rule: all the things they choose to
     recognize.
    ‘Forgetting history or even
     getting it wrong is one of the major elements in building a nation,’ Ernest
     Renan wrote, and he said history was a danger to nationalism; Eric Hobsbawm added:
     ‘I regard it as the primary duty of modern historians to be such a
     danger.’ 32
    For national history has a way of being radically
     incomplete. The Irish were and are deeply attached to the notion of an island of
     saints and scholars, which is not wrong at all, except that it leaves out the
     raiders, slavers and traders. Some Dutchmen used to have a deep mistrust of anything
     medieval on the grounds that it was bound to be Catholic and therefore unpatriotic
     and wrong, but it’s tough to get right a history that has to be a perfect
     blank before the Protestant sixteenth century; and it can be silly. When the
     Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam first opened in its pseudo-medieval glory, all Gothick
     spikes and towers, King William III in 1885 announced: ‘I shall never set foot
     in that monastery.’ Norwegian attitudes are even more complicated, since the
     Middle Ages were the time when Norway was independent and powerful, before Danes and
     Swedes took over and started to write the national story; so instead of leaving out
     the medieval, Norwegians chose to leave out the next four centuries, the
     ‘four-hundred-year night’. When the first Norwegian national assembly, a
     thoroughly democratic body, opened in 1814 the President perversely declared:
     ‘Now is re-erected the Norwegian royal throne.’ 33
    There is worse. The peoples around the
     North Sea have a remarkable story, the one I mean to tell, but it all too easily
     degenerates into a claim on Northern superiority: one in which the Southern lands
     where the lemon trees blossom, and the people have time to sit under them, are meant
     to learn from their betters, and long, thin blond people are meant to rule short,
     stocky, dark people. As a short, stocky dark person from the North, I am unhappy
     with this; the fact that Nordic saga-writers made all their thralls and slaves look
     like me is infuriating.
    And particular evils rest on the
     Northern legend: the story of connections is twisted to justify separations of the
     bloodiest kind. German nationalism was always fascinated by its Scandinavian
     connections; think of Wagner tweaking dragon-slaying superhero stories from the
Nibelungenlied
and the gods of old Iceland into the
Ring
cycle, think of Fritz Lang tweaking Wagner in the movie version of
Die
     Nibelungen
, setting out to make a perfectly medieval epic about
     ‘Germany searching for an ideal in her past’ and having to put upwith praise from Goebbels for ‘an
     epic film that is not of our time, yet is so modern, so contemporary and so
     topical’. 34
    The rediscovery of the great Saxon poem
Heliand
, the Gospels retold in the ninth century in the manner of some
     North Sea epic, produced a number of fits of fantasy: in the nineteenth century
     August Vilmar took it to show ‘all that is great and beautiful, with all that
     the German nation, its heart and life, were able to provide’. It celebrated
     all sorts of things he reckoned to be especially German, like ‘the lively joy
     of the Germans in moveable wealth’. He somehow deduced that the