Longfellow and King Alfred

Marcus Ward's Royal Illuminated Legends:
Longfellow's King Alfred and Othere (ca. 1872-80?)

I've been thinking (and also doing some writing) recently about the place of Anglo-Saxon literature in the nineteenth century, for a host of reasons, including what I recently discovered about the Wheeling, West Virginia, glassmaker, William Leighton, Jr (whom I've long known about from the glass world, as a major figure at Wheeling's Hobbs, Brockunier & Co). Leighton, I learned, was also an American poet of at least minor note. 

Even more surprisingly, he wrote two books (which I've not yet read) that appear to concern themselves with events from Anglo-Saxon England: The Sons of Godwin (1877) and At the Court of King Edwin (1878). Since medieval literature, and Anglo-Saxon literature in particular, has always been a focus of my academic writing, Leighton is especially fascinating to me: like me, he dealt in Victorian glassware, was interested in Anglo-Saxon literature, and lived in West Virginia. It's an unusual combination, I think.

"Othere, the old sea captain."

My post today, however, is about a more famous American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His short work, "The Discoverer of the Northern Cape)" was another American poem on an Anglo-Saxon topic that I knew nothing about until recently (note that here, Longfellow's title has been superseded by the title "King Alfred and Othere"). Of course I knew the story of King Alfred and Ohthere--it's one of the first things learners of Old English read, an interesting little bit of late ninth-century geographical learning that King Alfred inserted (or had inserted) into the Old English translation of Orosius's Historiae Adversus Paganos.

Longfellow's poem, as my images show, was of sufficient interest to readers in England that the firm of Marcus Ward & Co produced this children's version of the poem, set to music and lavishly illustrated with six full-page pictures. It is, apparently, a rare book: WorldCat shows copies published (as here) by Marcus Ward & Co, in London; and also copies published (with only four plates) by Nimmo, in Edinburgh; as well as an American version published by J. R. Osgood. But WorldCat only seems to show about half a dozen holdings in total for all of these three editions together.

So I was obviously delighted to get this copy recently. It certainly served a role, in the nineteenth century, of associating Alfred and the Anglo-Saxons with the discovery of and knowledge of foreign lands. In that sense, this book did its work in promoting the ideals of the British Empire; that Longfellow was the poet reminds us that Americans, too, could be both the influencers and the influenced in relation to such associations. 

At the same time, the book is part of a series, "Marcus Ward's Illuminated Legends" which the publisher's ad on the rear cover describes in the following terms: "Each Story, or Legend, is Illustrated with a set of brilliant Pictures, in the quaint spirit of Mediæval times, and printed in Colors and Gold. The stories are related in Antient Ballad form." One of the other titles advertised in the series is "Pocahontas, or La Belle Sauvage." One wonders, indeed, what "brilliant Pictures, in the quaint spirit of Medieval times," would accompany the tale of Pocahontas. But here, too, America and some notion of the Middle Ages were fit together somehow in the Victorian imagination, and they were further placed together for the consumption of Victorian children. 

There's still much to think about here, I think, though the transatlantic aspects of these linkages seems clear.

"And there we hunted the walrus"