The violence of Peter Wilkins - violence and Utopia in an eighteenth-century novel

For years I have been fascinated with Utopian fiction, i.e., stores that depict ideal societies, usually serving as a form of contemporary social commentary. In what we might call self-labelled Utopian fiction – that is fiction directly or indirectly inspired by Thomas More’s novel Utopia and thereby written after its publication in 1516 – the key recognisable elements of such societies are often well developed and used in a variety of different ways. However, similar forms of social commentary through imaginary places are found in abundance prior to More’s novel, and to fully understand the genre of Utopian fiction and its many complex components, it is often necessary to cast a very broad chronological net to see how the invention of, or reflections on, non-existent places function within a given discourse. I am currently dedicating some time to this kind of literature, and I hope to be able to develop my thoughts on various subjects pertaining to Utopian societies in the coming months.

Recently, I finished reading one such Utopian novel, published in 1751, namely The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins by Robert Paltock. The novel describes the eponymous protagonist’s journey from England to Africa and onwards to a land far to the south, in which he encounters a country of winged humans. Through his familiarity with metal and firearms – above all cannons salvaged from the ship on which he arrived – Peter Wilkins aids the king of the flying people to quell a rebellion and once more unite the vast kingdom. Desirous to spread Christianity and abolish slavery, Wilkins reforms the society of the kingdom, and continues to extend the territory of the king right to the very edge of the continent (which is the hypothesised southern land which was not yet documented by 1751). The novel is a troubling mix of imperialism, evangelism and abolitionism which really captures the complexities of eighteenth-century discourse, and provides an interesting and worthwhile read.

For my current purposes, my main interest in The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins is the function of violence in the making and sustaining of the Utopian society. The aspect of violence is an integral part of many Utopian stories, and violence serves different functions in how the ideal society is understood. In some cases, an ideal society is marked by the absence of violence, in other cases the ideal society is brought about through violence, and in yet other cases the ideal society is sustained by violence. Not infrequently, violence serves both a creating and a maintaining function in a Utopia. (I have written on the role of violence in Utopian societies in this blogpost.)

The case of The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins is somewhat peculiar, because it belongs to a particular sub-genre of the Utopian story that combines elements of the Robinsonade. In other words, the plot of the novel revolves around one – sometimes more – individuals shipwrecked and cast ashore in a strange and unknown country, whose society is in many ways radically different from their own. Such stories differ from the general plot of Thomas More’s Utopia, in which the reader receives a travelogue from a traveller who has arrived at the ideal society and then left it without any trouble or hindrance. The style of the travelogue renders the story more descriptive, and the polemical edge of this description is perhaps sharper in other, more adventure-like stories.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Utopian stories that employ elements of the Robinsonade is that like Robison Crusoe his island, so the protagonists of these stories often employ their technological knowledge and/or political precepts from their native countries to transform Utopia. In some such cases, the Utopia in question might be an ideal society that is destroyed by the application of the protagonist’s programme, perhaps most famously in Ludvig Holberg’s Niels Klim’s Undeground Travels. In other Robinsonade-cum-Utopian stories, it is the protagonist who creates the ideal society by transforming the Utopia – the no-place or imagined place – in accordance with their principles and their ambitions. The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins belongs to the latter category.

Peter Wilkins becomes acquainted with a society where the people are noble, industrious, clever, and have obtained a high-level intricate society of complex rituals, traditions and administration. Yet their primary technology is stone, they are a slave society, and their form of religion consists of what the Anglican Peter Wilkins deems idolatry. By the end of Peter’s time in this country – Normnbdsgrsutt [sic!] – the society remains a kingdom, but all slaves are now free, its territories are vastly extended, they have colonised previously uninhabited areas, taken up the use of metal, and adopted a version of their religion that does not contain idol-worship. This transformation comes through battles against rebellious subjects and through the conquest of a country of slave-holders. At the heart of this transformation is Peter Wilkins’ use of cannons and pistols, against which the pike-wielding armies of flying men stand no chance.

The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins provides an interesting and disturbing example of how envisioned ideal societies are heavily intertwined with the use of violence. The grand reforms of Normnbdsgrsutt and other neighbouring kingdoms are first of all made possible through violent means. Even if, as in this case, the violence is a response to extraneous violence, this response is not the end. Instead, Peter Wilkins goes further in his ambitions and takes advantage of the newly-established peace to control resources and initiate the production of metalwork. While the fabrication of armament is not mentioned as one of the pursuits of this metalwork, the cannons and pistols brought by Peter Wilkins would provide suitable models for copying should the flying people so desire. There is perhaps a hint of regret about this possibility in an aside comment in which the protagonists darkly questions whether his efforts of civilising have been all that positive.

The role of violence in The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins is a curious reminder that ideal societies are not necessarily brought about or sustained through ideal means, and that a potential for rot exists at the heart of most, if not all, of these Utopias. Robert Paltock’s novel is an importance case study in this regard, because it combines violence used to obtain goals with which few would not sympathise – the abolition of slavery – with violence used to extend territory and evangelise. Moreover, the possible future fabrication of firearms and cannons lurks as a devouring shadow at the edges of this transformed society, notwithstanding a prophecy of prosperity for 1500 years.

The violence in The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins forces us to grapple with the following question: how ideal are our visions of ideal society? Moreover, how do we avoid violence? How do we prevent the rot of violence at the heart of reforms and transformations? These questions are especially important due to the polemic function of Utopian stories. They are meant as social commentary, as a way to help us recognise errors in our own society and help us envision ways to deal with those errors. The question is whether we recognise those of our solutions that carry the rot within them, or whether we employ those faulty solutions only to end up with faulty replacements. 

The Madonna of Enebakk Church

Today is the feast of the Annunciation, and to mark this feast I present you, briefly and succinctly, with this Madonna with the Christ-child from the Church of Enebakk in Akershus, Eastern Norway. The sculpture was one gloriously painted, and traces of red can still be seen on Mary's dress. It is most likely form Norway, and is roughly dated to the period c.1230-c.1250. It is a testament to the notably high level of woodcraft in thirteenth-century Norway, and one among several Madonna sculptures that survive from the period. 

The sculpture is currently housed at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, but is currently in storage awaiting the reopening of the museum's medieval exhibition. Its former house, Enebakk Church, is a surviving structure from the medieval period. At the time of writing, I have not yet been there, but I hope to have a chance to visit soon.    

Creative googling and its consequences - or, Adventures in medievalism, part 4

 

Friday, March 10, I gave a seminar on Vikings in medievalism, explaining how our current ideas about Vikings were shaped by the renewed interest in medieval history in nineteenth-century Scandinavia. The ideas that came into place in this period were formed by a very particular context which blended romanticism, nationalism and scholarship. In Norway, for instance, one of the driving forces behind this interest in medieval history was the desire to provide nineteenth-century Norwegians with a golden age that could serve as a reference point in moulding the Norwegian nation-state of the 1800s, a period when Norway the weaker part of a union with Sweden. In Denmark, the interest in medieval history was in part moved by the loss of Norway to Sweden in 1814, and later pressure from expansionist Prussia which in turn resulted in the loss of Schleswig-Holstein in 1864.

While Swedish, Norwegian and Danish interests were moved by different impulses, these interests were nonetheless part of a wider phenomenon that appeared in many Western European countries. Consequently, despite the particulars of, say, Swedish medievalism, the Swedish ideas about the medieval past were part of a wider discourse and was therefore shaped by that discourse. This discourse also included input from Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Scandinavian diaspora in Canada and the United States.

The details concerning this historical developments are both interesting and numerous, and will hopefully be dealt with in a future blogpost, or perhaps several. However, in this present blogpost, my main aim is to share some of the reflections I made in the preparation for the seminar, and what I learned from the preparation process. It all started with some creative googling.

Even though the seminar was primarily focussed on nineteenth-century medievalism and how that medievalism shaped the modern ideas about the Viking, I thought this seminar would be a good opportunity to follow these ideas into the twenty-first century. I therefore decided to spend a couple of hours on the Internet, using very general search-terms that might yield some broader understanding of how pervasive and ubiquitous the figure of the Viking actually is in our day and age. One important foundational principle for this more or less aimless foray into cyberspace is the idea that the Viking is one of those reference points in a common register of what we might call ludic figures. These figures that are employed in cultural outputs because they are known by a very wide audience, and are therefore often used for play or gaming purposes. Examples of such ludic figures are pirates, ninjas, and cowboys, and such figures are often used in the same cultural expression, for instance if a film, a novel or a comic-book features pirates and cowboys in the same story, something which frequently happens. Because the Viking is a ludic figure, the Viking is often brought into play in cultural outputs, even when Vikings do not normally appear in the chronological or geographical setting in which that cultural output takes place. For instance, Rudyard Kipling’s story ‘The Knights of the Joyous Venture’ from his short-story collection Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) tells of Vikings reaching West Africa, thereby using the commonly-known figure of the Viking in a setting untypical of the Viking to create an entertaining story.

Knowing that Vikings are often fused with other such ludic elements popular in the common frame of reference, I decided to see what I could find, and how far afield I could follow the Vikings in the popular imagination. Since Vikings are not only used in entertainment and culture, but also for commercial purposes and in politics, I went on to cast a very wide net. My first port of call was Vikings and pizza. Remembering a pizzeria in York, UK, called Viking Pizza, I decided to dig a bit further, and learned that not only is this pizzeria still going – serving among other things its Viking pizza which is six toppings of your choice – but also that there is a nationwide chain called Vikings Pizza, whose website was blocked for Norwegian IP addresses, for some peculiar reason. This foray into modern food culture also brought to mind an advertisement campaign from my native Norway about twenty years ago, when a new brand of ham and tomato pizza made a claim that Vikings were the first to put tomato on their bread, on account of their contact with – the tomato-less – Vinland. Both these examples remind us that Vikings sell.

Moving on from culinary commercialism, I decided to try out various geographical connections. This yielded a throve of material. For instance, I found a picture of a reconstruction of a Viking ship in Sydney Harbour, taken in 2013, and learned of a collaboration between the Australian National Maritime Museum and the Swedish History Museum. Another antipodean find was a dart made in New Zealand called a ‘Viking hammer dart’, with decorations reminiscent of generic Norse knotwork patterns, and with an advertisement text that made a great effort in connecting the modern ideas about the Vikings – rampage and destruction – with this particular product.

Further geographically oriented searches produced a number of results pertaining to Vikings in space, including the 1963 novel Space Vikings by H. Beam Piper, and some short videos that dealt with the idea of Vikings in space. While I included Piper’s novel as a way to demonstrate how far removed from their chronological and geographical contexts Vikings could be used, it also served as a useful way to point out that this common imagination also yields real-life consequences, and in the mid-1970s the space probe programme called Viking was launched.

I also tried a few searches that connected Vikings with other ludic reference points, such as dinosaurs and robots, and the results were both varied and numerous, and provided good examples of just how ubiquitous the Viking is in the common imagination. Things did, however, take a weird turn, and not very long into my creative googling – I mean, my research. When searching for results in connections with Vikings at the centre of the earth – which was about halfway in my efforts – I got my first hit that pertained to literary pornography. The Internet being what it is, I guess it was inevitable that some of my searches should bring me into contact with pornography – thankfully, its literary kind – but the particular form was nonetheless unexpected. It was about this point that I became a bit despondent about my endeavours, and although I appreciate some forms of unbridled creativity, I had hoped to avoid certain of its incarnations.

At about the one-hour mark, I suspect, the overload of impressions and impulses had worn me out quite a bit, partly through the many encounters of Vikings in space and the various iterations of this theme, but especially due to the brief contact with erotic literature – erotic literature of a very weird kind. While at first I laughed heartily in my office when grasping what this result actually was, it was also something that hinted of a subtext and a subculture that employ these ludic figures in ways that are very far from my own comfort zone. My despondency grew even worse once I made some attempts to find useful material concerning the right-wing use of the Vikings, although that was an expected outcome since it always depresses me to do research on contemporary right-wing culture. 

On the whole, the two hours spent more or less aimlessly looking into various nooks and crannies of the Internet served me very well in the seminar, and it generally gave me a much broader understanding of the Viking in popular culture, and as a contemporary point of reference. My endeavour also fortified my conviction that having a broad familiarity with popular culture is crucial to our scholarly efforts, because this familiarity enables us to explain why a figure such as the Viking has had such a forceful impact, and also to evaluate what kind of impact the use of this figure might have in future iterations. In short, we understand better the after-history of our subject when we pay attention to its use in our own time.

The kind of magpie approach that I used, however, has both its benefits and its drawbacks. On the positive side, I now have a much broader understanding of Vikings in popular culture. On the negative side, the quick deep-immersion into such a vast trove as the Internet very quickly became both very weird and very much, and I felt as if my brain were melting after a while. Instead of doing this brief but intense foray into the subject, it would be better to have a small team dedicated to a concerted effort of gathering material. One day, this might be done and result in some very interesting books. 


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Similar blogposts: 

Adventures in medievalism, part 1 

Adventures in medievalism, part 2 

Adventures in medievalism, part 3  

The Bridge of Fire - a poem by James Elroy Flecker

 
To close this month, I briefly give you the short version of James Ellroy Flecker's wonderful poem "The Bridge of Fire", of which I was reminded one early Oslo morning following a fresh and heavy snowfall. 

The Bridge of Fire

Between the Pedestals of Night and Morning
Between red death and radiant desire
With not one sound of triumph or of warning
Stands the great sentry on the Bridge of Fire.
O transient soul, thy thought with dreams adorning,
Cast down the laurel, and unstring the lyre:
the wheels of Time are turning, turning, turning,
The slow stream channels deep and doth not tire.
Gods on their bridge above
Whispering lies and love
Shall mock your passage down the sunless river
Which, rolling all it streams,
shall take you, king of dreams,
Unthroned and unapproachable for ever
To where the kings who dreamed of old
Whiten in habitations monumental cold

- James Elroy Flecker 

The short version can be found here. 

The long version can be found here, together with the rest of the poetry collection The Bridge of Fire from 1907.

Reading-spots, part 2

 
In the previous blogpost, I began a new series of posts which consists of short presentations of spots where I have had memorable reading-experiences, or spots where reading has made that spot memorable. This blogpost is the second instalment in the series, and it continues from the first one, in that it records a reading-spot which I encountered during the quarantine in my native village of Hyen in June 2020. 

As I spent some time every day walking about in the landscape surrounding the cabin where I was staying during quarantine, and as I had no other immediate obligations that dictated the rhythm of my day, I decided to explore some parts of the area more thoroughly than I would do in ordinary circumstances. My family had told me about a cave - generously speaking, as it is more of an overhang - that had been carved out of the bedrock somewhere along the brook than ran close by the cabin. I went in search for this cave by following the brook on its meandering way, and I found a little nook, easily overlooked when passing by or when approaching from the wrong angle, which provided just enough shelter to merit the description. It was an open space more wide than it was deep, but which provided a small bed of medium-sized rocks and driftwood, large enough that I could lie down there and rest. It was not a particularly comfortable place, but the view, framed by the jutting rocks and the brookbed, was excellent, and the sound of running water made the experience even more atmospheric. Lying on this little spot of dry rock in the glorious summer day also made me more appreciative of the all the little details and signs of life that came into view from that angle: the rowan saplings that thrived through sheer endurance although they would never achieve the size or stature of rowan trees in less restricted locations, the ferns and flowers that seemed to thrive in the moist and dank atmosphere provided by the brook, and the great pine tree that had now become a dry, grey giant which had survived more winters than any human alive in the village. 

In this little cave-like hollow in the bedrock I read some poems by Raquel Lanseros, one of my all-time favourite poets, whose verses became something of a life-line for me in the darkest evenings of the pandemic. Her beautiful images and the sound her of poems became even more beautiful when read under that little overhang on a Norwegian summer's day. 

Reading-spots, part 1 - glimpses from a personal history of reading

As I have spent more and more time reflecting on reading, I have also begun to dwell more on the various other aspects connected to the reading experience. This means that I am not solely concerned with what I read, but also where, when, why, and sometimes even how. I think about these things solely because by doing so I gain a deeper understanding of how I draw pleasure from reading, and in so doing I learn to savour the reading experience more fully. For instance, I have a rather unscientific idea that if what I read does not have much to recommend it, something of the experience itself can be improved by those other circumstances. As a way to dig deeper into how reading stays in my memory, I will dedicate some blogposts to specific moments of reading that have an important place in my memory. 

 
The first reading-spot to be presented in this series is this grassy point that juts into one of the lakes of my native village, a lake called Skilbreivatnet, whose name roughly translates as "the lake that is broad as a shield" or "broad-shield lake". This lake is one of my favourite haunts whenever I am back home, and it has been an important part of my life ever since my childhood, but through my own experiences there as well as the stories told by my grand-aunt who worked as a milkmaid here in her youth. Due to the numerous nooks and crannies along the lake shore, there are also numerous new reading-spots to seek out, something I do as often as I can to gain a more detailed understanding of the landscape.  

To this date, I have only used this little point - which is part of a larger and broader promontory - as a reading-spot one time, but that was also a very memorable time, at least for me. This was in June 2020 and I had finally been able to return home after six months in Sweden during the beginning of the pandemic. For the first time in my life I had been unable to come home for Easter, and my homesickness was at times brutal. 

When I was finally able to return home, I was in quarantine in a cabin that we rent out to tourists, making sure that I had not caught Covid along the way. The eleven days I spent in this cabin were essentially a holiday, and one of the best times of my life. I spent much of my time walking, paddling and rowing, and on several of these occasions I brought books with me. 

The day I came to this promontory I had begun reading the Norwegian translation of Jules Verne's L'Île mystérieuse, a novel I first encountered in an abbreviated form when I was six years old, and which has been an important point of reference for my cultural imagination. At last I was able to read an unabridged translation, and doing so in the Norwegian wilderness greatly enhanced the experience. While the island imagined by Verne, and the struggles of his protagonists, have little in common with the idyllic and, above all, familiar scenery of my native village, it was far easier for me to envision the exploration and the various episodes of the novel surrounded by the the quiet calm of birch trees and the ubiquitous movement of water from melting snow gorging the many brooks and rivers coming down the mountainsides. Lying in the grass by a well-known and beloved lake, being transported back in time through this nineteenth-century novel - both to an imagined past as well as my own childhood - and not having to think about anything beyond the here-and-now was one of the most wonderful reading experiences I have had. Granted, I only read part of the book there, but it is especially that spot which comes to mind when I think back to those days of carefree reading, and the little point on the larger promontory has become a treasured place of memory - to bastardise and misrepresent a concept by Pierre Nora. To put it differently, reading a part of Verne's novel in this spot has both enhanced my joy of reading the novel, and it has also strengthened my love of that spot.   

Technologies of memory - border markers in stone, then and now

 
Following the discovery of the Svingerud stone - labelled the oldest datable rune stone - my own fascination with runes has increased significantly, and I am using this opportunity to reflect more on the role of runes and their significance for medieval literacy and medieval cultures of memory - meaning the cultural structures that facilitated the maintenance, dissemination and even construction and forgery of memory. Due to the durability of their medium and the notable continuity in legibility, runic inscriptions are particularly fascinating, and serve to remind us of the nebulous spectrum of literacy, wherein written messages can be accessible to a much wider audience than we often expect.  

Since rune stones are technologies of memory, and vehicles for the maintenance of information and knowledge, they perform this duty to memory in many different ways. Some stones are commemorative, serving to remind future generations of individuals or of great deeds, or a combination of both. Other stones are more pragmatic in function, yet also important. One example of this latter type is the Nørstebø rune stone (c.1050-c.1100) from Oppland in Eastern Norway (Nørstebø means "northernmost field" in Norwegian). The stone is placed by the entrance of the humanties library of the University of Oslo. One of the many perks of visiting this library is to pass by this and two other rune stones, presented to the public as books in stone, a very apt metaphor. 

The Nørstebø rune stone is particularly interesting to me because of how it reminds us of the durability and longevity of certain technologies of memory. The inscription of the stone records, in James Knirk's translation, that "Finnr and Skopti put up this stone when they divided their land, Váli's sons". In other words, the stone is a border marker that serves to remind future generations where one property ends and the other begins.   

This kind of stone marker is a physical proof of the historical agreement that shaped the landscape for later generations, a kind of security against the future failing memory of individuals, and the loss of oral transmission of the event. Because of their tangibility as forms of evidence, border markers in stone remained an important technology of memory also in later centuries. In my own native village, Hyen, located in the Western Norwegian fjords, we often encounter such border markers in stone. Indeed, there is one right outside the kitchen window in my childhood home, and they can also be found in the middle of the woods. The border markers - known as "merkesteinar", marking stones - do not carry any inscriptions, with possible and very sporadic exceptions. They are significantly younger than the Nørstebø stone, and the ones we encounter in the woods back home are probably not older than a couple of hundred years at the most. 

The lack of inscriptions on these modern border markers from Hyen are interesting, because they remind us of how technologies of memory have changed. When the Nørstebø stone was set into the ground, there was no central store of memory, no archive or library which could provide confirmation about the ownership of land and of the significance of the stone. With the combination of more widespread literacy - although the runic inscription also points to a significant degree of literacy - and the centralisation of memory in the administrative expansion of the modern era, it was no longer necessary to write on these border markers. The stones were important because they provided physical, tangible evidence of an agreement concerning property, but the details concerning that agreement - names, price of the transaction, duration of the agreement and similar issues - are housed elsewhere, in a central archive. In other words, the modern border markers found in my native village exist in a memory culture wherein memory is sustained by other forms of technologies of memory, namely written documents stored in a centralised archive. Some aspects of memory culture expressed through the Nørstebø stone are thereby retained, while other aspects are replaced with other technologies. 

The combination of change and continuity is in and of itself not surprising, but we do well to remember that certain technologies are perfected at a very early stage, and continue to be used even though there are other ways to perform the tasks that these technologies were made to perform.   

The Nørstebø stone, University of Oslo, humanities library