The aim of my master’s thesis is to study how of nationalism was expressed in Swedish and Danish paintings c. 1850 to 1865. In both Sweden and Denmark there were strong feelings of nationalism in the 19th century. The development towards a modern nation state meant that people began to feel like citizens of a nation rather than subjects to a king. In the words of the Irish-American anthropologist and political scientist Benedict Anderson they had the feeling of being in an imagined community.  I examine how nationalism was expressed, what factors influenced the portrayal of national feelings and the purpose of choices of subject. The final question is if there are differences between the countries and, if any, possible reasons. The time period I have chosen is the time between the two Slesvig wars in Denmark, which is now often seen as the latter part of the Danish Golden Age. It is also the period when many Swedish painters chose to travel to Düsseldorf to study painting and the Düsseldorf school became especially important in genre and landscape painting, often with nationalistic subjects. My study is divided into four themes, Mythology, Monarchs, People and Nature, covering different aspects of life and also of different categories of painting. For each theme I examine one painting by a Swedish artist and one by a Danish artist using Panofsky’s iconological method.  I include other paintings and texts for reference.  The expression of nationalism shows similarities between the countries, such as use of old Norse mythology and genre paintings of rural people in traditional costumes. Landscape paintings reflected the geographical differences between the countries. Current events, in particular the Slesvig wars for Denmark, also left their mark on nationalism and found their way into art.

My Interdisciplinary dissertation examines illustrations in manuscripts and early print sources and reveals their participation in the transmission and reception of Old Norse mythology. My approach encompasses Material Philology and Media Specific Analysis. The reception history of illustrations of Old Norse Mythology affects our understanding of related Interdisciplinary fields such as Book History, Visual Studies, Literary Studies and Cultural Studies. Part One of my dissertation begins with a discussion of the tradition of Old Norse oral poetry in pagan Scandinavia and the highly visual nature of the poems. The oral tradition died out in Scandinavia but survived in Iceland and was preserved in vernacular manuscripts in the thirteenth century. The discovery of these manuscripts in the seventeenth century initiated a cycle of illustration that largely occurred outside of Iceland. Part One concludes with an analytical survey of illustrations of Old Norse mythology in print sources from 1554 to 1915 revealing important patterns of transmission. Part Two traces the technological history of production of digital editions and manuscript facsimiles back to the seventeenth century when manuscripts were hand-copied and published by means of copperplate engravings. Part Two also discusses the scholarly and cultural prejudices towards images that are only now slowly fading. Part Two concludes with a description of my prototype for a digital image repository named MyNDIR (My Norse Digital Image Repository). MyNDIR will facilitate the emergence of images of Old Norse Studies from the current informal crowd sourcing of material on the web to a digital image repository supporting the dissemination of accurate scholarly knowledge in a widely accessible form. Part Three presents two thematic case studies that demonstrate the value of applying the skills of visual literacy to illustrations of Old Norse mythology. The first study examines Jakob Sigurðsson’s illustrations of Norse gods in hand-copied paper manuscripts from eighteenth-century Iceland. The second study examines illustrations by prominent Norwegian artists in the editions of Snorre Sturlason: Kongesagaer published in 1899 and 1900 respectively. What emerged from these studies is an understanding that illustrations offer insights for the study of Old Norse texts that the words of the texts alone cannot provide. / Graduate / 0362 / 0377 / 0279 / pabaer@uvic.ca

The subject of this master’s thesis is depictions of Old Norse mythology and related motifs in the visual arts during the period 1775–1855. The main question of this research is how the motifs were visualized and how the depictions are related to the classical tradition. Three artworks are objects of detailed study: Johann Heinrich Füssli’s painting Thor Battering the Midgaard serpent (1790), Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg’s The death of Balder (1817) and Nils Jacob Blommér’s painting Näcken and the daughters of Ägir (1850). The paintings are compared with literary sources and analyzed in relation to classicism as well as ideas about history and the Old Norse. It is argued that symbols, themes and compositions from the classical tradition, such as the heroic nude, were used by artists to visualize motifs from Old Norse mythology. It is also argued that the depictions, which by previous scholars have been considered primarily classical, are in fact characterized by a resistance against likeness with the Olympic gods and antique costume.