Tom Shippey’s edited collection of essays on Grimm’s mythology, The Shadow-Walkers, won the Mythopoeic Society’s 2008 award for scholarship. He is working on a book about death-scenes in Old Norse.
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Vol. 12 No. 14 · 26 July 1990
pages 14-15 | 2747 words
Footpaths
Tom Shippey
- England and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry, 1688-1900 by John Lucas
Hogarth, 227 pp, £18.00, February 1990, ISBN 0 7012 0892 9
- The Englishman’s England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism by Ian Ousby
Cambridge, 244 pp, £45.00, February 1990, ISBN 0 521 37374 3
- Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems, 1616-1660 by Gerald Hammond
Harvard, 394 pp, £24.95, March 1990, ISBN 0 674 30625 2
‘Of all nations’, writes Ian Ousby, ‘we’, the English, have ‘perhaps the most strongly defined sense of national identity – so developed and so stylised, in fact, that we are frequently conscious of it as a burden or restraint’. I wonder what he can possibly mean by that. The most anomalous thing about England in comparison with all other European nations (of course it isn’t a nation, but even in comparison with Scotland and Wales) is that it doesn’t have the formal marks of national identity acquired even by Iceland or Finland, Luxembourg or Albania. It has no national anthem – ‘God save the Queen’ is played at football matches, but that is shared with other parts of the UK, who, however, don’t play it (except for the Northern Irish, who are making a political point). It has no national dress, nor any evident national icons in the tartan/leeks/thistles class. St George’s Day attracts no celebrations. It does have a national flag, but not everyone knows what it is. A football commentator remarked that he was pleased to see ‘nearly as many’ St George’s Crosses being waved as Union Jacks, when England played Cameroon in the World Cup. No Union Jacks were on display at Scotland’s games. At a recent conference in Denmark I asked some forty Danish Anglicists if they knew what the English flag looked like. Yes, they replied, it’s that red, white and blue one with crosses going different ways. At least they were pleased to discover that the English flag is the exact reverse of the Danish one, for, as Saxo Grammaticus wrote long since, history in the North began with two brothers, whose names were Dan and Angul. But that particular national myth is unknown in England.
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Letters
Vol. 12 No. 15 · 16 August 1990
From John Lucas
Tom Shippey (LRB, 26 July) wonders where I can have been in recent years if I think that the English press praise ‘England’ when matters go well at football, but blame the ‘British’ when they go badly. Well, actually I’ve been living in England and noting that this slippage does indeed occur. Admittedly it’s happened far less often in the last two years, since my book went to press, and admittedly, too, I might not have noticed the frequency of its earlier occurrences had my attention not been drawn to them by a Scottish friend.
Shippey also seems to imply that I’m so anti-English that I must be either upper or middle-class and probably have a foreign grannie lurking somewhere in my background. Nothing so exotic, I’m afraid. I did, however, learn a thing or two about the Englishness of radical republicanism from one of my grandfathers, and I later made the discovery that for a long time radical republicanism had been a popular form of Englishness. When my book came out I further learnt that this fact was news to some of my reviewers. John Carey asserted that ‘the English temperament’ – genetic or acquired? – naturally favours monarchy. This apparently explains why Shakespeare put domestic scenes featuring the royals into his plays: he was providing snippety, reassuring information of a kind nowadays supplied by the tabloids. You know: Hal the good egg as shown in episodes with his father or in friendly chat with Francis the drawer. Or was Carey perhaps thinking of the cosy arrangements of Lear and his daughters? Shippey is too intelligent to fall for that – and to be fair he makes some good points against me. But when he says that my account of Englishness is one ‘defined by negatives’ I have to say No, in Thunder, it isn’t, any more than it was for Milton, Blake, Shelley or Browning – to name just some of the poets about whom I write and whose radical republicanism is essential to their ways of being English.
John Lucas
Beeston, Nottingham
