Medievalism and (White) Nationalism: From Ossian to Today
By Vanessa K. Iacocca
Introduction
At the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, among various signs and symbols, one demonstrator held a poster that labeled Donald Trump ‘Braveheart’ and showed him screaming ‘Freedom!’ and brandishing a claymore sword in one hand and the severed head of Karl Marx in the other.[1] Earnest analysis of the poster renders something approaching farce: The poster equates Trump’s recent 2020 electoral defeat with the Wars of Scottish Independence; even more absurdly, it recasts a man who was exempted from military service in Vietnam due to ‘bone spurs’ as a military leader who literally was torn limb from limb for his commitment to Scottish freedom. Yet, the people circulating such pieces of propaganda are not concerned with accuracy or perceived histrionics, not when their strategies lie in emotionally and symbolically appealing to a political cause. Logic and particularities aside, according to this poster, we are meant to understand that Trump, like William Wallace, is a masculine, martial, and self-sacrificial icon and that we should support his equally noble (but nebulous and apparently anti-communist) cause of liberty. The past here is merely a vehicle for politics.
Sign depicting Donald Trump as Braveheart decapitating Karl Marx (photo taken by journalist David Weigel at the 6 Jan. 2021 capitol riot, image posted to Twitter/X @daveweigel)
Of course, evoking the past for political purposes is nothing new. Even ancient texts like The Aeneid reimagine the past to shape a political present. I am interested in a particular trend of reinvention of the past—what I call ‘Ossianic medievalism’—which arguably permeated Britain and Ireland in the long nineteenth century and is still recognizable in political discourse, especially white nationalist discourse, today. As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Medievalism and the Inventions of Nation: From Ossian to the Irish Free State, 1760—1922, this particular trend emerged in the Romantic period as reimagined medieval pasts infused with heroic sentimentalism came to act as articulation points for national identity construction and political agenda setting. I suggest that this almost ubiquitous tradition of medieval reinvention was instigated by a curious figure by the name of James Macpherson. Macpherson, a Scottish writer—or, as some would argue, a forger—reimagined medieval and contemporary materials in his enormously popular The Poems of Ossian (1760—1765) to advance his own constructions of a racialized national identity and vision for Britain’s future. Besides creating a European sensation, Macpherson inadvertently modeled a framework for using a manufactured medieval past to influence real political outcomes.[2]
Writers of the long nineteenth century from Sir Walter Scott and Felicia Hemans to Alfred, Lord Tennyson and W. B. Yeats arguably adopted Macpherson’s method for their own agendas, imprinting ‘national’ medieval pasts with an Ossianic heroic sentimentalism to project essentialist, politicized visions of race, culture, and nation. These ‘Ossianic medievalisms’ were vehicles for political dialogue, with writers adapting not just Macpherson’s strategies but one another’s, even when pursuing diametrically opposed political interests. Significantly, this pattern did not conclude after the nineteenth century. White nationalist medievalisms today regularly use these frameworks to perpetuate the myths of essentialism deployed by their Romantic forbearers to construct supposedly innate identities and destined national futures, even to the point of terrorism.
By sharing some of my research on Macpherson and his legacies, I seek to expose the alluring strategies of political rhetoric, demonstrate the transnational development of ‘insular’ nationalisms, and reveal the manufacture of so-called ‘innate,’ ‘natural,’ or ‘essentialist’ nationalist identities. This, I hope, will shed some light on the politicized, but also aestheticized, uses of the medieval past seen in contemporary culture and undermine attempts to project a singular and ‘essentialist’ vision of nations and their futures.
A Romantic Legacy
In the 1760s, Macpherson published his Ossian materials, works that he claimed were translations of third-century Scottish Highland epics and fragments. In actual fact, he adapted medieval and contemporary bardic sources to produce immensely popular works that had very specific things to say about the racial and cultural makeup of Scottish Highlanders and about ideal Britishness at a time when Anglo-Scottish competition over cultural and political dominance was escalating. Although Scotland and England had officially united to form Great Britain in 1707, this union was by no means settled. The Jacobite rebellions that sought to reinstate the Catholic line of British kingship stemming from James II & VII earlier in the century reignited with vigor in the Jacobite Rising of 1745, a failed uprising primarily staged by Scottish Highlanders. In the aftermath of this rebellion, many efforts were undertaken to prompt full assimilation, sometimes framed as the civilization of the ‘Celtic-derived’ Scottish Highlanders, who were maligned as ferocious, disloyal traitors. A Highlander growing up in this context, Macpherson may not challenge Scotland’s integration into a shared British state, but I argue that he adapts elements from the Ossianic—or Fenian, as it is known in the original Irish tradition—cycle in his Ossian to challenge accusations of Scottish barbarism, assimilative efforts, and an Anglocentric sense of British identity.
Filtering medieval and contemporary materials connected to the Ossianic cycle through a sentimentalized, primitivist aesthetic, Macpherson uses his reinvented texts to rewrite history, racial origins, and identity in Scotland and Britain. As discussed in his accompanying dissertations to the Ossian works, the Ossianic epic Fingal supposedly reflects the history of the original ‘inhabitants of Britain,’ whom Macpherson argues are Celtic-based. He goes on to insist that the Highlanders remain the most ‘incorrupted [sic]’ descendants of the ancient Britons,[3] describing how their ‘manners are those of an antient and unmixed race of men [sic].’[4] Within the text itself, he elaborates on what these ‘manners’ entail, establishing a Celtic Highlander identity characterized by what might be called ‘heroic sentimentalism.’ He uses his reinventions to reframe Highlanders as inheritors of a tradition of noble martialism tempered by sensibility. Avoiding unsavory portrayals of violence and merciless characters like Connan from the traditional sources, Macpherson instead focuses on cultivating works that consistently show a martial focus alongside emotional sensitivity. In his Fragments, for instance, Macpherson describes the warrior-poet Ossian’s lament for lost loved ones and a lost warrior spirit as follows:
Sorrow revived in his soul: he began and lamented the dead.
How hast thou fallen like an oak, with all thy branches round thee! Where is Fingal the King? where is Oscur my son? where are all my race? Alas! in the earth they lie. I feel their tombs with my hands. I hear the river below murmuring hoarsely over the stones […]
Sightless I sit by thy tomb. I hear the wind in the wood; but no more I hear my friends.
The cry of the hunter is over. The voice of war is ceased.[5]
Macpherson here shows a Scottish Highlander tradition of battle but also of sentimentalism. Ossian mourns the passing of ‘the voice of war’ and his personal loss of his son and grandson, acting as an icon of a warrior culture but also a paragon of emotional depth and refined sensibility at odds with stereotypes of Highlander barbarism. Macpherson makes even boasting warriors sound like sophisticated poets: ‘He answered like a wave on the rock; who is like me here? The valiant live not with me; they go to the earth from my hand.’[6] Marrying martialism and sentimentalism, Macpherson rewrites a piece of Celtic Highlander culture to construct an admirable Highlander identity that runs counter to contemporary negative stereotypes.
What is perhaps most fascinating about Macpherson’s method is not just that he imprints the characteristics that he wishes to ascribe to the Scottish Highlanders onto his own Fenian reinventions but that he uses these reinventions to prove various racial and historical theorizations that affirm Scottish Highlander superiority. In essays accompanying his Ossian publications, Macpherson uses his rewritten materials to provide evidence for his claim that the Celtic Highlanders are the purest descendants of the ‘ancient Caledonians,’ a group deriving from ‘the Celtae’ whom he claims are the most ancient extant Britons.[7] Whereas ‘South-Britain’ became mixed with the Romans and Saxons, he claims that the Highlanders remained ‘unmixed with strangers’ in their mountains, as proven by their continued martial and poetic prowess.[8] Yet, significantly, he implies that it is not just an ennobled Scottish past, but a shared, ennobled British past that is preserved in his native Highlands. The Highlanders are a conduit to the manners and identity of the most ancient Britons, the implication being that they are the most British of all and that their example should serve to define Britishness itself. Macpherson, thus, elevates Celtic Highlander identity, but also rejects assimilation to an Anglocentric sense of Britishness. In so doing, he uses a romanticized, medievalized reinvention to shape politics. He reimagines a Scottish Highlander past to validate a Celtic-derived Scottish and British identity, affirming contemporary Scottish cultural and political influence in Britain in the process.
Besides becoming exceedingly famous, Ossian catalyzed a larger tradition in which reimagined, medievalized pasts defined by Ossianic traits, such as heroic sentimentalism, became mechanisms for constructing essentialist racial, cultural, and national identities tied to various political interests. In short order, British and Irish writers followed Macpherson’s lead, reinventing medieval ballads and bardic materials to demonstrate the heroic sentimentalism—and superiority—of their particular target group. For instance, English antiquarian Thomas Percy’s heavily edited—often fully rewritten—Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)[9] attested to a Gothic, or Saxon-derived, British tradition replete with chivalry and sensibility that reinstalled an Anglocentric vision of Britishness. Irish antiquarian Charlotte Brooke, Scottish Lowlander writer John Pinkerton, and Welsh antiquarian Iolo Morganwg followed similar methods to assert the superiority of their respective regions in the late eighteenth century,[10] ironically revealing the artificiality of so-called ‘innate’ national identities and the cross-cultural, transnational nature of nationalist constructions.
As demonstrated in my forthcoming book, Macpherson’s method became embedded in the literary nationalist discourse of the long nineteenth century, with figures such as Sir Walter Scott, Sydney Owenson, Thomas Carlyle, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, building off Macpherson and one another to pursue various political ends. In a later, striking example, Irish 1916 Easter Rising Rebels Constance Markievicz and Patrick Pearse used Ossianic medievalism to inspire Irish youths to become part of a cyclical line of national martyrs from the Ulster hero Cú Chulainn to the 1803 rebel Robert Emmet through their own violent commitment to Irish resistance.[11] Though constructed, though often dependent on the rhetoric of competing political actors, appeals to an intrinsic national character validated through medieval reimagining contribute to concrete political outcomes.
The Legacy Continues
Manipulative, misleading, but also highly effective as these reinventions are, is it shocking that similar practices recur in contemporary discourse? The vast majority of people now have not heard of Ossian, but the Romantic legacy of reinventing an ideologically-saturated medievalized past, infusing it with heroically sentimental rhetoric, and using it to attest to an ‘innate’ identity that suits a specific political motivation persists. Most concerningly, so called ‘white nationalist’ rhetoric shows that the myths of national essentialism and the methods that supported them in Romantic-era medievalisms reappear in today’s medievalisms to hateful, and even murderous, ends. Scholars have noted ‘a revival of racist sentiment’ in the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, and Western Europe more broadly since the early 2000s.[12] This ‘racist sentiment’—namely the white supremacist belief that white people are biologically superior to non-white populations—is regularly couched in nationalist terms, with British organizations such as the British National Party, Britain First, and the National Front and American organizations such as Vanguard America, the Rise Above Movement, and the Patriot Front advocating for what they believe is a desirable ‘return’ to a white, Christian nation in the face of immigration and multiculturalism.[13] Examining the articles published by the periodical The Occidental Observer in the context of Macpherson shows evidence of a continued Romantic legacy and allows us to better understand the strategies and ideological assumptions at play in white nationalist discourse.
The Occidental Observer makes no secret of its white nationalism, asserting in its mission statement a focus on ‘themes of white identity, white interests, and the culture of the West.’ Like its affiliated organization, the Charles Martel Society—which takes its name from a Christian military leader known for unifying the Frankish kingdom and repelling Muslim invasions in the eighth century—the periodical depends on medieval reinterpretation as one of its core strategies of representing western, white identity. The many articles that reassess the Middle Ages for white nationalist interests also depend on what we might call Macphersonian methods.
This is starkly evident in Andrew Joyce’s ‘In Search of the Western Bushido,’ an article that is rife with Ossianic heroic sentimentalism, dependent on reinvented medieval materials to project an essentialist vision of nation, and deeply enmeshed in contemporary nationalist politics.[14] Joyce begins his article referencing the white nationalist theory of the ‘Great Replacement,’ which posits that white, Christian European-descended people are being systematically replaced by non-white, non-Christians. He states, ‘It should be obvious that at the heart of the problem of the West is a failure to participate in the basis of life: to reproduce, and to compete with other groups.’[15] He connects this failure with the supposed loss of a foundational element of pan-European identity, a Western, Christian, and white tradition of chivalry, or ‘way of the warrior.’ In doing so, he encases a hateful conspiracy theory in a medievalist, emotionally appealing packaging, ultimately reframing anti-immigration, Islamophobia, and even violence as necessary to enacting a chivalric white identity.
Joyce attests to an innately Western character defined by both martialism and civility that is under threat: ‘The warrior-aristocratic ethos of violence and conflict that lay at the heart of chivalry and blended with Christian ideals of social responsibility and Renaissance notions of virtue has largely disappeared from the culture of the West.’[16] Echoing Romantic nationalist discourse with his slightly re-branded sense of heroic sentimentalism, he indicates that the martial, but also morally refined spirit at the heart of Western culture, is dissolving as white populations dwindle. His heroic sentimentalism does not stop there, however. Though lacking Macpherson’s poetic artistry, Joyce seems to embody the melancholy of Ossian himself through his mournful lamentation, ‘Whence the Western Bushido?’ Joyce further recasts himself as the tragic bard witnessing the demise of an idealized warrior culture with his concluding reflection: ‘For my part, I find myself surveying the ruins of Western culture, and finding only debris.’[17] Joyce romanticizes what would otherwise be sterile diatribes about an unfounded conspiracy theory. He suggests that the very spirit of the West—encapsulated by a warrior ethos supposedly originating in the Middle Ages—is at stake. Implicitly, however, this mantle can still be picked up, if his readers can be rallied into reinstating this Western chivalric tradition.
Joyce’s emotional appeal and attempt to make a conspiracy theory more appealing through medievalism are calculated to incite action. As Brenton Tarrant, the terrorist responsible for the 2019 mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, notes in his manifesto: ‘Emotion rules over facts.’[18] Tarrant put this idea into practice when he appealed to Viking and Crusader references in his manifesto’s call to arms and wrote the names of medieval soldiers like Charles Martel on the guns used in the attack. Like Tarrant, Joyce uses medievalism to encourage a violent ‘return’ to what is framed as the inherently heroic character of white, European-descended people. This resolution is implied by his idealization of violent exclusionism over multiculturalism:
Religion has also collapsed as a support of the European warrior ethos. […] Today Christianity has been largely reduced to a foot-kissing immigration-assistance network. Look at any mainstream church and you’ll hear plenty about being meek and humble, and nothing about treading down one’s enemies like a winepress (Rev. 19:15).[19]
The problem of white precarity, Joyce implies, is that white Christians have embraced immigration and abandoned the ‘European warrior ethos.’ However, he argues that this issue can be resolved by reinstating a program of violence and expulsion against outsiders, approaches implicitly validated by a medieval warrior inheritance. He uses Ossianic appeals and medievalist evocations to propel white nationalist ideology, even to the point of violence.
Joyce is not alone in wielding medievalism to advance white nationalist interests. In an anti-democratic article that would make Thomas Carlyle proud, titled ‘Can Feudalism Save the Western World? Reflections on the De-Centralization of Power,’ Antonius Aquinas advocates for reviving a feudal system reminiscent of the supposed glory days of ‘trust, loyalty and contract.’[20] Another, titled ‘“The Mightier Our Blows, the Greater Our Emperor’s Love”: The Crusader Ideology of Germanized Christianity in the Song of Roland,’ by Guillaume Durocher reinterprets medieval history to help readers ‘understand both the emergence and defense of European identity in past centuries.’[21] What Durocher actually does is create this supposedly centuries-old, implicitly innate ‘European identity’ by reimagining the Middle Ages as a theater of continuous conflict between hypermasculine, white, Christian, chivalric Westerners and invading Muslims that he suggests continues even today, shown in his concluding pronouncement: ‘The European crusade never ends.’[22] Like Joyce, Durocher reinvents a medieval past to assert an inherent, white, Christian, European-derived identity that necessitates exclusionism and violent defense in his own day. With medievally validated appeals to racial defense regularly disseminated in the Occidental Observer, we see the building of a white nationalist ideology that tragically, and unsurprisingly, results in acts of terrorism.
Conclusion
If essentialist ideology is at the heart of white supremacy, then medievalism acts as a major artery in the white nationalist circulatory system, supplying it with alluring narratives calculated to promote an inherently chivalric white identity, legitimize Islamophobia, anti-immigration, and other exclusionist political positions, and even justify violent action as ‘defense’ of Western, white culture. The very fact that the British National Party ran a youth camp called ‘Camp Excalibur’ that included what appeared to be paramilitary training to recruit new generations of white nationalists in the early 2000s speaks to the power and perpetuation of such narratives. By studying medievalism and its lasting rhetorical and essentializing legacies from the Romantic period, we can do more than identify parallels between Romantic and contemporary nationalist discourse. We can expose the manufactured and flawed assumptions undergirding a tradition of invention that, though now repeated, is just as artificial as it was in the nineteenth century. In doing so, we may drain a dangerous ideological channel of its life force.
Author Bio:
Vanessa K. Iacocca is an Assistant Professor of English at Young Harris College. She received her PhD in English, with a specialty in British and Irish literature of the long nineteenth century, from Purdue University in 2022 and was awarded an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2022-2023. Her research primarily focuses on interactions of medievalism, nationalism, politics, and gender. In both her teaching and scholarship, she is also interested in exploring how Romantic legacies of nationalism, colonialism, and racialization shape nationalist rhetoric and ideology today. Vanessa has publications in Studies in Medievalism, Arthurian Literature, Scandinavian-Canadian Studies, and The Wagner Journal. Her current book project, titled Medievalism and Inventions of the Nation: From Ossian to the Irish Free State, 1760-1922, is under contract with Manchester University Press.
Bibliography
Aquinas, Antonius. ‘Can Feudalism Save the Western World? Reflections on the De-Centralization of Power.’ The Occidental Observer. February 21, 2021.
Brooke, Charlotte. Reliques of Irish Poetry: Consisting of Heroic Poems, Odes, Elegies and Songs (Dublin: George Bonham, 1789), https://archive.org/details/reliquesofirishp00broo.
Durocher, Guillaume. “‘The Mightier Our Blows, the Greater Our Emperor’s Love”: The Crusader Ideology of Germanized Christianity in the Song of Roland.’ The Occidental Observer. December 11, 2018.
Flemmen, Magne, and Mike Savage, ‘The Politics of Nationalism and White Racism in the UK,’ The British Journal of Sociology, 68.1 (2017): 233-64.
Joyce, Andrew. ‘In Search of The Western Bushido.’ The Occidental Observer. June 6, 2022.
Macpherson, James. The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, edited by Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996).
Markievicz, Constance, ed. Fianna Handbook (Dublin: The Central Council of Na Fianna Eireann, 1914).
Mayne, Michael. ‘White Nationalism and the Rhetoric of Nostalgia,” in Affect, Emotion, and Rhetorical Persuasion in Mass Communication (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 81-92.
Percy, Thomas. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. (London: John Nichols, 1794), 3 vols., https://archive.org/details/reliquesancient01perciala.
Pinkerton, John. Scottish Tragic Ballads (London: J. Nichols, 1781), https://archive.org/details/scottishtragicba00pinkiala.
Rigney, Maeve, and Carolyn E Holmes. ‘Is “White Nationalism,” Nationalism?,’ Nations and Nationalism, 29.2 (2023): 512-27.
Tarrant, Brenton. The Great Replacement. 2019.
Weigel, Dave (@daveweigel). “Freedom, Braveheart, Karl Marx [Photograph of sign featuring Trump as Braveheart].” Twitter/X, January 6, 2020. https://x.com/daveweigel/status/1346895282861125632.
Williams, Edward [Iolo Morganwg]. Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (London: J. Nichols, 1794), 2 vols, https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_poems-lyric-and-pastora_iolo-morganwg_1794_1.
Notes:
[1] Dave Weigel (@daveweigel), “Trump, Braveheart, Karl Marx [Photograph of sign featuring Trump as Braveheart],” X, January 6, 2020, https://x.com/daveweigel/status/1346895282861125632.
[2] James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996).
[3] James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian, p. 5.
[4] James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian, p. 206.
[5] James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian, p. 18.
[6] James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian, p. 28.
[7] James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian, p. 35.
[8] James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian, p. 212.
[9] Thomas Percy. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. (London: John Nichols, 1794), 3 vols.,
https://archive.org/details/reliquesancient01perciala.
[10] Charlotte Brooke, Reliques of Irish Poetry: Consisting of Heroic Poems, Odes, Elegies and
Songs (Dublin: George Bonham, 1789), https://archive.org/details/reliquesofirishp00broo; John Pinkerton, Scottish Tragic Ballads (London: J. Nichols, 1781), https://archive.org/details/scottishtragicba00pinkiala; Edward Williams [Iolo Morganwg], Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (London: J. Nichols, 1794), 2 vols, https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_poems-lyric-and-pastora_iolo-morganwg_1794_1.
[11] Constance Markievicz, ed. Fianna Handbook (Dublin: The Central Council of Na Fianna Eireann, 1914).
[12] Magne Flemmen and Mike Savage, ‘The Politics of Nationalism and White Racism in the UK,’ The British Journal of Sociology 68.1 (2017): 234 [233-64]; Mave Rigney and Carolyn E. Holmes, ‘Is “White Nationalism,” Nationalism?,’ Nations and Nationalism 29.2 (2023): 512-13 [512-27].
[13] Michael Mayne, ‘White Nationalism and the Rhetoric of Nostalgia,” in Affect, Emotion, and Rhetorical Persuasion in Mass Communication, ed. Lei Zhang and Carlton Clark (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 81-92.
[14] Andrew Joyce, ‘In Search of The Western Bushido,’ The Occidental Observer, June 6, 2022.
[15] Andrew Joyce, ‘In Search of The Western Bushido.’
[16] Andrew Joyce, ‘In Search of The Western Bushido.’
[17] Andrew Joyce, ‘In Search of The Western Bushido.’
[18] Brenton Tarrant, The Great Replacement, 2019.
[19] Andrew Joyce, ‘In Search of The Western Bushido.’
[20] Antonius Aquinas, ‘Can Feudalism Save the Western World? Reflections on the De-Centralization of Power,’ The Occidental Observer, February 21, 2021.
[21] Guillaume Durocher, “‘The Mightier Our Blows, the Greater Our Emperor’s Love”: The Crusader Ideology of Germanized Christianity in the Song of Roland,’ The Occidental Observer, December 11, 2018.
[22] Guillaume Durocher, “‘The Mightier Our Blows.”’
