The body, in all its incongruity, is a key visual and literary motif
in the work of artist-engraver and poet William Blake. His
illuminated books—that is, poetry with accompanying designs—lends itself to a wide and varied range of conceptualizations of
the human form. For example, The [First] Book of Urizen (1794) describes a world
emerging from the deformed and disabled body of Urizen. Milton: a Poem (c.
1804–11) follows the eponymous poet on a journey through his own body in
search of Selfhood, and in Blake’s most famous epic, Jerusalem: The Emanation of
the Giant Albion (composed 1804–c. 1820), the narrative centres around Albion,
the personification of the nation who subsumes other beings that then interact
as various components of his body politic. Reading Blake’s bodies through the
Judeo-Christian context, they are seen as moving towards a pre-determined
outcome as envisioned in the Bible; the Divine Christian body is the reunion
between humankind and Eternal God through the Body of Christ, resulting in
physical and spiritual renewal to achieve perfection (Tannenbaum; Erdman
1990; Rowland). Although Blake invests in the Human Form Divine, the body in
the illuminated books is a complex signifier with multiple definitions and
sometimes conflicting interpretations. It does not necessarily move towards
resolution or completion, especially since Blake imagines multiple forms within
single entities alongside the Human Form Divine. The body acts like a fluid force
and an open configuration unfixed across poems, resulting in multiple ideas co-existing within the limits of their corporeality. This syncretic view of the body
complicates normative conceptions by revising the human form into a plurality
and network of interactions like an assemblage where, “despite the tight
integration between its component organs, the relations between them are not
logically necessary but only contingently obligatory” (DeLanda 12).
An over-reliance on hegemonic frameworks like a Judeo-Christian reading
limits our critical purview, as it leads us to assume that the human form—literal
or metaphorical—desires wholeness and correction of difference. For Blake, the
body is an ever-changing motif which contributes to his critique of State
Religion, an organized system that suppresses the divine into “forms of
worship” (E38. 11).
Blake collapses the body to explore the consequences of
repressive organization, and, in turn, re-think the body politic, a metaphor for
a state or institution figured within a biological body, governed by an
institutional Head or governing majority. The body politic is an idealistic and
ableist model in that it determines functionality through unity, wholeness, and
subsuming any variation within its totality, though the reality of such a system
is to be debated (Hirschmann). In eighteenth-century political discourse,
physiognomic language and imagery became a powerful discursive tool through
which Britons imagined themselves as part of different communities (Forman
Cody 27). Body politics are a type of embodied citizenship, and so they capture
“the typically overlooked ways in which embodiment carries an ideological
weight for the visibly different citizens marked by disability, race, gender, and
sexuality” (Russell 7). As a result, when “these encounters prompt an
imaginative reconsideration of the body politic itself,” the ableist impulse to
organize physical difference pushes against the epistemological shift that
disability induces by drawing attention to the limits of ideas (Russell 3; Siebers
3). An early conception of a body politic in the illuminated books is found in
Urizen’s aphorism, “One King, one God, one Law” (E72. 4:40), which places him
as the figurehead of his universe. However, when Los the Eternal Prophet
creates a body for him that desires wholeness, this model is revealed to be
unsustainable, and they are “cut off from life & light frozen / Into horrible
forms of deformity” (E77. 13:42–43). I read Urizen’s deformity as a fundamental
“misreading and subsequent failure to identify Urizen” by the Eternals and Los,
and the adjective “horrible” here is not an indicator of a negative outcome, but,
rather, it signals the problematic nature of organization (Choe 2020, 530). My
reading of Urizen’s aberrance as impacting the body politic centres on the way
physical difference aggravates concepts of able-bodiedness, and the
incompatibility of normative visions of the body with the body politic model
(Choe 2020, 531–32).
Blake does not use the term “disability” in his poetry, and although he is
interested in exploring aberrant, subversive forms, like most eighteenth-century writers, he “relies on metaphorical language and concepts that scholars
in this field would view as ableist” (Lorenz 128). Deformity in Blake refers to
both the aesthetics of form and the physical schisms created within the body
and material environment as a result of discord. As such, it is not automatically
an indication of an unfavourable form or aesthetic, but it communicates
resistance against homogeneity and the problematic schema of wholeness. For
example, at the end of Jerusalem, Albion textually seems to reunite with God
through healing, and yet the poem ends on a final graphic plate where the vision
of unity is somewhat left ambiguous due to the druidic symbolism that reminds
readers of a sacrificial past and re-opens Albion once more for future potential
movement (Choe 2022, 183; 226). Deformity and disability are part of the
language Blake uses to challenge the perceived status quo of an able-body
politic, offering an alternate model that instead relies on “relations of
exteriority, so that a part may be detached and made a component of another
assemblage” (DeLanda 18). Although “disabled” and “able-bodied” were terms
in circulation during the eighteenth century, they were not categories of
identity that divided society by physical capability or impairment (Turner 17).
Essaka Joshua examines key words used in lieu of “disabled” and “disability,”
arguing that the eighteenth century distinguished ability from aesthetics (184).
In her examination of William Godwin, she suggests “capacity” as an alternative
expression as it was synonymized by Godwin with “utility” to conceptualize a
society where people moved towards their perfect state with new skillsets;
“capacity” then denominates the re-valuing of the socially disadvantaged
within society (Joshua 42–48). Catherine Packham similarly observes that bodily
toil in Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776) translates into a calculation of labour’s economic value, thus rendering
“human variety and difference of work into a calculable and abstracted
economic value” (83–85). In terms of a body politic, subjects became part of a
single body where those thought to be “radically at odds” were transformed
“into constitutive parts of a unified whole, achieving an expression of
corporeality or aggregation in the face of seeming difference, and implying,
against evidence to the contrary, the existence of shared, communal interests”
(98). Taking into account Packham’s view of eighteenth-century body politics,
alongside Joshua’s analysis of capacity as a substitute term for “disability,”
eighteenth-century visions of normative embodiment reinforce the
connections between conformity and utility within a body politic or collective
identity.
During the eighteenth century, the British nations were consolidating
emergent ideas of national and individual cultural identity through textual
production (Strabone 55; 64), and discourse concerning “Britishness” diffused
into an appropriation of other cultures to reaffirm a sense of self. One such
landscape was the ancient North. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland—which was under Danish rule at the time—provided alternate historical and
ethnic heritages through which Britain renewed, contested, and adopted
desirable cultural political beliefs. The developing eighteenth-century
movement of Northern antiquarianism became a literary and artistic pursuit of
Old Norse culture to consolidate a “British” identity and body politic, though it
also consequently promoted independent cultural heritages across the British
nations. Early in the century, antiquarian interests skewed towards Classical
Greece and Rome, and so the Gothic nations were vilified as barbaric, with the
term “Gothic” used to refer to something barbarous, savage, and uncouth
(Parker 4). As the century progressed, this shifted into the view of Rome as
synonymous with moral decay and therefore political decay, while the Gothic
cultures gained public opinion (Weinbrot 36). Opinions on the Norsemen’s
barbaric impulse for war developed into an understanding where it was
perceived as a cry for liberty and resistance against Roman corruption, and by
the late eighteenth century, British poets and writers addressing the American
and French Revolutions turned to the North for a landscape and culture that
embodied their desire for political autonomy.
Between 1750–1760, the term “Gothic” was largely an ambiguous word
conflated with other ethnic groups, and many used “Gallic,” “Celtic,” “Erse,”
“Gothic,” “Teutonic,” and “Runic” quite interchangeably to refer to the ancient
languages and the poetry of North-Western Europe” (Clunies Ross 41). There
was no real distinction between the “Gothic” and “Celtic,” until the disputes
surrounding James Macpherson’s Ossian poems prompted a determined move
to distinguish the linguistic and cultural differences between these cultures. In
Thomas Percy’s seminal Northern Antiquities (1770), a translation of Paul-Henri
Mallet’s Introduction à l’histoire de Dannemarc (1755) and Monumens de la
Mythologie et de la Poësie des Celtes (1756), his Translator’s Preface is provocatively
titled, “Proofs that the Teutonic and Celtic Nations were ab origine two distinct
People” (Percy 1:A3), and he expressly points out that his translation
endeavours are rooted in how Mallet contributes to “a great source of mistake
and confusion to many learned writers of the ancient history of Europe [ . . . ]
confounding the antiquities of the Gothic and Celtic nations” (Percy 1:ii).
Macpherson claimed his Scottish poems were discovered in the Highlands and
derived from fourth-century oral tradition, and when he and Ossian apologist
Hugh Blair defended Celtic culture, they drew marked differences between the
“delicacy of sentiment” in Scotland and Scandinavia, a nation that they believed
“breathes the most ferocious spirit” (Blair 11; Macpherson 171; 174). In England,
Percy responded by offering an Ossian alternative, Five Pieces of Runic Poetry
(1763), which laid claim to Norse culture as the roots of a fundamental English
strength. Percy advocated for a revision of the public’s view of Norse culture as
war-mongering barbarism, and romanticized skaldic culture with the view of
incorporating it into English heritage (Rix 60; Choe 2025, 32). A prime example
is his presentation of Snorri Sturluson in Northern Antiquities as a poet with “a love for this
art which suggested to him the design of giving a new EDDA, more useful to the
young poets than that of Sœmund” (2:xxiii), which transforms the North as a
culture of poetic freedom and liberation. As a result, Percy reinforced the
division between Celtic-Scottish and Gothic-English poetry and persuaded his
readership to “find the causes of this their love of poetry, in the rolling passion
of the ancient Scandinavians ‘for war,’ in the little use they made of writing”
(2:xx).
Percy’s Northern Antiquities was the first accessible eighteenth-century
piece of scholarship and translation of Snorri’s Edda, via Mallet, into English. Its
influential presentation of the Norsemen and their myths aligned older
observations of Norse barbarism alongside their search for liberty. Between the
first volume, where Mallet—with Percy’s notations—presents Norse culture,
and the second, which is a translation of Snorri’s Edda, Northern Antiquities was
the primary source of inspiration for many British writers and artists, including
Blake who declared “Read the Edda of Iceland the Songs of Fingal [ . . . ] Likewise
Read Homers Iliad” (E615. Annotations to An Apology for the Bible:[p. 8]). Snorri’s
Edda is an important part of Blake’s syncretic worldview and practice, and Norse
culture is visibly present in his recombination of multiple cultural artefacts into
his own poetical lexicon. The North plays a key role in Blake’s re-evaluation of
the body’s symbolic value, especially with regards to an emergent, but
incongruous, British body politic. In The Book of Ahania (1795), Blake examines
the tension between Norse primitive warmongering and Gothic liberty as the
foundations of a body politic. These two different conceptions of the North map
onto the sacrifice of Fuzon, son of Urizen, who is deformed and sacrificed by his
father. Extending beyond Christological analogues such as the Crucifixion,
Fuzon’s death can be read as a type of Odinic sacrifice, wherein his death is a
composite image of Odin as chieftain seeking liberation from Rome, and Odin as
priest. As such, the politics of Fuzon’s sacrifice untangles the way Urizen’s body
politic pivots on a paradoxical liberation from and endorsement of an
oppressive system. Fuzon’s deformity, as I will discuss, reinforces this
ideological schism within Urizen’s State Religion, and augments Fuzon’s Odinic
features.
Fuzon the Son, Odin the Liberator
With Urizen representing State Religion and Fuzon offering freedom from
oppression like Moses or Christ, they can be seen as diametrically opposed
(Tannenbaum 226; Erdman 1954, 389; Mee 100). By the end of The Book of Urizen,
Fuzon seeks to liberate the other sons and daughters from Urizen’s quasi-theocratic system of “One King, one God, one Law,” and The Book of Ahania begins
with a furious altercation between Urizen and Fuzon, which culminates in a
scene frequently read as a satirical Crucifixion of Christ. The Book of Ahania’s
biblical imagery, such as the eroticism of the Song of Solomon and critique of
the doctrine of Atonement through sacrifice, is part of how Blake engaged with
eighteenth-century scriptural revisionist movements (Mee 1992; Mulvihill).
David Worrall suggests that, while the poem has an Ossianic air, it contributes
to “Blake’s scepticism about his age’s politicization of scriptural authority”
(153), and Jon Mee asserts that the poem uses Northern antiquities to criticize
Atonement as a heathen corruption of primitive Christianity, as was the view
within more liberal eighteenth-century circles (100). For Mee, British druidism
and human sacrifice coincide with orthodox Christianity through Urizen, but
the politics depend on Fuzon, who is “smitten with darkness, deform’d” (E86.
3:43) and is deeply entrenched within Norse rituals of sacrifice.
Fuzon’s death as a type of Odinic sacrifice complicates the simple
dichotomy of freedom versus oppression or saviour versus persecutor since,
being deformed, he draws attention to the inconsistencies within Urizen’s body
politic.
The Book of Ahania displays some of Blake’s clearest engagement with
Northern antiquarianism and builds on the connection between Urizen and
Odin through Fuzon. The suggestion that Urizen is a synthesis of Zeus, God, and
Odin, or that he is Mallet’s Odin of oppression, war, and druidism, originates
from the explicit mention of Odin in
The Song of Los (1795) (Frye 209; Mee 110).
Here, Odin is a figure of laws and codes when “in the North, to Odin, Sotha gave
a Code of War” (E67. 3:30), and so he reifies law in a similar manner to Urizen in
the illuminated books (Choe 2022, 71). Fuzon, though, also incorporates
eighteenth-century euhemerist visions of Odin, a chieftain liberating the Gothic
tribes from Rome:
Fuzon, on a chariot iron-wing’d
On spiked flames rose; his hot visage
Flam’d furious! sparkles his hair & beard
Shot down his wide bosom and shoulders.
(E84. 2:1–4)
This energetic, able-bodied, vision is a stark difference to Urizen, “This cloudy
God seated on waters” (E84. 2:11–12), thus marking an ideological, or even
political, deviation. A dualism is established between light and dark, which
further distances Fuzon the liberator from his father, whose obscurity in
The
Book of Ahania is a continuation of
The Book of Urizen, where he is “obscure,
shadowy” (E70. 2:4) and a “ninefold darkness. Unseen, unknown!” (E70. 3:9–10).
In comparison, Fuzon appears warlike and aggressive, akin to eighteenth-century visions of Norse warriors like those in Joseph Sterling’s poem “The
Scalder: An Ode” from
Odes from the Icelandic (1782):
Bright his kindling courage glows,
Fierce he shakes his frowning crest;
He grasps his sword, he burns with noble rage [...].
(Sterling, 152)
Sterling’s descriptions of brightness alongside courage and ferocity resonates
in Fuzon who “flam’d furious!” against Urizen. This “noble rage” is no longer
the primitive actions of a boorish Gothic warmongering, but a necessity for the
Norsemen and their valorous exploits. Robert Southey euhemerizes Odin into a
military leader in his 1795 poems, “The Race of Odin” and “The Death of Odin,”
describing “Where, upon some colder shore, / Freedom yet thy force shall
brave, / Freedom yet shall find a home” (98). Southey’s Odin leads his men to
freedom, and so the North symbolizes contemporary revolutionary sentiment,
while Rome corresponds to the
ancien régime (Mortensen 228). Similarly, Fuzon’s
role as warrior and liberator is established through similar imagery, but this is
quickly dismantled when he interacts with Urizen. The initial juxtaposition
between clouds and brightness in
The Book of Ahania seems to draw firmer
boundaries between oppression and freedom, but the difference between father
and son is not so clear cut when Fuzon,
On clouds of smoke rages his chariot
And his right hand burns red in its cloud
Moulding into a vast globe, his wrath.
(E84. 2:5–7)
At first, “clouds of smoke” seems to reinforce his role as a quasi-Moses liberator
as it parallels the Book of Exodus when the Egyptians pursue the Israelites to
the Red Sea, and “the LORD looked unto the host of the Egyptians through the
pillar of fire and of the cloud, and troubled the host of the Egyptians” (Exod.
14:24). In fact, when Fuzon wages war, “the fiery beam of Fuzon / Was a pillar
of fire to Egypt” (E85. 2:44-45), but here lies a contradiction. “To Egypt” infers
both direction and possession; rather than emulating the pillar protecting the
Israelites, Fuzon’s beam also suggests an intervention in favour of the
Egyptians, leading the children back to Egypt and Urizen.
The growing contradiction within Fuzon becomes clearer when read
alongside other Northern antiquarian poetry. For example, in Samuel Taylor
Coleridge’s short-lived periodical
The Watchman (1796), the poem “Invocation to
Liberty” combines cloud imagery with human sacrifice in an outcry for liberty:
Tho’ clouds of darkness round us lour
Eternal sunshine cheers the breast.
Scar’d at thy frown, (with human Victims fed)
Oppression shrinks aghast, and hides his blood-stain’d head.
(The Watchman 1796b, 100)
This vivid and grisly imagery is similar to Sterling’s “The Twilight of the Gods,”
where “the clouds descend in streams of gore” until “His sacred beam the
golden sun shall hide, / Nor spring nor summer shall enrich the plain” (Sterling
154). Despite their different subject matter—a political call for liberty versus a
mythological apocalypse—both use blood, cloud, and sun imagery from Norse
sources to signal ensuing conflict and oppression. Fuzon’s appearance “on
clouds of smoke” similarly is an early indication that, instead of being a bright
liberator of a dark world, he is a mirror of his father with the potential of
spearheading State Religion. As its figurehead, Urizen’s desire for an able-body
politic is rooted in his theocracy, but when Fuzon declares “I am God. said he,
eldest of things!” (E86. 3:38), the son begins to emulate the father’s self-proclamation as Creator. These descriptions blend together liberation and
oppression, so that there is no simple duality where light is good and dark is
bad. Instead, Fuzon slowly becomes complicit with Urizen’s body politic despite
an initial desire for liberty, and it is within death and deformity that this earlier
Odin-like role as liberator converges with the Odin of priesthood, law, and
religious corruption.
The Roots of a Nation
Fuzon’s attack results in “the cold loins of Urizen dividing” (E84. 2:29), and
this subsequent injury and disability sets up a more traditional idea of
aberrance as something to be corrected since the body politic is compromised.
However, in increments, it becomes clear that Fuzon revolts “not to bring
freedom to all but in an attempt to secure their own iron rule” (Hutton 158).
This is where the Christological framework falls short and does not fully
account for this change. Even when viewed as a critique of Atonement or
parody, unlike Christ who dies to bring salvation, Fuzon’s death embeds him
deeper within Urizen’s organized religion, and his deformity signals a shift in
the body’s metaphorical and ideological value (Choe 2022, 129). Fuzon’s death
is not a martyrdom or consequence of tyranny, since this idea extends the view
of a body politic striving for restoration. Instead, other antecedents and cultural
narratives can offer alternate approaches to this complex scene. Fuzon’s
sacrifice clearly borrows motifs from Norse myth and is inspired by Mallet
through Percy (De Luca 194; Mee 98), to the extent that Heather O’Donoghue
confirms that the event situates Urizen as both a Christian God and Odin
sacrificing his son Baldr (95). However, these observations still focus primarily
on Urizen and his role as priest and Fuzon falls to the wayside, despite being the
central element within the composite motif of deformed corpse and the Tree of
Mystery.
Blake’s Tree of Mystery is associated with Urizen’s lawmaking, and, in
The
Book of Ahania, the Tree is initially where Urizen sits “on his dark rooted Oak”
(E85. 3:16) and writes “in silence his book of iron” (E86. 64). It is a corruption of
the French Tree of Liberty and reinforces a self-betraying system, while also
carrying elements of the Tree of Knowledge, Yggdrasil, and the Upas Tree. Trees
were an important motif in eighteenth-century British political culture. In
Northern Antiquities, Gothic liberty emerges from the North like the roots of a
tree and flourishes once attached to a strong body—a nation:
That spirit of liberty, arising from their climate, and from their rustic
and military life, had received new strength from the opinions it had
produced; as a sucker which shoots forth from the root of a tree,
strengthens by embracing it.
(Percy 1:164)
The metaphor expands with propagation, “as it were in the bud, ready to
blossom and expand through all Europe, there to flourish in their several
colonies” (Percy 1:164–65), thus adopting this popular political motif in
circulation. Conservatives and radicals adopted the symbol of the oak tree for
Britain, and this pervasive motif became emblematic for an ancient English
constitution. The motif’s origins can be traced to the sixteenth century’s “Tree
of Commonwealth,” which was grounded on Christian faith, fair justice,
honesty, and peace (Marks 217). It developed after the Glorious Revolution of
1688 to represent English liberty until the 1790s, when it was used to address
the tension between those who believed the constitution was rooted within
aristocracy, and those who looked towards America and France to critique this
outdated view.
The oak appears in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790), where he addresses the rising discontent. Prior to this, in a 1772 letter
to the Duke of Richmond, Burke looks to the tree to augment his pro-monarchist
stance: “you people of great families and hereditary trusts and fortunes [ . . . ]
You, if you are what you ought to be, are in my eye the great oaks that shade
the country, and perpetuate your benefits from generation to generation”
(2002, 155). Thomas Paine refuses to accept this view, and his incendiary
response to Burke in Rights of Man (1791) demands that Britain “lay then the axe
to the root, and teach governments humanity. It is their sanguinary
punishments which corrupt mankind” (33). With Paine, the oak becomes
synonymous with an antiquated social structure which influences Blake’s
version of Druidism and his opposition of the Burkean notion of British liberty
(Whittaker 118). This influence is visible in Milton where “the Oak is cut down
by the Ax, the Lamb falls by the Knife / But their Forms eternal Exist, For-ever”
(E132. 32[35]:37–38).
Yggdrasil, the World Ash, is a core monument in Norse culture, and its
similarities to the Tree of Mystery have already been noted, though not so much
the way Blake uses Yggdrasil to address Britain’s claim to Gothic liberty (Bloom
143; Mee 97–98; Whittaker 118; O’Donoghue 101). Although the ash is not as
prominent as the oak or the toxic Upas in eighteenth-century British political
imagery, it is understood by the radical periodical, Politics for the People, as an
emblem for tyrannical institutions, since “the ash tree is destructive of
vegetables which grow under it” and “will not suffer any animal or vegetable to
exist within some miles of it” (Politics for the People, 8–9). Yggdrasil
predominantly appears in eighteenth-century antiquarian literature about
Ragnarök and does not deviate too much from the original myth. Percy
describes how “the great Ash, that Ash sublime and fruitful, is violently shaken,
and sends forth a groan” (2:163) during Ragnarök, and elsewhere Yggdrasil is
associated with the fall of the gods.
For example, Edward Jerningham describes
Yggdrasil as “the dread Ash” in The Rise and Progress of Scandinavian Poetry (1784),
where the norns “stand in the deep recesses of the shade” (6), and Thomas
James Mathias portrays “Ydrasils [sic] prophetic ash” in “The Twilight of the
Gods” (1781), where it is felled and “nods to the air with sudden crash” (5).
Yggdrasil complicates the Tree of Mystery as it grafts Gothic liberty to a
critique of Burkean hierarchical British liberty that is present within Blake’s
motif. Not only that, but in The Book of Ahania, when “on the topmost stem of
this Tree / Urizen nail’d Fuzons corse” (E87. 4:7–8) and transforms it into the
“Tree of Fuzon” (E88. 4:47), it reinforces Urizen’s repressive ideology, as it
further collapses the difference between father and son, oppressor and
deliverer. Leslie Tannenbaum believes that “Fuzon-Moses represents the
passion for justice, the spirit of righteousness that quickly expends its vitality
as it takes the form of doctrines, laws, and codes of living” (226), and through
the Tree of Mystery, Fuzon is bound by the same doctrines and codes that he
sought to remove. Snorri’s Edda describes Yggdrasil as a place where “Þar skulu
guðin eiga dóma sína hvern dag” [There the gods must hold their courts each
day], and it is “allra tréa mestr ok beztr. Limar hans dreifask yfir heim allan ok
standa yfir himni” [of all trees the biggest and best. Its branches spread out over
all the world and extend across the sky] (Sturluson 2005, 17; Sturluson 1995, 17).
In Northern Antiquities, Yggdrasil is described as the “ash Ydrasil [sic]; where the
Gods assemble every day, and administer justice,” with roots that spread
between the Æsir, the Giants “in that very place where the abyss was formerly”
(cf. “[ . . . ] þar sem forðum var Ginnungagap” [Sturluson 2005, 17]), and Niflheim
(Percy 2:49). The Tree of Mystery similarly “grows over the Void / Enrooting
itself all around” (E87. 4:2–3), which “recalls Yggdrasil even more insistently,
for there are secrets deep beneath its roots” (O’Donoghue 95), but as a place of
justice and administration, it is also complicit in lawmaking.
Self-immolation and Odin the Priest
Northern antiquarian letters and essays viewed Odin as a historical figure
who—while resisting Roman corruption—was a religious figure connected to
various religious rituals in groves that also supposedly included human
sacrifice. Eighteenth-century Britons thought Scandinavians possessed “a
simple religion, a libertarian government and a martial spirit,” but in Odin and
the Norsemen, war-chief conflates with religious leadership (Whittaker 27). In
his
Letters from Scandinavia (1796) William Thomson suggests that there
developed an “Odnisim,” when “Odin, the first king of the North, discerned the
influence which religious enthusiasm had over the minds of his people: he
joined the office of priest to that of king” (2:14), and so “the religion of the
ancient Scandinavians, before the arrival of Odin from Scythia, would appear to
have been very simple: they worshipped the sun, in which they supposed the
chief deity to exist” (2:15). This account of apotheosis can be traced back to the
original euhemerization of the Æsir, first mentioned in the
Edda’s Prologue, but
detailed in
Skáldskaparmál:
En eigi skulu kristnir menn trúa á heiðin goð ok eigi á sannyndi þessar
sagnar annan veg en svá sem hér finnsk í upphafi bókar [ . . . ] ok þá
næst frá Tyrkjum, hvernig Asiamenn þeir er Æsir eru kallaðir fǫlsuðu
frásagnir þær frá þeim tíðindum er gerðusk í Troju til þess at
landfólkit skyldi trúa þá guð vera.
(Sturluson 1998, 5)
[Yet Christian people must not believe in heathen gods, nor in the
truth of this account in any other way than in which it is presented at
the beginning of this book [ . . . ] and after that about the Turks, how
the people of Asia, known as Æsir, distorted the accounts of the events
that took place in Troy so that the people of the country would believe
that they were gods.] (Sturluson 1995, 64–65)
Eighteenth-century British writers were taken by this combination of law,
liberation, and religion from the ancient North, and they ascribed this
movement to Odin, “the founder of the Gothic mythology, [who] was an
Asiatic”; in this light, Odin “had introduced into Scandinavia those doctrines
which had been predominant in his own country” (Sterling 146). Coleridge
writes that “Sigge, the son of Fridulf, commanded the Ases [ . . . ] as the priest
of Odin, he assumed the name of that Deity” (
The Watchman 1796a, 67), and
attributes the warrior’s deification to Sigge, a “priest of Odin.” Mallet, through
Percy, condemns Odin as a “terrible and severe God; the father of slaughter; the
God that carrieth desolation and fire” (Percy 1:86–87), and in their review of
Northern Antiquities, the
Monthly Review takes particular interest in this image of
a deity who corrupted original Scandinavian religion (“
Northern Antiquities”
93–94). Urizen embodies this particular rendition of Odin, as discussed, but
Fuzon captures all aspects: the deliverer of Gothic nations and lawmaker of
oppressive religious institution.
Fuzon’s conception of freedom is entangled with his claims to legal
authority, and so the earlier altercation is not a fight between two polar
opposites. Instead of light versus dark, beauty versus deformity, this conflict is
an internal struggle where the body politic confronts its own hierarchical
structure and Fuzon’s deformity signals this self-reflexiveness as it further
aligns him with Urizen, who is also deformed and disabled. Deformity comes to
the fore in this body politic that “defies correction [ . . . ] to operate according
to its own idiosyncratic rules” (Davis 54). The more he becomes implicated
within Urizen’s systems, the more Fuzon emulates Odinic sovereignty rather
than war-chief, and he takes on the role of lawmaker that was once ascribed to
Urizen. The perceived cultural impact of Odin arriving in the North converges
with the warrior-king’s self-apotheosis, consequently enmeshing sacrifice with
the politics of liberty and State. Fuzon’s death is not a consequence of sacrifice
like in the Crucifixion, but his death occurs immediately after his declaration,
“I am God,” and he is “smitten with darkness, deform’d / And outstretch’d on
the edge of the forest” (E86. 3:43–44).
Before he is even nailed to the Tree of Mystery, Fuzon lies “deform’d [ . . . ]
on the edge of the forest,” which is when liberation turns to priesthood and he
reflects more of Urizen. In eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, “deformity is
most commonly defined in relation to its effect” (Joshua 122), and it speaks to
eighteenth-century conception of sympathy where a sympathetic mimesis is
communication between individuals. Throughout the illuminated books, the
refrain “he became what he beheld” (E97. 3:29) merges aesthetics, physical
attributes, and literal bodies together. In The Book of Urizen, Los looks upon
Urizen’s deformity in horror and becomes deformed himself. Here, Fuzon
emulates Urizen’s deformity and what it represents: the darker aspects of Norse
culture that vitiate Gothic liberty.
If deformity is defined in relation to its impact, then Fuzon’s deformity is
defined by how it transforms and integrates within Urizen’s body politic, since
this is what it influences. There is no cry of terror, like with Los, and Ahania’s
lament only serves to bolster the connection between Fuzon and Urizen, since
it is through her voice that the Tree of Mystery becomes the “Tree of Fuzon.”
This moment recalls Thomson’s account of Odinism, and how “Odin assumed
the deity; and after his death, the Goths could not offer to warrior gods fruits
and flowers: nay, the blood of beasts was deemed too mean an offering and
human victims were dragged to the altars” (2:15). When Fuzon assumes the
deity, his deformity signals a larger, more powerful, religion that overwhelms
the simpler religious expression of Urizen, and, as a result, his installation on
the Tree becomes an act of sacrifice to himself. In other words, a self-serving
body politic.
The enjambment, “deform’d / And outstretch’d,” may conjure an image of
the Crucifixion narrative, but the surrounding landscape “on the edge of the
forest” is more suggestive of Norse influences. Recalling Urizen earlier in the
poem sitting under the Tree, he creates a grove of repressive institutionalism
from the Tree of Mystery that “Grew to roots when it felt the earth / And again
sprung to many a tree” (E86–7. 3:64–67). This is where he eventually “nail’d
Fuzons corse.” Similar features appear in the description of the groves of
Uppsala in
Northern Antiquities:
[It] was full of the bodies of men and animals who had been sacrificed.
They afterwards took them down to burn them in-honour of Thor or
the sun [ . . . ] In whatever manner they immolated men, the priest
always took care in consecrating the victim to pronounce certain
words, as, “I devote thee to Odin.” “I send thee to Odin.” Or, “I devote
thee for a good harvests; for the return of a fruitful season.”
(Percy 1:136–37)
This passage follows a discussion on the prophetic nature of sacrifice, where
“the priests inferred what success would attend the enterprize” (1:135). The
hanging bodies in “ODIN’S GROVE” are an act of consecration, and a similar kind
of sanctification within Fuzon’s death transforms him from a motif of spiritual
renewal to one of human intervention and insight.
Depictions of these rituals were adopted and integrated into a pseudo-historical ancient British culture, notably the Druids, whose image synthesized
with eighteenth-century mediations of Odin like in Jerningham’s Stone Henge
(1792), where “furious Odin might obtest the skies, / And bless a hecatomb for
sacrifice” (4). The eighteenth-century’s syncretic approach to world religions
and myths regarded British druidism as an early iteration of Christianity, “that
the Druids were of Abraham’s religion intirely [sic]” (Stukeley 2). Politics for the
People published a satirical history of England where the Druids “had obtained
so complete an ascendancy over [the people], as to be permitted, without
exciting either murmur or resistance, to make very numerous sacrifices of their
miserable devotees” (Politics for the People 10). In these two examples, the druids
come to symbolize or endorse oppressive religious organization, and this is no
different in The Book of Ahania, where the treatment of Fuzon’s body, and by
proxy the body politic, conflates druidism with Norse elements to complicate
further the idea of Gothic opposition to oppressive institutions.
There is a curiously provocative similarity between Fuzon’s sacrifice and
Odin’s hanging in the Eddic poem
Hávamál, especially since in both cases the
death of a deity is self-serving and augments an extant system. The cultural
practice of hanging corpses to Odin as known during the eighteenth century
derives from
Hávamál, which recounts the god’s pursuit for knowledge. In this
first-person narrative, Odin hangs from Yggdrasil for nine nights in a sacrifice
from himself to himself:
Veit ek at ek hekk
vindga meiði á
nætr allar níu
geiri undaðr
ok gefinn Óðni,
sjálfr sjálfum mér,
á þeim meiði
er manngi veit
hvers hann af rótum renn.
(Kristjánsson and Ólason 350)
[I know that I hung
on a windswept tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear,
dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself
on the tree
which no man knows
from where its roots run.]
(Larrington 2014a, 32)
Both Odin and Christ are wounded with spears as they hang from trees, which
Gabriel Turville-Petre suggests shows that this moment is “a pagan reflexion of
Christ on the Cross. The similarities between the scene described here and that
on Calvary are undeniable” (42). He reads Odin’s hanging on Yggdrasil alongside
medieval visions of Christ on a rood-tree with no roots (43), but, more recently,
Jens Peter Schjødt has argued that “the myth of Óðinn’s self-hanging must be
unambiguously understood as the expression of a pagan thought complex”
(177). Mallet translates
Hávamál as “
Discours sublime ou la
Morale d’Odin” (135),
which Percy takes as “‘The Sublime Discourse of Odin’,” and suggests that the
maxims describe a moral system (2:205).
Northern Antiquities does not translate
Hávamál entirely and omits the verses concerning Odin. There is also no record
of Blake knowing the myth, but it is visible in Fuzon, who earlier uses an
“exulting flam’d beam” (E84. 2:20) like a spear to injure Urizen, and in death
embodies the tenets of a religious system.
The cultural significance of Odin’s death by spear moves beyond a simple
Christianization of pagan sources, demonstrated with kennings “geirs dróttin”
[lord of the spear] and “Gungnis váfaðr” [Gungnir’s shaker] (Turville-Petre 43).
Mallet describes Gungnir as a sword with which, during Ragnarök, Odin “prend
son épée nommée Gugner, & marche droit au loup Fenris” [takes his sword
named Gugner, & walks straight to the wolf Fenris] (110). Any Christianization of
Odin’s death is subsumed in a syncretic worldview in Northern antiquarian
writing, and eighteenth-century travel writing expands on other cultural facets
associated with Odin’s self-immolation such as the “gálga,” or gallows. In Uno
von Troil’s Letters on Iceland (1780), he corresponds with Baron Axel
Lejonhufwud and discusses Icelandic poetic metre and kennings, including
“sylgs gálga,” which he translates as “at the gallows of Odin’s Shield,” or “the
arm on which it is usual to wear the shield” (201–02). Schjødt views Odin’s
sacrifice and ceremonial stabbing as a mythic prototype for a symbolic death,
one where, by dying, he is transformed through death-rebirth symbolism (179–80; 194). The takeaway here is Odin’s association with hanging, which takes us
back to the groves of Uppsala where victims are hanged in religious ritual. The
association between Odin and death by hanging is perhaps more present in
Blake’s Fatal Tree at Tyburn, but the cultural significance remains an important
element within the Tree of Mystery, especially when it transforms into the Tree
of Fuzon since, through deformity, Fuzon’s sacrifice becomes an expression of
Urizen’s priesthood rather than of liberation.
Sacrifice is a transitional space where the body is a site of negotiation for
simultaneous system-making and system-breaking. At the heart of The Book of
Ahania, the sacrifice scene explores the consequence of religious institution by
using deformity as a physical indicator of ideological similarities and shifts
between Fuzon and Urizen. Fuzon’s characterization is not a simple reflection
of Christ or Moses, and the presence of Odin’s warmongering and self-apotheosis moves him closer to his father, thus implicating him within the very
system he initially resists. In The Book of Ahania desiring freedom does not
necessarily result in liberation, because one system is no better than another,
and it is Odin’s multifaceted character—a perpetrator of Gothic liberty and
founder of corrupt religious expression—that makes him a rich source for Fuzon’s
role as a freedom-seeking son of Urizen who will never be free of the system he
originated from. Unlike Christ’s death, Fuzon’s demise does not lead to
resurrection, resolution, or reunion with the Divine; it is a self-serving
reaffirmation of established ideology. Moreover, as an important part of this
sacrifice, his deformity placed at the forefront of a ritual reinforces the paradox
of a body politic that does not seek wholeness. For this body, aggregation in the
face of difference, or restoration and healing, was never the goal.