Anonymous

1.        The collection The Tales of Terror came out in May 1801, following hard on the heels of Matthew Lewis’s Tales of Wonder (November 1800). This has frequently been attributed to Lewis, but no external evidence supports this claim. [1]  In his Tales, Lewis had included poems of terrible folklore daemons, whose kingdoms were the four elements. This later poem adds another fiend, a king of winter, whose name is a reflex of the Norse Hrimthursar (Frost Giants) in the Poetic Edda.

2.        The poem illustrates the extent to which Northern poetry and tradition had become associated with Gothic horror. In “An Introductory Dialogue”, which was prefixed to Tales of Terror, the following lines appear

Th’enraptured mind with fancy loves to toil
O’er rugged Scandinavia’s martial soil;
With eager joy the ’venturous spirit goes
O’er Morven’s mountains, and through Lapland’s snows
Sees barbarous chiefs in fierce contention fall,	5
And views the blood-stain’d feasts of Odin’s hall

3.        It is significant that the author of this Lewis-inspired composition calls it a “Lapland Ballad”, since Lapland was a place associated with black magic and dreadful witches. In fact, Lapland was often mentioned to invoke an atmosphere of terror and darkness. One may only think of Shakespeare’s “Lapland sorcerers”, Marlowe’s “Lapland giants”, or John Milton’s “Lapland witches”. Milton’s phrase was repeated by Henry Füseli in the title of his oil-painting The Night-Hag Visiting the Lapland Witches (c. 1796). Wordsworth and Keats also used Lapland to create a sense of horror. [2] 

***