Richard Hole (1746–1803)

1.        Richard Hole was a graduate from Oxford University, who considered a military career, but was eventually ordained in the Church of England. He held the curacy of Sowton, and later Buckerell, both near Exeter. He contributed to several periodicals, such as the Monthly Review, British Magazine, and Gentleman’s Magazine, and, most notably, a series of satirical dialogues to the London Magazine during 1782. In 1789, Hole published a paraphrase of a passage from Njals saga, which he entitled “The Tomb of Gunnar”. The source was a Latin translation by Thomas Bartholin. In Hole’s adaptation, Gunnar, a famous warrior of outstanding prowess, awakes in his tomb to raise a “loud-resounding song”. When Hogner, Gunnar’s son, arrives with his friend Sarhedine (versions of the Saga-names Högni and Skarpheðinn) to investigate, Gunnar delivers a poetic clarion call to martial fortitude: “Unmanly flight the brave despise/ Conquest of death is the warrior’s prize!” [1]  The reason for Hole’s interest, given his later poetic focus on heroic romance, seems to be the dramatization of how valiant virtues of the past may be communicated through poetry to a new age.

2.        Hole was a founding member of a literary society at Exeter, whose members included Richard Polwhele, Hugh Downman, and William Jackson. Hole wrote a number of Miltonic odes that appeared in the society’s publication Poems Chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwall (1792). This also included a new version of “The Tomb of Gunnar”, which was printed alongside a number of other Norse translations concerned with the heroic (including Regnar’s Death Song). The collection was partly a response to the debates over the French Revolution; and the Norse poems were surrounded by several patriotic and alarmist pieces. The collection was edited by Richard Polwhele, who would later emerge as a prolific anti-Jacobin.

3.        Hole’s major work, Arthur, or, The Northern Enchantments, is a romance epic in seven books, written in imitation of both Ariosto and Ossian. It is an Arthuriad, focussing on how Arthur’s Britons encountered the invading Saxons and Scandinavians in the fifth century. An essential part of the action concerns the magician Merlin’s daughter, who is betrothed to Arthur. However, Hengist, the legendary leader of the Germanic invasion, according to the Venerable Bede, also woos her. However, Anglo-Saxon practices are confounded with Scandinavian ideals of the Viking age. Hole further assumes that Scandinavians were part of the invasion force, placing the Danish leader Valdemar as a cohort of Hengist (perhaps inspired by James Macpherson’s description of Anglo-Saxon culture through the use of examples taken from Old Norse literature in An Introduction to the History of Great Britain and Ireland (1771; rev. ed, 1772, 1773). However, in the scholarly preface to Arthur, Hole repeats the argument made by Thomas Percy that the medieval romance tradition originated in Scandinavia: the ideals of chivalry and Scandinavian manners were “really and originally the same”. [2] 

4.        Hole’s romance is an examination of early heroism in Britain. He shows how the Anglo- Saxon/Scandinavian warriors were motivated by their superstition: the conviction of heavenly rewards for the fallen warrior and the fear of a terrible abode for those who die an unheroic death. The poem is awash with references to magic and incantations, pitting Merlin against Urda, the Norse goddess of fate, who assists Hengist and Valdemar. Much Gothic horror emerges from the use of magic.

5.        The extract below is taken from Book four of the poem, in which Valdemar, king of Denmark, and the northern chieftains are feasting in Calisle, when Urda adopts the form of Odin and appears to them. She exhorts the Scandinavian warriors to show the death-defying courage for which they were known and march against the Britons, who are marching towards them.

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