‘One Valhalla of the Free'

Finland was held out as the potential prize, and a Europe relieved from the tyranny of Russia and the papacy was characterized as 'One Valhalla of the Free'. For some in Britain, the contemporary interest in Scandinavian Confederation was borne purely of a desire to create a bulwark against the might of Russia. As a European identity developed in opposition to a perceived threat from the East, the 'Machiavellian Tartars of Muscovy', Enlightenment ideas of progress also helped to develop a north-south dichotomy within Europe. The British autostereotype was not of a relatively small island nation in northern Europe, but of a global superpower. An examination of Victorian British conceptions of Scandinavian identity demonstrates the flexibility of the idea of 'Nordic space', as well as the ways in which the idea was communicated. The Scandinavianist movement was bound up in popular discourse with other nation-building projects in Europe, notably those by Kossuth in Hungary and Garibaldi in Italy.