Norwegian Wood: P. B. Shelley’s Palimpsestic Pines

This essay explores the appearance of a distinctively Northern European tree, the pine, in Shelley’s works between 1814 and 1817. This period corresponds with the Shelleys’ continental travels and the composition and publication of their History of a Six Weeks’ Tour. Following Michael Rossington’s description of the Shelleys’ Europe as a “palimpsest” in the History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, I consider how Percy Bysshe Shelley’s works of this period also build on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In Norway, Wollstonecraft distinguishes between the English woods comprised of “oaks, ashes, and beech” and the Norwegian woods tenanted by pines. In the History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, Shelley draws associations between his reading of Rousseau and Gibbon and distinctive tree species: the walnut, chestnut, and acacia. More subtly, the pine reappears as a tree of Wollstonecraftian import. In particular, the appearance of the pine in Laon and Cythna amplifies the poem’s revolutionary cast and spotlights a distinctively Norwegian exploration of identity. In “the gloomy pines of a Norwegian vale,” Shelley draws a palimpsestic picture of revolutionary Europe.