The Viking and the Farmer: Alternative Male Life Histories Portrayed in the Romantic Poetry of Erik Gustaf Geijer

Abstract

This article applies a life history model to advance the evolutionary understanding of poetry that inspired nineteenth-century Swedish National Romanticism. We show that the characters featured in two of Erik Gustaf Geijer’s poems, “The Viking” and “The Yeoman Farmer” (1811), display patterns of time perspective, mating effort, and parental invest­ment that are now recognized as central life history attributes: a fast strategy and a slow strategy, respectively. These patterns were identified by undergraduate participants (N = 427) who read excerpts of the poems that had been stripped of identifying information and mentions of romantic or sexual relationships. Participants read each poem and rated each character on validated scales of the life history dimensions of mating effort and paren­tal investment, relationship interests and attractiveness, characteristics of his developmen­tal environment, and physiological characteristics. Results are consistent with generally accepted associations in life history theory and also inform current theoretical develop­ments and debates. Geijer had an intuitive understanding of life history patterns, which he used to create recognizable characters for his Romantic depiction of Swedish history.