This essay seeks to bang the drum for three Victorian makers of the Viking middle ages, all sons of Merseyside. Their names are John Thomas Stanley (1766–1847), George Stephens (1813–95), and John Sephton (1835–1915), and their achievements have not perhaps yet enjoyed the recognition, either on their native heath or further afield, that they deserve. These scholars were strikingly different in vision and achievement. Stanley brooded unsystematically but persistently about the old north for half a century following his expedition to Iceland in 1789; Stephens preached his version of Anglo–Scandic values passionately for almost fifty years from Copenhagen; and Sephton patiently promoted a many–sided old northernism in the heart of Liverpool towards the end of the century. Temperamentally they were poles apart. Stanley was a laconic lord, Sephton a dignified divine, and Stephens a peppery professor, whose lifelong furor philologicus was of so volcanic an intensity that it more than makes up for the relative equanimity of the others.

Yet they had much in common. They were all Merseysiders – Stephens from Wallasey, Sephton from Rainford in the south–west of Lancashire, and Stanley from Alderley Edge (which just about counts, particularly when we factor in the family's summer retreat in Hoylake). They were all, by the standards of their day, pioneering philologists, devoted in some way to the pursuit of old northern languages and literatures. And they all contributed distinctively to the fascination with the Viking Age that developed in Victorian Britain. The present writer, born and bred in Wirral, seeks to celebrate the achievement of all three, as representatives of an emerging medieval consciousness on Merseyside during the nineteenth century.

The tale to be told may be thought of, like the Christmas carol, as one of three ships that came sailing in – three vessels that can serve as symbols by which each of our old northernists can be identified initially. The first ship is a 160–ton brig, the John, chartered by John Thomas Stanley of Alderley to take him and his party of Edinburgh University natural scientists to Iceland in 1789. Nicholas Pocock (1740–1821), one of two accomplished topographical artists chosen by Stanley to turn rough sketches from the expedition into a lasting record, depicts the vessel as it approaches the Vestmannaeyjar, off the south coast of Iceland.