Reading Kipling’s The Land Through a Lens of Archaeology, Landscape, and English Nationalism

Abstract

Rudyard Kipling was enchanted by the Sussex landscape surrounding his house, Bateman’s. Many of his stories and poems are set in this landscape, and draw on its rich history, archaeology, and folklore. In this paper we examine Kipling’s 1917 poem The Land, which weaves together strands of landscape archaeology and nationalist origin mythology. The Land is the story of a single Sussex field, its colonial landowners from Roman Britain to the present, and the generations of the peasant Hobden family who care for it. In examining the poem we consider the notions of Englishness that Kipling conjures, their disconnection from the realities of rural Sussex, their contexts of war and revolution, and the uses of archaeology in the creation of nationalist myth.