Matthew Arnold s Balder Dead: Unraveling His Deployment of Balder, Odin, and Lok

This article examines how Matthew Arnold embodies diverse figures in his epic narrative poem Balder Dead (1855). It argues that Arnold’s awareness of Norse mythology plays a key part in characterizing the protagonist Balder, along with Odin and Lok, who reveal allegorical significances amidst Victorian contexts of religious chaos and dilemmas. Arnold s chief characters implicate man’s irresistible realm of death, the problem of faith in confronting this aspect, and questions about immortality of spirit and divine justice. The paper explores the writer s dynamic construction of characters in its link with plot development and his religious and ethical issues prevalent during the Victorian era. It suggests that Balder Dead foreshadows Arnold’s further elaborations on the aforementioned subjects, which he embeds in his later oeuvre of poetry and prose, composed from the late 1850s to 80s.