The first part of the chapter examines how the loss of the Christian colony became a prism through which it was possible to reflect on the two globalising European projects of the nineteenth century: colonialism and Christian mission. The ‘lost colony’ in Greenland came to function as a mirror for contemporary anxieties about the danger of settling far from European metropoles. Analysis of available sources shows that this fear was fed by anecdotal evidence that the European Greenlanders had lost their Christian faith and descended into savagery. The second part of the chapter explores a series of significant themes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary representations of the Christian mission in Greenland. As the old colonists had been Christian and new missions were now making progress, a ‘fall-and-restoration’ structure became embedded in several texts. The most notable example is the British poet James Montgomery’s Greenland (1819), a text neglected in modern criticism despite the fact that it enjoyed significant popularity in the Romantic period.

This essay investigates the influence of Romanticism on writings about the role of music in religious practice. It argues that this influence is evident in writers’ explorations of themes such as music’s relationship with poetry, and its ability to arouse or heighten human passions, as well as their broadening field of inquiry beyond Western Christianity.