SCANDINAVIAN INFLUENCES IN THE

ENGLISH ROMANTIC MOVEMENT

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

WHEN

THEN Thomas Gray published The Fatal Sisters and The

Descent of Odin, in 1768, he felt obliged to append to the text certain explanations which implied that cultivated Englishmen of his time could hardly be expected to understand simple allusions to the elements of Scandinavian mythology. Half a century later, on the other hand, an English poet who looked to the Norse Eddas or sagas for his inspiration could be sure that a good share of his readers, though they might feel on rather less familiar terms with the deities of Valhalla than with those of Olympus, would at any rate find allusions to Odin, Thor, Freyr, or Loki perfectly intelligible. An attempt is made in the following pages to trace the steps by which various adventures of the old Scandinavian gods and sundry exploits of the Norse vikings, for a long time known in England only to a few painful antiquaries, gradually became more or less familiar to the English people at large.

We must begin with these antiquaries; and first, the reader should know something of the sources from which they extracted their information with regard to Norse literature, history, mythology, and archæology. Without attempting to cover anything like the whole field,

“ the

as

1 As early as 1801, in fact, we find William Richardson referring to religious opinions entertained by the ancient Scandinavians” now very generally known” (The Advertisement, dated Sept. 1, 1801, to The Maid of Lochlin, in Poems and Plays by W. Richardson, Edinburgh, 1805, II, 109).

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then, I shall undertake to give the briefest possible account of some of the more important of these sources.

“Until the latter end of the sixteenth century," wrote Grenville Pigott, a "all knowledge of the religion of heathen Scandinavia, possessed by other nations, was confined to what could be gleaned from the works of Paulus Diaconus, Adam of Bremen, and Saxo Grammaticus. The first was a Lombard of the latter end of the eighth century; the second a canon of Bremen, who wrote in the eleventh, and the last the secretary of Bishop Absalom in the twelfth." Pigott's list might be eked out by the addition of Cæsar, Tacitus, Jornandes, and a few other writers whose names appear occasionally in the marginalia of ancient books on the subject; but the total contribution of these writers, with the exception of Saxo, is very meagre and very vague.

The Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus, finished early in the thirteenth century, is a mine of information for Septentrionalists.* Saxo was not a discriminating historian; but it is his very

lack of discrimination that gives value to his work, for he gathered together, largely in all probability from oral recitation, a great

1 For further information see Möbius, Catalogus Librorum Islandicorum et Nor. vegicorum Ætatis Medie, Lipsiæ, 1856; Nyerup and Kraft, Dansk-Norsk Litteraturlexicon, Copenhagen, 1818; Hansen, Illustreret Dansk Litteratur Historie, the second edition of which is now in the process of publication; H. Jæger, Illustreret Norsk Literaturhistorie, Christiania, 1896; Schück and Warburg, Illustrerad Svensk Litteraturhistoria, Stockholm, 1895–1897; Bruun, Bibliotheca Danica, Copenhagen, 1872–1896; Paul, Grundriss der Germ. Phil., 2 Aufl. ; Horn, Hist. of the Lit. of the Scandinavian North, translated by R. B. Anderson, Chicago, 1895; Vigfusson and Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale, Oxford, 1883. A helpful Chronologie der Ausgaben Nordischer Sagen u. Gedichte, compiled by Rasmus Nyerup, is printed in the second volume of Gräter's Bragur, Leipzig, 1792, pp. 354-379.

2 A Manual of Scandinavian Mythology, London, 1839, p. xxxix. 3 A doubtful conjecture. See Elton and Powell, p. xiii.

4 This work was first printed at Paris, 1514. The Danish scholar Stephan Stephanius published Breves Emendationes et Notæ in Sax. Gram. in 1627, and in 1644 a new edition of the Historia which is constantly cited by early English antiquaries. Müller and Velschow brought out an edition at Copenhagen in 18391858, and Alfred Holder at Strassburg in 1886. Books i-ix were translated into English and edited by Elton and Powell for the Folk-Lore Society, London, in 1894. The introduction to this volume contains extended information about Saxo's life and work.

mass of most interesting legendary matter, some of which was worked up independently in Norse sagas put into writing years afterward.

After the middle of the sixteenth century, books of the character we are considering become more numerous. The Historia Gothorum of Joannes Magnus, Archbishop of Upsala, and the Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus of his brother and successor, Olaus Magnus, appeared at Rome in the years 1554 and 1555 respectively. These books, which are of much the same general character, repeat some of Saxo's legends and add others from various sources. They are constantly quoted by later writers, and Olaus was translated into English in 1658.

In 1593 appeared the Brevis Commentarius de Islandia of the learned Icelander, Arngrim Jonsson, published for the purpose of contradicting certain wide-spread and ridiculous stories about various marvels to be seen in Iceland. This book, as well as the same writer's Crymogea, sive rerum Islandicarum libri tres (Hamburg, 1609), and his Specimen Islandia Historicum (Amsterdam, 1643), became known all over Europe. The Brevis Commentarius was reprinted, with an English translation, in Hakluyt's Collection of Early Voyages (London, 1599).

The works on runic inscriptions and ancient Northern monuments written by Ole Worm, a famous Danish antiquary (b. 1588, d. 1654), have for two centuries been read with great interest in England and elsewhere. The best known of Worm's writings may be found bound together in a single volume formerly belonging to the elder and the younger Grundtvig, and now owned by Harvard University. The

first of the tracts in this volume is entitled Rooth seu Danica Litera1 tura Antiquissima, vulgò Gothica dicta (Copenhagen, 1651). This

1 First printed in 1636. Professor Kittredge (Phelps's Gray, p. xlviii) cites Pope's use of “Wormius" as "a name for the typical mousing antiquary (Dunciad, iii, 188)” together with his “disclaiming note.” With this may be compared the following lines from the Poetical Part of a Music Speech at Cambridge, 1730, by Dr. John Taylor, printed in Nichols's Anecdotes, IV, 531 :

I see the Classes into Side-boards flung,
And musty Codes transform’d to modern Song;
The solemn Wax in gilded sconces glare,

Where poring Wormius dangled once in air. See also Sir Joseph Ayloff's list of “the most proper Books to be read by a young Student in our English Antiquities,” printed in Nichols's Anecdotes,

treats of monuments, inscriptions, and the general subject of runes; it is provided with an Appendix by Thorlak Skulason, containing, among other things, the famous Epicedium of Ragnar Lodbrok, in runes, with an interlinear Latin translation by Magnus Olafsson. The second tract is a Specimen Lexici Runici (Copenhagen, 1650), in runes (with transliteration) and Latin. Then follows Danicorum Monumentorum libri sex (Copenhagen, 1643), containing illustrated descriptions of runic monuments, with explanations of their inscriptions. The last tract is entitled Fasti Danici universam tempora computandi rationem antiquitus in Dania et vicinis regionibus observatam libris tribus exhibentes (Copenhagen, 1633). It contains illustrations and explanations of a number of curious runic calendars.

The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson was first printed in 1665 by Peder Resen, better known by the Latinized form of his name, Resenius, later president of the University of Copenhagen.' In this year appeared likewise the first printed edition of the Voluspá, also edited by Resenius; the Latin translation in this volume was by Stefan Olafsson, and it contained notes by Guðmund Andersen, whose Lexicon Islandicum Resenius edited in 1683. In 1673 Resenius brought out a new edition of the Voluspá, in which the number of strophes was increased from fifty-nine to sixty-four. This time Andersen furnished the Latin translation. In 1665, once more, Resen published the first printed edition of the Hávamál.

Andersen provided the notes. Resenius's editions of the Prose Edda, the Voluspá, and the Hávamál are frequently bound up in one volume. For a long time these texts were available in no other editions; consequently Resenius is frequently cited by antiquaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The second edition of the Prose Edda was published in 1746 by J. Göransson. According to Möbius this contained only the Gylfaginning, the first tract of Snorri's Edda. Percy appended it to his Northern Antiquities in 1770. Göransson also edited a Swedish version of the Veluspá

1

in 1750.

The name of Olaus Verelius, a Swedish antiquary, occurs frequently in books of the sort we are considering. When Verelius died in 1682 he was librarian of the university at Upsala. He was best known, perhaps, by his edition of the Hervarar Saga (Upsala, 1672) and his Index Linguæ veteris Scytho-Scandicæ sive Gothicæ (Upsala, 1691), though he published many other works on history and archæology.

Another Swedish scholar, Olof Rudbeck, published at Upsala in 1675-1702 a work in four volumes which attracted considerable attention throughout Europe, Atlantica eller Manhem, in which he tried to identify Sweden with Plato's Atlantis, and to show that it had been the seat of the Garden of Eden and the cradle of the human race.

In spite of its vagaries, the book exhibited a vast amount of learning and was widely read. Even scholars who disagreed with its conclusions looked upon it as a standard authority on Scandinavian antiquities.

One of the most important books we have to consider is the work of a Danish physician, Thomas Bartholin, second of the name, a member of a remarkable family, several of whom were eminent in

1 De yfverborna Atlingars eller Sviogötars ok Nordmänners Edda ... Hyperboreorum Atlantiorum, seu, Suiogotorum et Nordmannorum Edda, hoc est, Atavia ccu Fons Gentilis illorum et Theologie et Philosophiæ : jam demum versione Svionica donata, accedente Latina ..., Upsala, 1746.

2 Rask was the third editor of Snorri's Edda : his edition appeared in 1818. Egilsson edited the work in 1848–1849, and the Arna-Magnæan commission in 1848–1852–1880-1887. The Hávamál was not edited again until 1818, when Rask and Afzelius brought out their edition of the Poetic Edda.