Is Nordic Mythology Nordic Or National, Or Both? Competing National Appropriations of Nordic Mythology in Early Nineteenth-Century Scandinavia

Chapter 3 Is Nordic Mythology Nordic or National, or Both? Competing National Appropriations of Nordic Mythology in Early Nineteenth-Century Scandinavia

Tim van Gerven

Humanity’s highest goal is truth; it is therefore our duty not to neglect the wisdom and faith of our ancestors, but to try to understand them as best as we can during our lifetime, using our ability to grasp human life. And what is the very beginning of every meaningful history if not its myths?1 ling, 1819, p. 15 ∵

Among scholars today there appears to exist an unspoken consensus that at the very beginning of Scandinavism lies Nordic mythology.2 Usually, this very be ginning is traced back to the latter half of the eighteenth century and connec ted to the pre-Romantic fashion for the sublime that emerged around the 1750s. The new vogue in art and literature for everything dark and terrible informed an unprecedented scholarly and artistic enthusiasm for the violent tales and mysterious imagery of the Eddas throughout north-western Europe, a move ment that was later termed the Nordic Renaissance (Blanck, 1911). Although an antiquarian interest in Old Norse poetry had persisted in Scandinavia ever since the Middle Ages, the eighteenth-century revival of Nordic myth gave new impetus to age-old preoccupations. The subsequent realisation by men

1 Translations are by the author unless indicated otherwise. 2 Because the term Scandinavism was plausibly coined only as late as 1843 in connection with the emergence of the political movement, it might seem anachronistic to employ the term when writing about the preceding decades. Can one write about Scandinavism before Scan dinavism? I propose that one can as long as the term is used heuristically to describe the awareness of and the commitment to a shared Scandinavian identity, and not with reference to a well-organised, clearly defined cultural and/or political movement.

50 VAN GERVEN of letters that the objects of their research belonged to a shared Scandinavian or Nordic heritage went a long way toward making the idea of Scandinavia imaginable as a focal point of (pan-)national identification (Clausen, 1900; Sanness, 1959; Hemstad, 2008; Haarder Ekman, 2010). The presupposed status of Nordic mythology as a pan-Scandinavian commonality never went completely unchallenged, however. In addition to extra-Scandinavian claims from Britain and Germany (see, e.g., Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie “Germanic Mythology”, 1835), Nordic mythology was the topic of several fierce debates in Scandinavia itself in the early nineteenth century. To be sure, at the primary level these debates centred around the question whether Nordic mythology could function as a valuable alternative to the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian traditions as an inspiration for contemporary literature and art (see below). As such, this side of the debate constituted a unifying force: the rhetorical division between north and south that stood at the basis of the evolving argument helped harness the idea of a common Scandinavian identity (Van Gerven, 2018). At a subaltern level, on the other hand, there was in these self-same debates a subtle but clear tendency to appropriate the treasured corpus of Norse myth as being part – or rather, as being “more” part – of a specific national heritage rather than of a shared Scandinavian legacy. As a result, this undercurrent had the opposite effect of undermining the pan-national profile. In what follows, the overlapping and conflicting importance of Nordic my thology for both early Scandinavism and the separate national movements in Scandinavia is examined through the analysis of arguably the two best-known debates on Nordic mythology from this period. The first of these debates took place within the learned circles of the Götiska förbundet (Geatish Society) dur ing the years 1818–1820 and evolved from a personal feud between the poets Erik Gustaf Geijer and Pehr Henrik Ling. In 1820, things were heating up in Denmark as well; the Icelandic philologist Finnur Magnússon was personally targeted by the brothers Gustav Ludvig and Torkel Baden for his (in their eyes) unjustified and immoral promotion of Old Norse culture as an inspirational source for the modern artist. Both debates are frequently mentioned in scholarly literature, mostly in art-historical or biographical contexts, but the pamphlets, essays and treatises written in the heat of the battle have hitherto not been the subject of a more thorough source-critical analysis, nor have the two controversies been studied in relation to each other. In this article, the application of a transna tional-comparative approach shows, first, that the debates were intimately connected and, second, that the ultimate ownership of the sources of Nordic mythology – the Eddas and sagas – became a bone of contention, a dispute that to no small degree was instigated by the perception of the other.