Atlantis Online
March 28, 2024, 04:09:26 am
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Towering Ancient Tsunami Devastated the Mediterranean
http://www.livescience.com/environment/061130_ancient_tsunami.html
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links Staff List Calendar Login Register  

TEUTONIC MYTH AND LEGEND

Pages: [1] 2 3   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: TEUTONIC MYTH AND LEGEND  (Read 1468 times)
0 Members and 5 Guests are viewing this topic.
Tannhäuser
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 1158



« on: April 17, 2009, 01:14:23 pm »

settlers were also of mixed Irish descent. Nor was the old English element absent, as certain borrowed words show clearly. But, when these facts are given adequate consideration, it must be borne in mind that literature, and especially poetry, owes usually more to the individual than to the race. If we knew as little of Keats as we do of the author of Beowulf, it might be held that he was a son of Greek parents who settled in England.

The survival of these Pagan Eddic poems in Christian times is suggestive of the slow extinction of old beliefs. Christianity was adopted in Iceland in 1000, a century after it had spread throughout Norway, and two hundred years before the people of Sweden can be said to have abandoned their ancient religion. It must not be inferred, however, that the Icelanders were exemplary Christians in Saemund's day or even in Snorri's. The bulk of them were, no doubt, half-Pagan, like those Ross-shire Highlanders in the vicinity of Loch Maree, who, as late as the seventeenth century, offered up sacrifices of bulls and performed other heathenish rites, to the horror of the Presbytery of Dingwall. The Icelanders must have clung, long after the introduction of Christianity, to the Pagan beliefs and practices of the great sea kings. They continued, we know, to chant the lays and recite the old traditional tales about the gods and ocean heroes of the mother country. The collectors may, indeed, have had more than a literary appreciation of oral song and haunting tradition.

When Snorri was a boy, a Danish priest named Saxo was engaged writing a history of his native land. The first nine books are like the Histories of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, for they are founded on the traditional poems and tales of the time. Saxo Grammaticus ("the Lettered") writes of Odin and the

p. xxi

other gods as if they were men, and when he refers to them as "gods" he takes occasion to scorn the hollowness of the claim, rarely failing to comment on the absurdity of the beliefs entertained by ignorant people. His history is a quarry of folklore and romance. To it we owe our Shakespeare's Hamlet, for the story which is retold in these pages from the Danish priest's immortal work, was the original source of our great poet's inspiration.

This "history" is indispensable to students of Scandinavian religion. Rydberg, the poet and folklorist of Sweden, is the author of a monumental work on Teutonic Mythology, 1 in which he made exhaustive and critical examination of the tales embedded in Saxo's works, showing their relation to the Eddas and Sagas and existing oral poems of the north, and making masterly endeavour by their aid to reconstruct the great mythological drama of the northern peoples. He has not escaped criticism, but his reputation has withstood much of it. On every point he has raised he cannot be regarded as conclusive, but no scholar before or since has shown greater aptitude for restoring form from mythological chaos. His intimate knowledge of his native lore gave him special equipment for his work. Not infrequently scholars, by a process of detached reasoning, miss the mark when dealing with folklore, because their early years, unlike Rydberg's, were not passed in its strange atmosphere. The theorist is never as reliable as he who was aforetime a faithful believer in giants and elves, spirit voices and awesome omens.

"No one," wrote Frederick York Powell, 2 "has



p. xxii

Report Spam   Logged


Pages: [1] 2 3   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum
Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy