1
Old English Studies and the Politics of Philology in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Scandinavia
The Anglo-Scandinavian literary connection mentioned briefly in the Introduction was renewed in England in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, chiefly in the scholarly community, which had increasing access to important Scandinavian texts.
1 This chapter is a revised and expanded version of my “Nineteenth-Century Scandinavia and the Birth of Anglo-Saxon Studies.” Reprinted with permission of the University Press of Florida. The first edition of Saxo Grammaticus’s
Gesta Danorum (Deeds of the Danes) was published in Paris in 1514, and Olaus Magnus’s
Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (History of the Northern Peoples) followed from Rome in 1555. A host of other important Scandinavian texts subsequently appeared internationally between 1636 and 1702. Learned readers had access to Snorri Sturluson’s
Heimskringla, editions of the Old Norse (ON) legendary sagas and runes, summaries of material related to the Orkneys, an Icelandic grammar, basic Icelandic dictionaries, and the
Poetic Edda, with its evidence that “old northern ‘barbarians’ had developed a coherent system of ethics, a mythological system, and an artful tradition of poetic composition.”
2 Wawn, The Vikings and the Victiorians, pp. 17–18. In the nineteenth century, British interest in all things Scandinavian – particularly Icelandic – expanded exponentially, as Andrew Wawn has impressively documented in his
The Vikings and the Victorians. People were enlightened and moved by English translations of the
Poetic Edda,
3 Ibid., chapter 7. for example, and
Heimskringla4 Ibid., chapter 4. and
Njal’s Saga;5 Ibid., chapter 6. by Sir Walter Scott, whose hugely influential novel
The Pirate (1822) gives a vivid account of Viking life;
6 Ibid., chapter 3. See also Leersen, National Thought in Europe, pp. 202–03. and by English translations or popularized forms of Esaias Tegnér’s
Frithiof’s Saga7 Ibid., chapter 5. (1820–25), the Swedish epic poem built on the ON
Friðþjófs saga. The Vikings were everywhere in the past and present of Gregorian and Victorian England,
8 For the full extent of the presence of ON poetry and saga during the period, see Wawn, “Early Literature of the North.” and N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872) was one of them. On his first trip to England, he was a vacationing, unthreatening one, as he himself describes it in 1839:
The first summer I was in England – for like the first Danish Vikings, I only made summer expeditions to the Thames to store up for the winter – the first summer, Englishmen regarded me as a half-mad poet who had gotten the crazy idea that there lay great treasure in the old, barbaric scrolls, which they really laughed at seeing me sit and rummage through daily and told me with a self-important air that there was nothing there.
9 “Den første Sommer, jeg var i England–thi ligesom de første danske Vikinger gjorde jeg kun Sommertog til Themsen og pakkede mig før Vinter–altsaa den første Sommer betragtede Engelskmanden mig som an halvgal Poet, der havde faaet den Grille, at der laa store Skatte begravede i de gamle barbariske Skroller, som de ordentlig lo ad at se mig sidde daglig og rode i, og fortalte mig med en vigtig Mine, der var ingen Ting.” Repr. in Johansen and Høirup, Grundtvigs Erindringer og Erindringer om Grundtvig, pp. 70–71.No. They – both scholars and laypeople – thought nothing was there. Daines Barrington, the exception to the rule, implicitly laments the situation in his preface to his 1773 translation of the ninth-century Old English (OE) translation of Orosius’s Latin world history (
Historiae aduersum paganos, fifth century), stating that “[t]here are so few who concern themselves about Anglo-Saxon literature that I have printed the work chiefly for my own amusement, and that of a few antiquarian friends.”
10 Quoted in Adams, Old English Scholarship, p. 106. John Bosworth in 1823, on the other hand, promotes the situation in describing OE poetry “as an artificial and mechanical thing, cultivated by men chiefly as a trade” that should not be confused “with those delightful beauties which we call poetry.”
11 Bosworth, The Elements of Anglo-Saxon Grammar, p. 212. An observation made by one of Thomas Hughes’s characters in a novel published in 1859 seems to characterize a more general nineteenth-century attitude: “Yes, people sneer at the Old English chronicles now-a-days, and prefer the Edda, and all sorts of heathen stuff, to them.”
12 In The Scouring of the White Horse or, The long vacation ramble of a London clerk and what became of it: and the ashen faggot: a tale for Christmas, p. 37. Quoted in Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, p. 183.In Scandinavia, interest in its past glory was keen as well, and had been since the thirteenth century.
13 Clunies Ross and Lönnroth, “The Norse Muse,” pp. 8–10. That interest increased through the centuries and reached new heights in the seventeenth century with the development of Scandinavian Gothicism, which originated in Sweden and promoted the nationalistic idea that the Gothic tribes that defeated the Romans in late antiquity came originally from Sweden. Sweden, therefore, was one of the most ancient countries in Europe and “possessed a culture that was at least as venerable and glorious as that of the Romans.”
14 Ibid., p. 11. The great Swedish runologist and father of Swedish grammar Johannes Bureus (1568–1652), most prominently championed the idea and even proposed replacing the Latin alphabet in Sweden with the runic.
15 Enoksen, Runor, pp. 182–84. The idea never took hold, and neither did August Strindberg’s over 200 years later to replace the study of Latin in schools with the study of Icelandic.
16 Mjöberg, Drömmen om sagatiden, vol. 2, p. 21. Although not supplanting Latin, Icelandic began being taught in the nineteenth century in schools in Norway and continues to this day. See Mjöberg, “Romanticism and Revival,” p. 236. A milder form of Scandinavian Gothicism was also practiced in Denmark during Bureus’s time, although its major proponent there, Ole Worm (1588–1654), professor of Latin, Greek, physics, and medicine at the University of Copenhagen, sought to prove that ON poetic language and runes originated in Denmark, not Sweden.
17 Clunies Ross and Lönnroth, “The Norse Muse,” p. 11.Then came the Nordic Renaissance,
18 The pioneering work in this field is Blanck, Den nordiska renässansen. which brought a renewed awareness of Nordic culture in Western Europe from ca. 1750 to ca. 1800. Nordic myth, sagas, poetry, and runes were viewed on a par with Latin and Greek myth and poetry,
19 Clunies Ross and Lönnroth, “The Norse Muse,” pp. 14–18. and the primitive aspects of Norse poetry – “wild, passionate, and sublime”
20 Ibid., p. 15. – captured the imagination. The first Swedish novel, Jacob Mörk’s and Anders Törngren’s
Adalriks och Giöthildas äfwentyr (Adalrik’s and Giothilda’s Adventure, 1742–44), for instance, is partially based on episodes from the
Heimskringla.
21 Lönnroth and Delblanc, Den Svenska Litteraturen, p. 24. Language reformers were also at work for patriotic reasons during the eighteenth century in Scandinavia. For instance, in Sweden, Jesper Swedberg (1653–1735), one of the most prominent figures in the Swedish Church of his day and father of the mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), published long lists of foreign words and expressions that should be replaced by Swedish equivalents in order to purify the language;
22 Bexell, “Swedberg.” and in Denmark, J. S. Sneedorff (1724–64) helped promote a purified Danish stripped as much as possible of foreign influences in his periodical
Den patriotiske Tilskuer (The Patriotic Spectator, 1761–63).
23 Haugen, The Scandinavian Languages, p. 397.Romantic Nationalism (ca. 1800 to ca. 1870) focused the attention even more, with its emphasis on the earliest literature of a language group being the earliest expression of the nation itself. It started in Denmark around 1800, in Sweden around 1810, and in Norway and Iceland in the 1830s and was associated with a nationalistic revival in each country.
24 Clunies Ross and Lönnroth, ”The Norse Muse,” p. 20. When the Norwegian constitution was ratified on 17 May 1814 in Eidsvoll, Norway, in fact, among the assembly delegates, known as “the Eidsvoll men,” the coupling of the dream of the saga period with the possibility of a national awakening was self-evident and central. They even looked on Peder Claussen’s Danish translation of
Heimskringla (
Snorre Sturlesøns Norske Kongers Chronica [Snorri Sturluson’s Chronicle of the Norwegian Kings, 1633]) as a kind of Norwegian
Magna Carta.
25 Mjöberg, Drömmen om sagatiden, vol. 1, p. 224. Despite the Scandinavians’ veneration of their own literary heritage, however, there was no sneering at the OE chronicles in Scandinavia, where the whole of OE literature was increasingly held in high regard, and not just by N. F. S. Grundtvig.
The history of OE studies in Scandinavia winds through certain complex and tumultuous political realities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – especially Napoleonic ones between 1795 and 1815 – as well as reactions to those realities by Scandinavians. During the earliest period, the cradle of OE studies in Scandinavia, the political climate in Scandinavia was stormy.
26 The following sketch of Scandinavian history is based on Mjöberg, Drömmen om sagatiden, vol. 1, pp. 207–39. See also Olesen and Kouri, The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, and Derry, A History of Scandinavia. Mjöberg touches on many of his findings in his two-volume Drömmen om sagatiden in his “Romanticism and Revival.” Before Napoleon, for example, Sweden was plagued by recurrent internal strife and imperiled by a Danish–Russian alliance leading to a war with Russia in 1789; after the advent of Napoleon, all of Scandinavia was in jeopardy, either from him, his allies, or his enemies. Denmark was threatened by England (which was then allied to Sweden) and successfully repelled an English naval attack in 1801, but suffered grievously from another onslaught six years later. In 1807, Copenhagen was besieged once more as a result of the British belief that Denmark would help Napoleon exclude all British goods from import to Europe. Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin (1752–1829), in fact, who had ventured to England from 1785 to 1791 for the express nationalistic purpose of “examin[ing] and transcrib[ing] every manuscript that could shed light on Danish history,”
27 “inspiciendi, tractandi, et exscribendi omnia, qvæ rebus Danicis lucem affere possent manuscripta.” Bjork, “Thorkelin’s Preface,” pp. 300–01. claimed that he would have published his edition and translation of
Beowulf in 1807 instead of 1815 had not “the city of Copenhagen, ancient home of riches, thrice renowned in cruel war,” sunk in flames, as he paraphrases
the Aeneid in his preface to his 1815 first edition of the poem.
28 “Divum antiqva domus sævo ter incluta bello / Havnia.” Ibid., pp. 308–09. His scholarship, wrote Thorkelin, sank along with Copenhagen, and only “love of country” and the monetary and moral support of his patron allowed him to bring it back again.
29 “amor patriæ.” Ibid., pp. 310–11.~
Figure 2. Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin, undated.
Sweden, meanwhile, had more of its own troubles. England was its only ally; it was at odds with Denmark–Norway (a well-established tradition, but this time because of Denmark’s alliance with Russia); Russia invaded Finland in 1808, and the Swedes had lost that region, which had been theirs for 600 years, by 1809. The same year, a new constitution was set up.
30 This constitution lasted until 1975, becoming the “oldest written constitution still in force in Europe.” Derry, A History of Scandinavia, p. 216. Then followed revolution, the abdication of King Gustav IV Adolf, and a new truce with Denmark. Everything was in turmoil.
Norway, too, was in a precarious position, especially after Denmark’s aligning itself with Napoleon after the 1807 British attack on Copenhagen. Norway disapproved of Danish foreign policy, but because it was under Danish rule at the time (as were Iceland, Greenland, the Faeroe Islands, and the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein),
31 Denmark was one of two Nordic states during this period, the other being Sweden. The Kingdom of Sweden included Finland, Swedish Pomerania, and St. Barthélemy island in the Caribbean. See Nordstrom, Scandinavia Since 1500, p. 165. its disapproval did not lessen the oppressive effect that the British hunger blockade on the Danes had on the Norwegians. When Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, Napoleon’s marshal to Sweden, became the successor to the Swedish throne and then took part in the allied victory over Napoleon, Denmark gave up Norway to Sweden through the treaty of Kiel in January 1814. The Norwegians, though, were disgruntled about this act, since they had not been directly involved in it. They developed a new constitution as a consequence, and had hardly begun reveling in their new-found freedom and solidarity when Norway put itself under the rule of Bernadotte. Bernadotte, however, approved the new constitution anyway, thus preserving Norwegian freedoms.
The reaction to all this political tumult and uncertainty and to the rampant expansionism of Napoleon was, of course, nationalism, the glorification of the Fatherland. While nationalism manifests itself in such acts as establishing new constitutions, it also has its effect in many other areas such as architecture, design, theater, music, art, and sculpture.
32 See Mjöberg, Drömmen om sagatiden, vol. 2, chapter I, and on architecture see Lane, National Romanticism and Modern Architecture. Furniture, porcelain, silverware, pewterware, and textiles, for example, were created in forms inspired by the ON style and spirit.
33 Mjöberg, Drömmen om sagatiden, vol. 2, p. 8. Patriotic songs were also composed and sung throughout Scandinavia,
34 For a comprehensive survey, consult Enefalk, En patriotisk drömvärld. as were the twenty-four songs from Tegnér’s
Fritiofs saga, which had been set to music by the Swedish-Finnish composer Bernhard Henrik Crusell (1775–1838). In Norway, Edvard Grieg wrote music for one of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s Viking plays,
Sigurd Jorsalfar, and began writing an opera about Olaf Tryggvason as well.
35 Mjöberg, “Romanticism and Revival,” p. 236. After Sweden lost Finland to Russia in 1809, representing the world of the Norse gods and Sweden’s most ancient history in art became one way of coping with the humiliation and pain. An exhibition of such art in 1818 inaugurated a new era in Sweden that would thrive to the end of the nineteenth century.
36 See Stenroth, Gudar eller människor.~
Figure 3. Bengt Erland Fogelberg, “Tor,” 1845.
In addition, nationalism also found one of its most forceful and compelling articulations in imaginative literature. Although Finland itself plays no direct role in OE studies in Scandinavia, what took place there epitomizes a more general Scandinavian response. The separation of Finland from Sweden and its incorporation into Russia as an autonomous grand duchy by 1809 was traumatic for both Sweden and Finland. In Finland, the urge to find a national identity emerged most powerfully in the work of Elias Lönnrot (1802–84), a physician, writer, and professor of the Finnish language, who compiled two large literary works out of the oral poetry of the Finns,
Kalevala (Land of Kaleva, 1835–36; second edition 1849) and the
Kanteletar taikka Suomen Kansan Wanhoja Lauluja ja Wirsiä (Kanteletar or old songs and ballads of the Finnish people, 1840–41).
37 Branch, “Finnish Oral Poetry,” p. 3. The first of these – 22,795 lines in fifty poems in the definitive edition of 1849
38 Ibid., p. 4. – became almost instantly regarded as Finland’s national epic and has served the needs of artists, writers, politicians, businessmen and women, educators, and others in promoting Finland’s identity. The impact of it and the
Kanteletar on the arts and scholarship and politics in Finland, where its publication day (28 February) is still a national holiday, “has been enormous and still awaits systematic analysis and assessment.”
39 Ibid., p. 33.In Denmark, Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850) and N. F. S. Grundtvig responded to the two British sieges by reaching back into the Viking Age for inspiration. Both had already been moving strongly in the direction of Romantic Nationalism, Oehlenschläger with his
Nordiske Digte (Nordic Poems, 1807) and Grundtvig with his
Nordens Mytologi (Nordic Mythology, 1808).
40 Rossel, “From Romanticism to Realism,” pp. 187–88. Oehlenschläger – then deemed the leading Danish author and later in 1829 honored as the “King of Nordic Poetry”
41 Gerven, “Oenlenschläger.” – penned three poisoned poems against the British in which, for instance, he says that “Oldtids Aand og Oldtids Ære” (the past’s spirit and the past’s glory)
42 Quoted in Mjöberg, Drömmen om sagatiden, vol. 1, p. 209. are rekindled by the Danish deeds of the present, and Thor actually awakens to inspire the Danish and Norwegian warriors with the fire of ancient heroism.
43 Ibid. Grundtvig – who became a member of the Danish Constitutional Assembly in 1849
44 Holm, The Essential Grundtvig, p. 11. – has Valhalla opening to welcome the brave naval officer Peter Villemoes, slain like a dauntless Viking by the British, in his “Drapa om Villemoes” (The Heroic Poem of Villemoes, 1808).
45 Mjöberg, Drömmen om sagatiden, vol. 1, p. 211. See also Mjöberg, ”Romanticism and Revival,” p. 233.The Swedes responded with the same righteous fury (and fear) to the loss of Finland as the Danes did to the assaults from England. Pehr Henrik Ling, for example, wrote an allegorical poem (1810) about the loss, in which the Viking king Gylfe (Sweden) sits on a burial mound mourning his dead love, Aura (Finland).
46 Mjöberg, Drömmen om sagatiden, vol. 1, p. 216. Esaias Tegnér wrote his anti-Russian “Svea” (subtitled “Pro patria”) in response to the situation as well. In that poem, the poet’s glorious Viking forefathers rise from their graves to applaud Swedish soldiers who recapture Finland.
47 Mjöberg, “Romanticism and Revival,” p. 233. In such writers as Ling and Tegnér, Swedish nationalism was being redirected and rejuvenated. It actually began in a flamboyant way in the Middle Ages, and continued in the Renaissance with independence from Denmark. From a linguistic point of view, it was institutionalized in 1786 when the Swedish Academy was established to preserve the purity of the national language and to compile a historical dictionary. The 37-volume
Svenska Akademiens ordbok (SAOB) (the Swedish Academy’s Dictionary) started to be published in 1898 and was completed in 2019. It is the Swedish equivalent of the
Oxford English Dictionary, the
Deutsches Wörterbuch, and the Dutch
Woordenboek Der Nederlandsche Taal (Dictionary of the Netherlandic Language).
48 Haß, “The Germanic Languages,” p. 475.The Norwegian situation was more complicated than the Danish or Swedish because Norway was still part of Denmark and subject to the strict censorship rules of
Tvillingrigerne (the Twin Realms). Possibly for that reason and certainly for others, no important literary works were produced in Norway between 1800 and 1830, a golden age for literature in Sweden and Denmark.
49 Naess, “Norwegian Literature 1800–1860,” p. 83. But Norwegian nationalism had already been engendered among members of “Det Norske Selskab” (the Norwegian Society), founded in Copenhagen in 1772. Those members “created and consolidated a Norwegian national consciousness, which did not appear in its full flowering until after the dissolution of the Danish-Norwegian union in 1814.”
50 Naess, “Holdberg and the Age of Englightenment,” p. 77. In the meantime, wanting a freedom and independence they had not possessed since the Middle Ages, the Norwegians clung above all to
Heimskringla, the ON book about ancient Norwegian kings and glory that took its place next to the Bible in most Norwegian homes.
51 Mjöberg, Drömmen om sagatiden, vol. 1, p. 224.Amidst the striking literary reactions to political chaos and threat come the somewhat more restrained reactions of historians and philologists. Less fired by the flames of Hyperborean Apollo (to use Thorkelin’s phrase for the god of poetry in the extreme north) than poets, perhaps, they nevertheless manifest the same kind of patriotic feeling. All over Europe, the Napoleonic wars and the rise of Romanticism had their effect on people’s worldviews. Joep Leersen outlines the main changes between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries relative to nationalism:
Nationalism emerges in the nineteenth century from eighteenth-century roots: Herder’s belief in the individuality of nations, Rousseau’s belief in the sovereignty of the nation, a general discourse of national peculiarities and “characters”. What changes from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth is this:
1. an unprecedented imperial campaign mounted by Napoleon and fiercely resented outside France; this turns eighteenth-century notions of tyranny and liberty from a power imbalance within the state (between rulers and governed) into one of power imbalance between states (between occupier and occupied);
2. the rise of Romantic idealism which sees national character as a spiritual principle, a “soul”, rather than a set of peculiarities;
3. the Romantic belief that a nation’s culture, and in particular its language, are the manifestation of its soul and essence;
4. the historicist belief that all culture must be seen as an organic tradition linking generations across centuries.
52 Leersen, National Thought in Europe, pp. 125–26.There is a long tradition of appropriative, nationalistic historical writing in Scandinavia, including Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum (ca. 1208) in which Saxo glorifies Danish history to justify Denmark’s being a Baltic power. Denmark, in fact, compares favorably with the Roman Empire for Saxo, and any accomplishment in the latter could be equaled in the former.53 Colbert, “The Middle Ages,” p. 11. Saxo is followed by somewhat less restrained reflections on the past such as those by the Swede Ericus Olai in his Chronica regni Gothorum (1460s), which promotes the thesis that the Swedes (götar or Geats) descend from the Goths of antiquity.54 Johannesson, The Renaissance of the Goths, p. 85. His identification of the two had been articulated before in 1434 by Nils Ragvaldsson, who found support for his view both in native Swedish sources and in learned ones such as Jordanes, the sixth-century Roman historian who wrote about the Goths, and Isidore of Seville, the seventh-century Hispano-Roman scholar and archbishop of Seville.55 Michell, “The Middle Ages,” p. 46. On the tension between Sweden and Spain in claiming to have been founded by the Goths, see Leerssen, National Thought in Europe, p. 38. The Gothicism of Olai’s Chronica had in turn great impact on later authors such as Johannes Magnus, who elaborates Isidore of Seville’s idea that the Swedes descend directly from Gog and Magog of the Old Testament in his Historia de omnibus gothorum suedonumque regibus (History of all the Kings of the Goths and Swedes, 1554).56 Johannesson, The Renaissance of the Goths, p. xviii. The Dane Hans Svaning in his Refutatio calumniarum cuiusdam Ioannis Magni (Refutation of the False Claims of one Johannes Magnus, 1561), on the other hand, seeks to prove that the Goths originated in Denmark, not Sweden, and that only Danes therefore can claim to descend from them. Similarly, Erasmus Laetus in his Res Danicæ (1574) tries to show that the Danes have roots in the Cimbrian (southern Bavarian) and Gothic past, the Swedes only in the Gothic,57 Skovgaard-Petersen, “The Literary Feud,” p. 115. and in 1679, the Swede Olof Rudbeck published the most ambitious work of Swedish Gothicism, his Atland, eller Manheim (Atlantis or the Home of Mankind). This “enormous work of misguided but influential research”58 Clunies Ross and Lönnroth, “The Norse Muse,” pp. 12–13. asseverated that all languages demonstrably descend from a Swedish original and that Sweden (i.e., Atlantis) is the birthplace of European culture, including Greek and Roman.59 Larson, “The Reformation and Sweden’s Century as a Great Power,” pp. 92–93. After moving through the slightly maniacal speculations of Rudbeck, the tradition of historical writing settles into the more empirically based, but still nationalistic, studies of the Age of Reason.
Philologists embed national spirit first in the titles of many of their works on OE language and literature. Thorkelin’s title is a prime example in its boldly proclaiming that
Beowulf is a Danish, not an English, poem; the epic merely comes to us in the OE dialect:
De Danorum rebus gestis seculi III & IV: Poëma Danicum dialecto Anglo-Saxonica (Of Events Concerning the Danes in the Third and Fourth Centuries: A Danish Poem in the Anglo-Saxon Dialect). The original poem is Danish or ON,
60 Shippey, “Kemble, Beowulf,” p. 68. and the epic “that had been absent for more than a thousand years returned to its country of origin”
61 “in patriam una Epos, qvod suum olim fuerat, post plus qvam mille annos postliminio rediit.” Bjork, “Thorkelin’s Preface,” pp. 300–01. when Thorkelin brought his transcripts back to Denmark. Other prime examples are the various titles of works by Grundtvig. In 1819, he titled his selection of translations from
Beowulf “Stykker af Skjöldung-Kvadet eller Bjovulfs Minde” (Fragments of the Scylding Song or Beowulf’s Memorial), but he is subtler on other occasions. He labeled his important 1817 review of Thorkelin “Om Bjovulfs Drape” or “Concerning the [implied Old Norse or Northern European] Heroic Praise Poem of Beowulf” and titled his 1820 translation
Bjowulfs Drape but appended a subtitle: “Et Gothisk Helte-Digt fra forrige Aar-tusinde af Angelsaxisk paa Danske Rim” (A Gothic Epic Poem from the Previous Millennium Rendered from Anglo-Saxon into Danish Rhyme). In his introduction to the translation, he further reinforces Nordic provenance by stating, “if I am right, then the poem is also beyond question elevated, a very Thor of a poem, to which Iceland itself cannot find the like.”
62 Shippey and Haarder, Beowulf, p. 160. He then transmutes the subtitle in his 1841 review of Thorkelin, Kemble, Leo, and Ettmüller to reaffirm the poem’s Northern European provenance: “Bjovulfs Drape eller det Oldnordiske Heltedigt” (The Heroic Praise Poem of Beowulf or the Old Nordic [Northern European] Epic Poem). Concluding his review with particular criticism of John Kemble (who regarded the poem as English) and Heinrich Leo (who regarded it as German) and further affirmation of the poem’s provenance, Grundtvig observes that “it is both an honour and a profit to the North that foreigners find powerful resistance, when they set themselves up as judges of the Nordic condition, which they do not know and defenders of the Nordic spirit, which they do not understand.”
63 Ibid., p. 245. Grundtvig naturally does know, however, and does understand. He makes the final transformation of the subtitle in his second, improved edition of his translation published in 1865:
Bjovulvs-Drapen, et høinordisk heltedigt, fra Anguls-Tungen fordansket [Beowulf’s Heroic Praise Poem, a High Nordic Epic Poem Danished from the Language of Angul]. “Gothic” had become too much associated with Germany by this time, so Grundtvig narrows his focus on the High North; and “Anglo-Saxon” changes to the language of the legendary founder of the Anglo-Saxons, Angul, brother of Dan, the legendary founder of Denmark.
The change in Grundtvig’s subtitle clearly reflects his Romantic Nationalism.
64 On the broad impact of Grundtvig’s nationalism, see Hall et al., Building the Nation. As
Beowulf speedily gained stature as a major early Germanic text, more Germanic tribes tried to lay claim to it. Kemble, writes Grundtvig, was “pulling at all the oars to move Gothland to Angeln,” and Leo was “sparing no effort to squeeze, if possible, the whole of Scandinavia into the ‘Cimbric peninsula’, which he sees as part of the great ‘Germania’.”
65 Shippey and Haarder, Beowulf, p. 245. Leo, who naturally viewed OE as a German (not Danish) dialect,
66 Stanley, The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism, pp. 5–7. would be the first of four German scholars to think
Beowulf was “dasz älteste
deutsche … Heldengedicht,”
67 Haarder, Beowulf: The Appeal of a Poem, p. 20 note 10, lists the other three scholars: J. P. E. Gerverus (1848), Karl Simrock (1859), P. Hoffmann (1893), and G. Paysen Petersen (1904). Note that one of the original reviewers of Thorkelin’s edition, Nicholaus Outzen, in 1816 also argues that the poem is German. See Shippey and Haarder, Beowulf, pp. 123–31. On the proto-Nazi claim on Beowulf for the German people, see Osborn “Bruder’s Beowulf.” On the German reception history of Beowulf, see Baatz, Beowulf in Deutschland. and Grundtvig had a reputation, by his own account, “for being almost as bitter an enemy of the Germans as of the Romans” for their tendency to want to make everything, such as poems and the Scandinavian languages, German.
68 Broadbridge and Jensen, A Grundtvig Anthology, p. 99.But Grundtvig had another nationalistic reason for altering the subtitle in his 1841 review. He hoped, namely, that Beowulf would
instantly attract the attention of all Nordic, and especially Danish, scholars, and, as soon as it became readable in the mother tongue [i.e., in Grundtvig’s Danish translation], be found in all homes and become a reader for all children, yes, become for Scandinavia in a small way what the
Iliad and the
Odyssey were for the Greeks.
69 “Strax tiltrække sig alle Nordiske og da især Danske Lærdes Opmærksomhed, og, saasnart det blev læseligt paa Modersmaalet, findes i alle Huse og blive Læsebog for alle Börn, ja, blive for Norden, efter fattig Leilighed, hvad Iliaden og Odysseen var for Grækerne.” “Bjovulfs Drape,” p. 482.Grundtvig concludes by stating that indifference to “such a treasure trove” is “truly a crystal clear testimony to how horribly unnatural we have become in placing Latin above our mother tongue.”
70 ”Saadant et Dannefee er ret et soleklart Vidnesbyrd om, hvor rædsom unaturlige vi er blevne ved at sætte Latinen over Modersmaalet.” Ibid.Titles do or can imply nationalistic sentiment, but philological studies, grammars, prefaces to collections of texts, and random comments interspersed throughout the literature frequently make the nationalism explicit. In pre-Napoleonic Scandinavia, we find the love of country seen as early as the Middle Ages bubble to the surface in works embracing OE language or literature. This is the case with the first four Scandinavian texts ever published that pertain to OE studies. They were produced in 1733, 1751, 1772, and 1787, the first by Andreas Bussæus or Anders Buss (1669–1735). Born in Norway, fatherless at age seven, and rather corpulent,
71 Meier, “Bussæus, Andreas.” Bussæus was a philologist, historian, and lawyer, who became barrister of the supreme court in Denmark in 1710 and mayor of Helsingør in 1718. In 1733, he published the first complete edition of Ári Þorgilsson´s
Íslendingabók (Book of the Icelanders)
72 Titled Arii Thorgilsis filii, cognomento Froda id est Multiscii, Schedae, seu Libellus de Is-landia, Islendinga-Bok dictus. together with Latin translation and notes,
73 Paulli, “Andreas Bussæus.” to which he appended the OE
Periplus Otheri, Halgolando-Norvegi, ut et Wulfstani (Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan) from the OE
Orosius, also together with Latin translation and notes. The Latin translation was reprinted from Christopher Ware’s 1678 edition of John Spelman’s
The Life of Ælfred the Great. During a visit to Wessex and the court of King Alfred the Great, the ninth-century Norwegian chieftain or wealthy seafarer Ohthere told the story of three voyages in Scandinavia, which were recorded in OE. This account and the account of an Englishman or Frisian named Wulfstan of his journey into the Baltic have obvious interest for Scandinavians and are suitably appended to what is essentially a national history of Iceland. In his greeting to the reader, Bussæus asserts that all that he offers in his book is “for the glory and profit of the fatherland.”
74 “in patriae gloriam et emolumentum.” Bussæus, Periplus Otheri, “Lecturo salute.”~
Figure 4. Hans Gram, 1754.
Hans Gram (1685–1748) was a historian, philologist, professor of Greek, twice vice chancellor of the University of Copenhagen, patriot, and famous both in Denmark and Europe for his capacious learning, which evidences itself in the earliest yoking we have of OE and one of the Scandinavian languages.
75 Paulli, “Hans Gram.” In “Prøve af Danske Ord og Talemaader, af det Engel-Saxiske Sprog forklarede” (Sampling of Danish Words and Expressions Clarified by the Anglo-Saxon Language, 1751), Gram gives shape to an idea that will influence many subsequent Danish scholars. He maintains that language is an integral part of a nation’s history. One needs it not only to “understand those documents that pertain thereto, but also to be able to decide about the origin of its people and inhabitants or its relationship to other nations.”
76 “Forstaae de Skrifter, som dertil hører, men endogsaa til at kunde dømme om dets Folkes og Indbyggeres Herkomst, eller dets Slegtskab med andre Nationer.” Gram, “Prøve,” p. 127. Icelandic has been accepted as Old Danish (128), he writes, but there is a language older than Icelandic that can help us understand modern Danish even better: OE, a tongue which “on the one hand our old forefathers from southern Jutland and on the other their neighboring Saxons, whom people have since called Holsteiners, brought with them to Britain.”
77 “Til deels vore gamle Forfædre fra Synder-Jylland, till deels deres Naboer Saxerne, som man siden har kaldet Holster, bragte over med sig til Britannien.” Ibid., p. 129. Gram examines 117 Danish words and phrases, from “Aand” (ON
ønd, mistakenly designated OE, “spirit”)
78 On “Aand,” Gram observes “At Spiritus og Anima ogsaa i Engel-Saxiske Skrifter kaldes Ond beviser Hickesius in Grammatic. Anglo-Saxon. & Moeso-Gothica, pag. 118” (that spirit and anima are also called ond in Anglo-Saxon writings Hickes shows in Institutiones, p. 118). The Institutiones, however, that Gram refers to ends at p. 114 and is followed by an Icelandic grammar with separate pagination, Runólfur Jónsson’s Grammatica Islandica rudimenta. In the Icelandic glossary on p. 119, not p. 118, ønd is glossed as “anima.” to “Øl” (OE
ealu, “ale” or “beer”), and observes that they “have been [in use] among the ancient Saxons and Jutlanders long before they come to appear in any Icelandic text.”
79 “Har været [i Brug] hos de ældgamle Saxer og Iyder, længe førend de ere komme i noget Islandsk Skrift at staae.” Gram, “Prøve,” p. 130. In his review of the first edition of
Beowulf in 1815, however, Grundtvig agrees that OE is more like Danish than Icelandic, but “one must strongly remember to give up the illusion that Danish grew out of Icelandic, which Gram claimed in vain, but which history and healthy reflection contradict, and which a thorough study of the Norse languages utterly destroys …”
80 Busbee, “A Few Words,” p. 31.Our next adventurer into OE studies, Jacob Langebek (1710–75), was left without either parent at age seventeen; Hans Gram took him into his household about eight years later. Langebek had been interested in the history of the Denmark from the beginnings of his studies at the University of Copenhagen, where he learned Old Icelandic, OE, French, and German as supplements to his already very strong Latin. Gram gave Langebek access not only to his home but also to his considerable library of books and manuscripts and arranged for an amanuensis position for him at the Royal Library, which helped Langebek advance a plan that he had been formulating from early in his career: a monumental edition of the sources of Danish history.
81 Bech, “Jacob Langebek.” That plan was eventually realized when he became the Danish National Archivist, working with a massive collection of documents having anything at all to do with Denmark, Norway, and provinces, the
Scriptores rerum Danicarum medii ævi (Danish Historians of the Middle Ages), including documents in OE. Volume one contains a genealogy from
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (pp. 6–9), volume two, “The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan” (pp. 106–23) and “The Battle of Brunanburh” (pp. 412–22), and volume five, miscellaneous OE material (pp. 1–231). Of
Beowulf, and anticipating the reaction but not the stridency of Grundtvig about the lack of English editions of OE poetry, he states, “I am surprised that none of the scholars of England has taken the trouble to edit a work of such antiquity, which would infinitely gratify both his own people on account of the poetry, and ours on account of its history.”
82 Shippey and Haarder, Beowulf, p. 77. Langebek was definitely serving his own people in the
Scriptores and is unequivocal both in his title and in his preface about what moved him to his enterprise: “Glory and love of my country, both of which seem wholly at risk in whatever part of our land you turn, have given me stimulus.”
83 “Gloria & amor patriæ meæ, qvi uterqve, in qvamcunqve etiam partem systema nostrum vertas, periclitari admodum videtur, mihi stimulos addidit.” Langebek, Scriptores, vol. 1, p. iv. Langebek’s patriotism, as keen as Gram’s, seems to have roots running deeper into Danish history than the fifteenth century, when predominantly German-speaking Holstein became a Danish duchy. He comes close to apologizing for some small items “written in the inferior Saxon tongue”
84 “In lingva Saxonica inferiori scripta.” Langebek, Scriptores, vol. 1, p. vi. that have crept into his work, a disdain that may harken back to ninth-century nationalism and the building of the Dannevirke (Danes’ Bulwark). The walls in southern Denmark were raised, according to an entry for the year 808 in the Frankish annals,
Annales regni Francorum, to protect the kingdom from the Saxons.
85 Glob, Denmark, p. 275. In a very real sense, OE scholarship in the eighteenth century was a kind of Dannevirke, protecting and preserving national linguistic and literary boundaries against the Germans. The fortification grew stronger in the nineteenth century.
~
Figure 5. Jacob Langebek, 1751.
Rasmus Nyerup (1759–1829) is my last eighteenth-century example. Head of the Royal Library and professor of literary history,
86 Jørgensen and Petersen, “R. Nyerup.” he was devoted to his teacher Peter Frederik Suhm (1728–98), a figure largely forgotten today but a central intellectual in eighteenth-century Denmark. Besides being a remarkable book collector, Suhm was “a dramatist, a translator, a journalist and critic, a political commentator, and, finally, a historian,” who eventually published a 14-volume history of Denmark.
87 Mitchell, “The Age of Englightenment,” p. 152. He was also a nationalist and proponent of Scandinavianism, as reflected in his writing several short stories or novellas based on early Danish and Scandinavian history, in which his ON characters are depicted as eighteenth-century Europeans
88 Blanck, Den nordiska renässansen, p. 218. and in which he sometimes contrives some pretty improbable scenes. In
De Tre Venner (The Three Friends), for example, he has fifteen fishermen sing the
Völuspá from the
Poetic Edda “as a sea shanty.”
89 Mjöberg, “Romanticism and Revival,” p. 230. Suhm’s
Symbolæ ad Literaturam Teutonicam Antiquorem (Contributions to Ancient Teutonic Literature), one of the earliest collections of Old High German (OHG) texts, is a serious work of scholarship, however, yet still informed by Suhm’s nationalist impulses. In Nyerup’s preface to the book, he echoes some of Suhm’s concerns as well as Hans Gram’s, making nationalism a clear motivator for studying OE. It is abso lutely certain, he writes, that the origin of Danish should not be sought solely in the Icelandic dialect:
It appears that three languages once held sway in the northern and western regions of Europe sprung from one and the same mother and differing among themselves solely by dialect: Franco-Theotiscan [Old High German], Anglo-Saxon, and Gothic. The name Gothic signifies that language from which in the course of time flowed Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. Both the other dialects, Anglo-Saxon and Franco-Theotiscan, prove of remarkable use for scrutinizing and studying the antiquity and origins of our language, and Anglo-Saxon, polished and cultivated with great learning from the most ancient times, supplies written memorials that are numerous, distinguished, and more ancient than the Icelandic.
90 “Plane et unice ex Islandica dialecto peti non debere, nec posse. Obtinuere scilicet olim in septentrionalibus et occidentalibus Europæ regionibus tres fere, ut videtur, lingvæ, ab una eademqve matre prognatæ, et sola dialecto inter se discrepantes, Franco-theotisca, Anglosaxonica, et Gothica. Gothico nomine fas est insignire illam, ex qva tractu temporis fluxere Danica, Svecica, Norvegica, Islandica. Ambas reliqvas dialectos, Anglosaxonicam et Franco-theotiscam, insignem in antiqvitatibus et originibus lingvæ nostræ perscrutandis excolendisqve præstare utilitatem, inde intelligitur, qvod illa, ab antiqvissimis inde temporibus magno studio exculta et expolita, monumenta suppeditet, ut longe multa et egregia, ita Islandicis antiqviora.” Nyerup, preface to Suhm, Symbolæ, pp. v–vi.Note here and in Gram that the simplifications of the Stammbaum model for the development of the Germanic languages (i.e., dividing the language group into branches) serve an unconscious ideological purpose. The ancient Franco-Theotiscan and Anglo-Saxon (now called West Germanic) branches both explain and legitimate the younger Gothic (North Germanic) branch. Scandinavian dedication to OE thus grows as the philological Dannevirke rises.
In post-Napoleonic Scandinavia we find even more intense expressions of love of country stretching from 1815 to 1885. Thorkelin, for example, writing at the beginning of the century in 1815, expresses a kind of simplicity as well as a dependence on the work of Hans Gram. Obviously having formulated his ideas long before Napoleon caused him so much grief, he says this about the language and origin of Beowulf:
By Hercules! I am astounded that Hickes attributed to the Anglo-Saxons a song that poured forth from the Danish bard, fired by the flame of hyperborean Apollo
… . Obviously he does not remember that the language spoken by the English before William I had been common to three peoples of the north – all called by one name, “Danes” – who spoke slightly different dialects of the same tongue. This fact is as clear as the light of day, even if no other authority could be found for it. For our epic plainly teaches that the Anglo-Saxon idiom is actually Danish, a language cultivated and kept pure even to this day by the inhabitants of Iceland, who dwell almost beyond the path of the sun.
91 “Igitur hercle miror Hickesium Anglosaxonibus tribuisse carmen, qvod vates Danus Appolinis hyperborei igne calefactus fudit … Eqvidem non bene meminit lingvam, qva ante Wilhelmum I. utebantur Angli, fuisse communem tribus septentrionis populis, qvi vocati uno nomine Dani, omnes ore eodem dialectice solummodo differente loqvebantur. Hujus si vel aliunde auctoritas nulla peti posset, plena sane hic in aprico cubat. Epos etenim hoc, qvale id nunc habemus, evidenter docet, idioma Anglosaxonicum esse revera Danicum, qvod Islandi extra solis vias fere jacentes hodiedum servant purum, et studiose colunt.” Bjork, “Thorkelin’s Preface,” pp. 302–03.The clear light of Thorkelin’s day would have had a different luster in Germany, where the OE idiom was actually considered to be German. “The German language,” wrote Count Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg, “became the language of England, and remained fairly pure.”
92 Quoted in Stanley, Search, p. 5. As amusing as Thorkelin’s and Stolberg’s views may seem today, they point to an important fact: OE comes from a period of linguistic history relatively close to when the proto-Germanic mother tongue from which the modern Germanic languages descend was in use. Though later, OHG and ON do as well, and so all three are fairly mutually intelligible. Take, for example, the first few lines of Ælfric’s “The Letter of Christ to Abgarus” (Blessed are you, Abgar, who believes in me when you see me not).
Eadig eart þu, Abgar,
þu þe gelyfost on me,
þonne þu me ne gesast. (OE)
Sæll ertú, Abgarus,
er þu eins um trúir,
þótt þú sjálfan mik
sæir aldreigi. (ON)
Abagarus du bist selig
dz du an mich gelobest
vnd mich nicht gesehen hast. (19th-century German)
93 Stephens, Tvende Old-Engelske Digte, pp. 17, 41, 70–71.One can easily see by comparing these three versions of the prayer how an early Danish or German scholar might confuse parallels among OE, ON, and OHG with parenthood of one of those languages over another. “OE,” observes Hans F. Nielsen, “has more exclusive (and active) par allels in common with ON than with any of the other [Germanic] languages except OFris, which suggests that pre-ON and pre-OE were once in immediate contact (or that there was a Scandinavian element among the fifth-and-sixth century invaders).”94 Old English and the Continental Germanic Languages, p. 258. See also Robinson, Old English and Its Closest Relatives, especially chapter 10, and Fulk, A Comparative Grammar. In 1705, George Hickes, in chapter 21 of the OE grammar included in his Thesaurus, adumbrated Nielsen’s observation by classifying OE poetic language as Dano-Saxon. And in 2014, Joseph Embley Emonds and Jan Terje Faarlund argued that Middle English descends from North Germanic (i.e., ON), not West Germanic, in their English: The Language of the Vikings. OE, like Gothic, simply died out.
Frederik Hammerich (1809–77), Grundtvig’s friend and follower, displays in his
De episk-kristelige oldkvad hos de gotiske folk (The Ancient Christian Epic Among the Gothic People, 1873) his piety in his selection of OE, ON, OS, OHG, and other “Gothic” texts; his nationalism or, more precisely, Scandinavianism in gathering those texts in one Danish volume; and his aesthetic appreciation of those texts inspired by Grundtvig. “We have gone through the most important poems,” he states in the last chapter of the book. “They sounded in our ear like birdsong far away on a spring morning after rain, like sweet chirping upon chirping, where one cannot easily distinguish the individual’s – the thrush’s, the starling’s – melodies.”
95 “Vi har gennemgået de vigtigste kvad. De lød i vort øre som fuglesang langt borte en forårsmorgen efter regn, som sødt kvidder i kvidder, hvor man ikke let kan skelne den enkeltes, drosselens, stærens, melodier.” Oldkvad, p. 171. Whether OE is the thrush and ON is the starling or vice versa, the point is that beautiful melodies emerge from all the Gothic languages, which are, in a sense, one. Hammerich’s treatment of OE texts comprises close to half his book, which contains the text and an alliterative verse translation of parts of “The Dream of the Rood” (pp. 15–20), a translation of “The Grave” (pp. 92–93), and selected translations from, for example, “Cædmon’s Hymn,” “The Ruthwell Cross,”
Genesis A and
B,
Exodus,
Daniel,
Christ and Satan,
Judith,
Christ I,
Andreas,
Guthlac B,
The Phoenix, “Soul and Body II,” and “Meters of Boethius” interspersed throughout a discussion of the poems (pp. 13–96). He expresses some Grundtvigian surprise, however, at English deafness to the distant melodies: “Englishmen, whose Anglo-Saxon (Old English) heritage is far richer in Christian epics than any other Gothic people, have taken on a strangely cool attitude toward it.”
96 “Engelskmændene, hvis angelsaksiske (oldengelske) arv er langt rigere på kristelig epik, end noget andet gotisk folks, har stillet sig underlig koldsindigt lige over for denne.” Ibid., p. 2. For hundreds of years, Hammerich claims, they have resented the fact that their cultural life began with the Scandinavians, and that has made them “blind to their rich heritage,”
97 “Det er en gennem hundreder af år næret fordom, at Englands kulturliv begynder med Normannerne, som har gjort Engelskmænd blinde for den rige fædrenearv.” Ibid., p. 3. as they “greatly underestimate the remnants from their antiquity.”
98 “stærkt undervurdere lævningerne fra sin oldtid.” Ibid. Hammerich, as J. R. Hall points out, “is the first to suggest that the account of Satan’s fall and the temptation of man in the poem now known as
Genesis B owes something to book II,
De originali peccato, of
Carmina de spiritalis historiae gestis, by Alcimus Avitus.”
99 Hall, “England, Denmark, America,” p. 446.Two other Scandinavian scholars, both editing the same texts by Ælfric, one writing in Latin in 1835, the other in Danish in 1853, offer the standard Gramian justifications for studying OE but add a couple of twists. Ludvig Christian Müller (1806–51), a minister and gifted linguist, translated the New Testament from Greek into Hebrew as a student, received a scholarship from Rasmus Rask to go to Iceland to learn Icelandic, tutored Hans Christian Andersen, and later became a tutor for Grundtvig’s sons.
100 Engberg, “Ludvig Christian Müller.” He promoted Grundtvig’s ecclesiastical and popular views and in 1835 published a collection of OE texts. He begins his preface to his
Collectanea Anglo-Saxonica101 Collectanea Anglo-Saxonica maximam partem nunc primum edita et vocabulario illustrata (Copenhagen, 1835). with the bold statement that “No obsolete Germanic dialect is more distinguished today than Anglo-Saxon.”
102 “Nulla dialectus Germanica hodie obsoleta insignior est quam Anglo-Saxonica.” Ibid., p. iii. But, he argues, OE and Old Icelandic poetry represent the whole range of Nordic literature, a literature revealing a race not inferior to the Romans in its thinking, feeling, or writing. Furthermore, he writes, “the tongue itself finally about which we are speaking sheds so much light on the tongues of the Icelanders, Danes, Germans, and English that it must be judged worthy for that reason alone to be snatched from oblivion.”
103 “Lingua denique ipsa, de qua loquimu, tantam Islandorum, Danorum, Germanorum et Anglorum linguis lucem affundit, ut vel hanc solam ab causam digna sit judicanda, quæ oblivion eripiatur.” Ibid. He, “being a Dane, [has] concluded that a language so closely related to ours should be cultivated.”
104 “Natione Danus linguam colendam existimavi nostræ affinem.” Ibid., p. iv.More than promoting the OE language, however, Müller offers in his book a mini first edition of prose and poetry inspired by Grundtvig and his defunct Prospectus, including Ælfric’s “The Letter of Christ to Abgarus,” the “Vindicta Salvatoris,” Ælfric’s homily “Dominica III in Quadragesima,” “Maxims I,” “Maxims II,” “The Battle of Brunanburh,” “The Battle of Maldon,” Riddles 5 (shield) and 43 (book or Bible), and “Christ I,” lines 1–29. After crediting the memory of Rasmus Rask for urging him on in this endeavor, Müller makes his indebtedness to the living clear:
Grundtvig has urged [this], three times having set out to England, who brought back the richest spoils. Obstructed by occupational concerns, he was unable to make these things available to the public himself, but he wished and was able to help me strive for the same thing. The codices described by him no less than his advice were at hand for me, by which being supported, I attacked the matter; I edited these items, which hopefully prepare the way for writings of greater moment.
105 “hortatus est Grundtvig, ter in Angliam profectus, qui spolia retulit ditissima. Occupationibus impeditus cum illa publici juris facere ipse nequiret, me eadem molientem juvare et potuit et voluit. Codices ab eo descrlpti non minus quam consilia mihi præsto erant, quibus sublevatus rem aggressus sum; hæcce edidi, quæ ut viam muniant scriptis majoris momentum in votis est.” Ibid., pp. iv–v.The Collecteana Anglo-Saxonica thus served an explicit linguistic as well as a subtler, intrinsic political or personal purpose for both Müller and Grundtvig. Again, however, Grundtvig was stymied. Benjamin Thorpe’s Analecta Anglo-Saxonica: A Selection in Prose and Verse from A-S Authors of Various Ages; with a Glossary appeared in 1834, a year before Müller’s collection did, and contains numerous OE texts edited for the first time.
George Stephens (1813–95), being an Englishman turned Dane, agrees with Müller about the linguistic importance of OE. After marrying in 1834, and deeply interested in finding evidence of the origin of English in the so-called Skando-Saxon (Dano-Saxon for Hickes), he and his new bride moved to Stockholm. There he immersed himself in Swedish and the language and culture of the North, editing and translating numerous old northern texts and runic inscriptions. He ultimately became a major force in those areas of research. He remained in Stockholm until 1851, when he took a position at the University of Copenhagen, where he taught and conducted research until 1893.
106 Dehn-Nielsen, “George Stephens.” In his
Tvende Old-Engelske Digte med Oversættelser og Tillæg (Two Old English Poems with Translations and Supplements, 1853), he generates both a more complicated edition than Müller’s and a more convoluted brand of nationalism. He dedicates the book to Grundtvig, “Great as Priest, Poet, Patriot, Greatest as the Unwearied Champion of the Northern Mother-Tongue,” and reprints Müller’s texts as poetry (Ælfric’s “Letter of Christ to Abgarus” from
Lives of the Saints and his homily on the third Sunday in Lent) that Grundtvig “first transcribed and made known by himself,” as Stephens phrases it in his dedication. Together with these texts are translations of them into English, Danish (by C. J. Brandt, a doctoral student at the University of Copenhagen), and ON (by Gísli Brynjlfsson, a stipendiary scholar at the University of Copenhagen) as well as original translations in Old Danish, Old Swedish (OSwed), MHG, German, and Dutch.
Including such a panoply of languages is meant to affirm international brotherhood: one of the most important developments in recent times, Stephens feels, is the growing spirit of community among Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and England, partially because of a mutual recognition of common roots. The work of philologists reinforces that idea, according to Stephens:
The English are now eagerly studying the Nordic languages in order to understand their own, and Danes learn with satisfaction that sumptuous OE (i.e., Anglo-Saxon) in a sense may be called a West Danish dialect from the 5th and 6th centuries within which the peculiarities that now distinguish the Scandinavian languages (passive form in sk or s, enclitic definite article, etc.) had developed to a certain extent …
107 “Englænderen begynder nu ivrigt at studere de nordiske Folkesprog for at kunne forstaae sit eget, og Danskeren lærer med Velbehag, at det rige Old-Engelske (Angel-Saxiske) i en vis Forstand maa kaldes en Vest-Dansk Mundart fra det 4de og 5te Aarhundrede, inden de Egenheder, som nu udmærke de skandinaviske Sprog (Passiv-Formen paa sk eller s, Post-Artikeln m. fl.) havde udviklet sig i nogen Grad …” Stephens, Tvende Digte, p. 1.Linguists, claims Stephens, recognize that the sound system of English has preserved more ON features than has Danish, and that many ON words and expressions “extinct in Denmark are in lively use among the common people of England.”
108 “Uddöde i Danmark, ere i frisk Brug iblandt Englands Almue.” Ibid. Small wonder, then, that the old water route between Denmark and England – “det stolte Vikinge-Stræde” (the proud Viking Street) – has been traversed once more. OE, “de Danskes Modersmaal” (the mother tongue of the Dane), has such great simplicity, such striking usefulness, that it understandably came to supplant first Latin and then French as the universal language. Stephens concludes: “That such an illustrious future was decided by Providence for a branch of the Nordic people, whose cradle was west Denmark (northern and southern Jutland) and Norway … is a thought that cannot help but rouse every Northman, each and every Danish man.”
109 “At denne glimrende Fremtid af Forsynet er bestemt en nordisk Folkestamme, hvis Vugge var Vest-Danmark (Nörre- og Sönder-Jylland) og Norge … er en Tanke, som ikke kan andet end röre hver Nordbo, hver dansk Mand.” Ibid., p. 2. This small edition of two texts thus became one of Stephens’ several attempts to promote his philological and political interests, which consisted of four parts:
(i) all that was best in British life, letters, and language was based on old northern values; (ii) a common culture had united the islands of and islands bordering the north Atlantic from the third century onwards; (iii) the most authentic extant texts from that unified old north were runic inscriptions; (iv) texts exhibiting the “folk-tungs” [dialects] of old northern English stand closer to the early common “Anglo-Scandic” language than do those texts that survive only in the standardized “book dialects of Alfredian Wessex and Saga Age Iceland.”
110 Wawn, “Early Literature of the North,” p. 280. For more on Stephens, see Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, pp. 132–34 and chapter 8 and Eriksson, “George Stephens.”By far the most sophisticated statements about why Scandinavians should engage in OE studies seem to come at the beginning and toward the end of the nineteenth century. Rasmus Rask (1787–1832), although a frail and sickly child, turned into one of the most powerful and influential scholars in Europe. He conducted research in Sweden, Finland, Russia, India, and Persia, spoke twenty-five languages, published widely about and in several languages,
111 Broadbridge, Living Wellsprings, p. 369. See also Wolf, “Thorkelin and Rask,” pp. 117–23. and is considered the founder of modern linguistics in Scandinavia.
112 Haugen, First Grammatical Treatise, p. 2. Grundtvig, in his poem titled “Rasmus Christian Rask” that he penned just days after Rask’s death, writes:
So his epitaph shall witness
“He broke ground where he came by,
and to follow in his footsteps
honour be to all who try.
He came down from reindeer lands
and encamped with elephants!”
113 Broadbridge, Living Wellsprings, p. 292.In his dedicatory letter to Johan Bülow (patron also of Thorkelin and Grundtvig) for
Angelsaksisk Sproglære, tilligemed en kort Læsebog (1817; trans. as
A Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue, with a Praxis, 1830), Rask reveals a nationalistic bias that probably has its philosophic roots in the works of Storm and Stress writers such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who emphasized the importance of concentrating on language and poetry in order to recover a nation’s culturally distinct, glorious past.
114 See Wilson, Folklore, pp. 28–31. That distinctive identity had to be “founded in the language and oral literature of the ordinary, nonliterate people.”
115 Branch, “Finnish Oral Poetry,” p. 5. But Rask’s nationalism also participates in the pan-Scandinavian penchant in imaginative literature for setting heathen cult and Christian faith in opposition.
116 See Mjöberg, Drömmen, 1: 107–207. In this pairing, heathenism frequently has the upper hand; Christianity sometimes does, as in Grundtvig after 1810;
117 Ibid., 1: 155–62. and sometimes the two balance each other, as in Grundtvig’s “Maskeradeballet i Danmark 1808” (The Masquerade Ball in Denmark, 1808), where he states that Odin and Christ are “begge Sønner af Alfader” (both sons of the All-Father), who represents “a higher Christian consciousness that subsumes the Nordic.”
118 Broadbridge, Living Wellsprings, p. 361.High Odin! White Christ!
Settled is your dispute,
Both sons of the All-Father.
With our Cross and our sword,
We consecrate your pyre here,
You both have loved our father.
119 Ibid., 1: 112. “Høje Odin! Hvide Krist! / Slettet ud er Eders Tvist, / Begge Sønner af Alfader. / Med vort Kors og med vort Sværd, / Vies Eder Baalet her, / Begge elskte I vor Fader,” GV “Maskeradeballet i Danmark,” pp. 19–20.Rask’s sympathies seem to fall with the heathens. Writing to Bülow, Rask quotes first from “Lunden ved Jægerspriis” (The Grove at Jægerspriis, 1788), a poem by Christen Andersen Lund (1763–1833) celebrating the spirit of the Nordic heroic past that was forgotten after the advent of Christianity. Both poem and poet, until now utterly forgotten, were well-enough known at the time that neither needed to be identified by Rask and the poem could be excerpted in a standard school reader.
120 Knud Lyne Rahbek, Dansk Læsebog og Exempelsamling til de lærde Skolers Brug, vol. 1 (Copenhagen, 1818), pp. 184–86. “More than eight hundred years have elapsed,” Rask begins, since the time:
da gamle Norden vendte bort sit Öje
med hellig Gru fra Fædres Hvilehöje,
og Munkens Messe dövede den Sang
der fordum höjt om Nordens Kjæmpe klang.
121 Rask, Angelsaksisk Sproglære, p. i.when the ancient North turned its eye
with righteous horror from the Father’s lofty place of rest,
and the priest’s mass muffled the song
that once was raised about the Nordic warrior.
It was then, Rask states, that the country was thrown into disarray, its customs transformed, its language corrupted; that was when national power began to falter.
122 Ibid., p. ii. Although the country sank into barbarism and thralldom, it was saved by the Reformation and the resultant birth of scholarship, which allowed Danes to turn to ancient books “to purify and adorn our language as well as zealously seek its original sources.”
123 “At rense og pryde vort Sprog, samt opsöge med Iver dets Kilder i deres förste Udspring.” Ibid., p. iv. Seeking the sources of Danish justifies Rask’s project: “Our modern mother tongue as well as our ancient history can gain so much light from Anglo-Saxon that it is well worth dragging it from the darkness and describing it in Danish.”
124 “Vort nuværende Modersmaal saavel som vor gamle Historie kan ogsaa af Angelsaksisken vinde saa meget Lys, at denne vel fortjente at fremdrages af Mörket og skildres paa Dansk.” Ibid., pp. iv–v. For Rask, it seems, OE language and literature were the loftiest expressions, in a pure Herderian sense, of the Danish soul. To recover them was to recover Danish national identity.
Rask’s
A Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue is known to just about all OE scholars, but his highly charged, polemical dedicatory epistle has not been. Thorpe published his English translation of the grammar in 1830 but did not include the epistle. He did, however, include Rask’s lengthy introduction, which, among other things, establishes the importance of studying OE for Scandinavians, so Rask’s nationalism was not entirely effaced. That effacement took place later, as the impulse to claim OE as specifically English seems to have taken full control. From the third edition of 1879, Thorpe eliminates Rask’s introduction as well, explaining the alteration thus: “The Grammar, as originally published, was obnoxious to at least one objection, which, in the present edition, will not be found – it was, perhaps, too Scandinavian, owing, no doubt, to the very natural bias of its author.”
125 Thorpe, preface to Rask’s Grammar, pp. iii–iv. Thorpe’s own bias caused him to suppress Rask’s valuable letter and expunge his introduction, steal Grundtvig’s ideas for a library of OE texts, and become a prime mover in the mounting English antipathy toward the Scandinavian interest in OE studies. J. M. Kemble likewise reveals his bias in the following statement at the beginning of his 1840 study of Anglo-Saxon runes:
These preliminary remarks will not be without service in assisting to explain why my interpretations of certain Anglo-Saxon Runic monuments differ toto coelo from those of the learned Danes, who have been so obliging as to attempt to decypher them for us; and to save them this trouble in the future, is partly the intention of this paper; especially as there seems to have been a sort of tacit understanding in this country, that the labour and the honour might just as well be left to them; in the propriety of which view it is difficult to concur.
126 Anglo-Saxon Runes, pp. 9–10.Frederik Rønning (1851–1929) did not take an interest in runic monuments, but he did study Nordic philology at Odense University, took a half-year of OE at the British Museum in 1880, and received his doctoral degree in 1883 after writing a dissertation on
Beowulf. He wrote extensively about Grundtvig and his work, including a four-volume biography (1907–14). He also wrote biographical works on Rasmus Rask (1887) and Rasmus Nyerup (1898).
127 Petersen, “F. Rønning.” Writing on “Den oldengelske digtning” (OE Poetry) at the end of the century in 1885,
128 Historisk Månedsskrift for Folkelig og Kirkelig Oplysning 4 (1885), 1–36. Rønning reflects a more modest kind of nationalism than Rask and a more balanced view of paganism and Christianity. Because, says Rønning, the language and literature of the northern peoples are distinct from those of other geographic areas – Herder seems in the background here – “the study of OE poetry will therefore always be of great value for us Northern dwellers.”
129 “Studiet af den oldengelske digtning vil derfor altid være af stor betydning for os Nordboer.” Rønning, “Digtning,” p. 2. In OE literature we have “an important source for the illumination of our own ancient past.”
130 “En vigtig kilde til oplysning om vor egen oldtid.” Rønning, “Digtning,” p. 2. Beowulf, for example, “in its original form arose in Scandinavia, probably in southern Sweden”
131 “I sin oprindelige skikkelse er opstået i Norden, og rimeligvis i Sydsverrig.” Ibid., p. 2. and manifests distinctly Nordic characteristics. Beowulf’s fighting Grendel without weapons is one of these; the poem’s verse form itself is another.
132 Ibid., pp. 8 and 9, respectively. In Christian literature, where “den hvide Krist” (the white Christ) is described in terms previously reserved for “den stærke Thor” (the powerful Thor), Rønning sees his Nordic heritage. The Nordic (as opposed to the generally Germanic) view of life as a battle reveals itself in both Christ and his apostles. “Christ is the great hero, who bursts the gates of hell, and his apostles are the loyal warriors who surround their chieftain.”
133 “Kristus er den store helt, der sprænger Helvedes porte, og hans apostler er de trofaste kæmper, der slår kreds om deres høvding.” Ibid., p. 5. All these distinctive features of OE, Rønning argues, demand that it be learned by Scandinavians.
Clearly Müller and Stephens, Rask and Rønning illustrate how varied, but essentially similar, the Scandinavian promotion of OE studies can be. These philologists and others, as Leersen phrases it, “stood with one leg in the field of literature and learning, with another in the arena of politics and its emerging institutions. They were in large measure the go-betweens, the transmitting agents, from one sphere to the other.”
134 Leersen, National Thought in Europe, p. 185. Grundtvig had no peers in this realm and stands at the center of the whole history of OE studies both in Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia. His contributions and influence deserve much fuller exploration.