Gripla - 20.12.2008, Page 125

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VIÐAR PÁLSSON
PAGAN MYTHOLOGY
IN CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
I. Mythology and Religion∗
“Soviel auch schon über die Snorra-Edda geschrieben worden ist, besteht
doch über den eigentlichen Sinn und Zweck des Buches noch immer wenig
Klarheit.” Thus the opening statement of Walter Baetke’s ground-breaking
Die Götterlehre der Snorra-Edda.1 Although Snorra-Edda still deludes us
on many levels, and still offers very difficult and multifaceted questions
and problems, few would dare to open with such a statement today. But
when it opened Baetke’s monograph in 1950 it was not at all an overstate-
ment.
Of the seemingly countless sets of problems offered by Snorra-Edda,
two in particular figure prominently in nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century scholarship. Firstly, there is the problem of an alleged inner
incoherence. The difficulty, which was to many an evident impossibility,
to read Snorra-Edda as a fairly cohesive work with a sound structure and
coherent ideology and presentation lead many scholars to the explanatory
device of dismissing significant parts of it as interpolations. The Prologue
became particularly suspect in this matter: Andreas Heusler famously
1 Walter Baetke, Die Götterlehre der Snorra-Edda. Berichte über die Verhandlungen der
Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philologisch-historische Klasse
97:3 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1950). Rpt. in Kleine Schriften: Geschichte, Recht, und Religion
in Germanischem Schrifttum, eds. Kurt Rudolph and Ernst Walter (Weimar: H. Böehlau,
1973), 206.
∗ Thanks are due to many for comments and discussions: my fellow participants in the
seminar “Fortíðin á íslenskum miðöldum“ at the Third Icelandic Historical Congress at the
University of Iceland in May 2006, where a previous version of this article was discussed:
Helgi Þorláksson, and Sverrir and Ármann Jakobssynir; to my mentor Carol J. Clover for
discussions at earlier stages; and above all to my other mentor at Berkeley, John Lindow,
for whom I originally wrote the paper that grew to be this article and who offered extensive
comments.
Gripla XIX (2008): 123–155.