Gripla - 20.12.2008, Blaðsíða 126

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argued against Snorri’s authorship of it almost a century ago, and both
R. C. Boer and Anker Teilgård Laugesen dismissed it, in significant
parts or whole, in two different studies, in 1924 and 1942 respectively, to
name only three widely read studies in this mould.2 Secondly, there is the
alleged problem of the cultural and religious context of pagan mythology
in Christian society in general and that of Snorra-Edda in particular. Early
scholarly response to this problem differs, but there seems neverthe-
less to have been a general consensus that the problem existed and that
is was imposing. If the open and considerable interest in mythological
and mythologically-related material was not seen by every scholar as
fundamentally contradictory to the proclaimed Christianity of eleventh-,
twelfth-, thirteenth-, and fourteenth-century Iceland, it was at least seen
to be somewhat odd, peculiar, or surprising, and demanding specific expla-
nations. One line of approach, forming the ballast in a tradition led most
prominently by Hans Kuhn, was to seek answers through interpretations
put thoroughly in religious and religiohistorical context. Kuhn’s determi-
nation to view Snorra-Edda and other mythological material primarily as
pagan religious remnants led him to his thesis of a post-conversion age of
religious syncretism, an age somehow primitively Christian but yet luke-
warm pagan.3
Baetke met both of these problems head-on in Die Götterlehre, quite
possibly the most important work yet written on Snorra-Edda, and funda-
mental to modern understanding of it.4 He argued cogently that Snorra-
Edda should be seen squarely within the classical and learned Christian
medieval traditions, that it gained inner coherence only when read against
the background of sophisticated Christian theological and religiohistorical
explanations and concerns, and that the Prologue and Gylfaginning are
inseparably intertwined in the larger and fundamental framework of the
2 Andreas Heusler, Die gelehrte Urgeschichte im altisländischen Schrifttum. Abhandlungen der
königlichen preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philologisch-historische Klasse
1908:3 (Berlin: Verlag der königlichen preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1908);
R. C. Boer, “Studier over Snorra Edda,” Årbøger for nordisk oldkyndighed og historie (1924):
145-272; Anker Teilgård Laugesen, “Snorres opfattelse af Aserne,” Arkiv för nordisk filologi
56 (1942): 301-315.
3 Of Kuhn’s numerous writings on the subject the classic is “Das nordgermanische
Heidentum in den ersten christlichen Jahrhunderten,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 79
(1942): 132–166.
4 Hans Kuhn is specifically targeted, cf. Baetke, Die Götterlehre der Snorra-Edda, 206ff.