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in myth. Indeed, in a remarkable passage in the preface to volume 2 of the
Kinder- und Hausmärchen, they explain how the tales help clarify various
points in heroic legend and also myth: “that Loki remains hanging from
the jǫtunn-eagle we understand better through the Märchen of the golden
goose, on which maidens and men who touch it hang stuck.”6 they con-
clude the paragraph with this claim: “In these folktales there resides pure
proto-Germanic myth, which people thought was lost.”7
the governing principle of Jacob Grimm’s thinking about pre-Chris-
tian religion was that Christianity had never really had much hold over folk
traditions, and that by peeling back the veneer of Christianity one could
get at the religion. thus, he thought, there were two fundamental kinds
of sources. Here is how he expressed the matter in the preface to the 1844
edition, the last to issue from his pen:
Much then is irrecoverably lost to our mythology; I turn to the
sources that remain to it, which are partly Written Memorials,
partly the never-resting stream of living Manners and Story. the
former may reach far back, but they present themselves piecemeal
and disconnected, while the popular tradition of today hangs by
threads which ultimately link it without a break to ancient times.8
In other words, there were medieval texts, and there was folklore. the
very combination that characterized the works of the Grimms as they led
the breakthrough into modern scholarship in the second decade of the
nineteenth century is here repeated, now as the linchpin of a theory of
recovering the pre-Christian religion of northwest Europe.
folkloristics broke from philology when it developed a method it could
call its own: the “folkloristic method” (“folkloristiche arbeitsmethode”),
as Kaarle Krohn termed it in a series of programmatic lectures published
6 “Daß Loki am riesen-adler hängen bleibt, verstehen wir besser durch das Märchen von der
Goldgans, an der Jungfrauen und Männer festhangen, die sie berühren.” Jacob Grimm and
Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder-und Hausmärchen vol. 2 (Berlin: in der realschulbuchhandlung,
1812–14), xi.
7 “[I]n diesen Volks-Märchen liegt lauter urdeutscher Mythus, den man für verloren ge-
halten.” Ibid. I have translated “urdeutsch” as “proto-Germanic” in line with the Grimms’
usage.
8 Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, translated from the fourth edition by James Steven
Stallybrass, vol. 3 (new York, Dover, 1966), xi.