Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Blaðsíða 24

4
Part One
having put into print his views on Old Norse literature. It was only four
years later, in 1866, that his Nordmændenes Videnskabelighed og Lite-
ratur i Middelalderen, the most comprehensive history of Old Norse
literature until then, was published posthumously.
By a curious coincidence, the first larger survey of Old Norse litera-
ture in Denmark appeared at almost exactly the same time, similarly a
posthumous summary of - or rather notes from - a university teaching
career. Niels Matthias Petersen had been professor of Scandinavian lan-
guages at the University of Copenhagen from 1845 to 1862, and his Bi-
drag til den oldnordiske literaturs historie was published in book form
in 1866, having appeared in a journal the year before.
Both works are prominent landmarks in Old Norse scholarship in
Scandinavia; they achieved particular historical importance by trigger-
ing an engaged debate, in which Svend Grundtvig and Edwin Jessen in
Denmark and Gustav Storm in Norway were the principal Scandinavian
protagonists, while Konrad Maurer and Theodore Mobius provided
smaller, but nonetheless important, contributions from Germany.
This controversy was still at its beginning when Keyser’s young pupil
Sophus Bugge published his epoch-making, and still unsurpassed, edi-
tion of the Eddie texts, Norræn Fornkvædi (Bugge 1867). Twelve years
later Bugge initiated a new debate by his famous leeture for Videnskabs-
Selskabet in Kristiania, in which he first presented his hypothesis that,
far from being age-old undiluted Germanic lore, the mythology of the
Edda was a product of the Viking Age, a relatively young mixture of Old
Norse religious ideas with remnants of Classical mythology and Chris-
tianity, brought together in the great melting pot of the British Isles.
Bugge’s theory was developed further in his extensive Studier over de
nordiske Gude- og Heltesagns Oprindelse (1881-89), and provoked en-
ergetic protests from, among others, Karl Miillenhoff in Germany and,
somewhat later, Finnur Jonsson in Copenhagen.
The opposing views on the age of the Eddie poems in the debate in
the 1860s and 70s may conveniently be summed up in the following
statements by Rudolf Keyser and Sophus Bugge. Keyser, for his part,
was convinced that the Eddie poems should be dated to the time before
the middle of the 9th century:
[...] saa maa man vel ansee Eddadigtenes Oprindelse fra en
Tidsalder ældre end Harald Haarfagers Dage, ældre end