Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 29
II Scholarly prehistory
The most extreme divergences possible regarding the age of the Edda
can be found in German scholarship from the last quarter of the 18th
century. Jacob Schimmelmann, Consistorialrath in Stettin, was the first
to present the Edda to a German-reading public with a translation of
Snorri’s Edda (1777). In a dissertation published a few years earlier
(1774), he boldly stated that the Edda was without doubt the oldest book
in the world, second only to the Bible.1 His strongest opponent was the
famous historian and lexicographer Johann Christoph Adelung, who
maintained to the contrary that “here everything is new, manuscript,
content and language”.2 Neither of them was specific in his dating of
any particular Eddie poem, but Schimmelmann was prone to dating the
Edda to a period not far from the days of the patriarch Noah (Schimmel-
mann 1777: 350), whereas Adelung did not see any reason why these
poems should be older than the manuscripts in which they were pre-
served; these manuscripts were supposed to be from the first half of the
14th century, but according to Adelung they might well be up to 200
years younger (Adelung 1797b: 165). We are thus left with a maximum
spån of time for the differing datings of about 4000 years, from Anno
Mundi 1700 to Anno Domini 1500.
Adelung was a serious historian and Schimmelmann an amateurish
fantast, but neither point of view has been retained by later scholars. The
most important difference between the two is that they operated within
the context of different historical frameworks, and only that of Adelung
1 “Ich bin [...] gesonnen, die sogenannte etwa Anno 1070 aus dem Staube, durch den Is-
landischen Samundar (Froden) hervorgeholte, und bis auf unsere Zeiten gliicklich conser-
virte islåndische Edda, als ein hauptrares und ohne Zweifel nach der Bibel das alleralteste
Buch in der Welt [...] dem Publico durch den Druck in die Hande zu liefem, und bekann-
ter zu machen” (Schimmelmann 1774: 44).
2 “Kurz, hier ist alles neu und jung, Handschrift, Inhalt und Sprache” (Adelung 1797a:
124).