Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 32

12
Part One
OSinn and the other men of Asia brought with them here to the north-
em part of the world and taught to men in their own tongue this kind
of art, as they had established and leamt it in Asia itself.)
In order to extract the dating implicit in this attribution, we have to know
the lifetime of the human OSinn. In the 17th and 18th centuries, how-
ever, OSinn posed a major problem in historical research - a problem
not so much on account of doubts about his historical existence as be-
cause the various passages in the sources are difficult to harmonize. The
problem was solved by postulating a plurality of OSinns: to Brynjolfur
Sveinsson there were at least three, the Old OSinn, Uppsala-OSinn and
Middle OSinn (ed. Faulkes 1977: ilr), and while the Danish historian
Peter Friderich Suhm in his monograph on OSinn from 1771 did not
hesitate to etymologize the name as deriving from Russian odin, mean-
ing ‘one’ (Suhm 1771: 4, 7), he counted the Saxon OSinn as a fourth.
Suhm lived in the Age of Enlightenment, and OSinn’s historical exist-
ence was no longer so uncontroversial; indeed, Suhm complained that it
had become necessary to “prove” that OSinn had really lived because
“in our time some scholars deny that OSinn ever existed as a human be-
ing”.9 As late as 1801, in an early work of the very critical German his-
torian Friedrich Riihs, OSinn is the central figure in the oldest history of
the Scandinavian peoples;10 but by the beginning of the 19th century
doubts had begun to grow stronger, and in 1823 the Danish bishop and
historian Peter Erasmus Muller affirmed that it was pointless to discuss
the exact age of OSinn because “he lived no more after than before the
birth of Christ”." The final death-blow to the theory of the historie im-
migration of the æsir had hardly been struck, however, before Rudolf
Keyser published his important essay on the origin of the Norwegian
9 “Endeel Lærde udi vore Tider begynde at nægte, at Odin haver været til som et Menne-
ske” (Suhm 1771: l,cf. p 69).
10 “Dem begierigen Forscher, der mit sehnsuchtsvollem Blicke in das Dunkel der nor-
dischen Vorzeit hineinschaut, schwebt ein groBer, heiliger Schatten, um den sich die gan-
ze alte Geschichte, wie ein Rad um seine Axe, drehet, Odin entgegen” (Riihs 1801: 10);
the immigration theory is also alluded to by Du Méril almost four decades later (1839:
48-54).
11 “Efter min Mening har Odin ligesaa lidet levet efter som for Christi Fodsel” (Muller
1823: 54, cf. p. 186-87; cf. further an extensive refutation of the medieval Euhemerism
and its modem offshoots in Kæppen 1837: 181-200).
J