Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 46

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Part One
cient northern Scalds, which I have translated at the end of this
book: He will there find, throughout, the same Mythology that is set
forth in the Edda\ although the authors of these pieces lived in very
different times and places from those in which Sæmund and Snorro
flourished.)45
On the other hånd, Mallet criticized Torfæus for his exaggerated trust in
Icelandic literature as a source for the oldest history of Scandinavia; the
very long lapse of time from the days of OSinn to the period when Ice-
landic literature was first committed to writing should not be disre-
garded (Mallet 1755: 32).
The first major Continental historian to take up the criticism of the
Edda was August Ludwig Schlozer, one of the fathers of “enlightened”
historiography in Germany, who together with Adelung and Friedrich
Riihs played an important part in the criticism of the Icelandic sagas.46
Including and commenting upon a treatise on the Uppsala Edda by the
famous Swedish historian Johan Ihre, who in Schlozer’s opinion acted
as a salutary counterbalance to people like Goransson, Schlozer pub-
lished in 1773 a book on Icelandic history and literature.47 In the pro-
gressive spirit of the age he voiced his disbelief in the Creative force of a
small nation like Iceland, on the very edge of the earth, whose literature
must of necessity have been brought in from abroad; the small Greek na-
tion was, moreover, treated with similar disdain.48 As a true historian,
however, Schlozer proceeded to look for historical proofs of contact be-
tween Iceland and the more developed nations of Western Europe, and
he found what he sought in a dissertation on the travels of ancient Ice-
landers by the Icelander Jon Eiriksson, Professor in Sorø (1775: 85-89),
where several instances of Icelanders studying in Germany and France
in the llth century were recorded. This period coincided with the cul-
mination of troubadour literature in France, and this was exactly the
contact needed for Schlozer’s conclusion: “Through the blending of
45 Transi. Percy, Mallet 1770, vol. 2: xxviii-xxix.
46 Cf. Andersson 1964: 19-21; Mundal 1977: 17-19.
47 Anders Grape has treated very fully the relationship between Goransson, Ihre and
Schlozer in his historical introduction to Uppsala-Edda (Grape 1962: 51-66, 83-90).
48 Schlozer 1773: 55-57; cf. Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 31 (1890): 575,595.