Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Side 48

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Part One
touched by the enthusiasm of the Pre-Romanticists. The real content of
history is cultural progress, and its culmination his own enlightened
age.52 The Nordic Vikings were, in Adelung’s eyes, the worst of barbar-
ians, as inferior in culture compared to the German nation as this nation
in its tum was inferior to the civilized peoples of the Mediterranean.
Since the religion of Eddie mythology seems to be imbued on the one
hånd with Christian ideals, such as the notion of a Trinitarian creator
god, of a dualism between good and evil, of a golden age before the fali,
and of the end of the world through fire and water before the creation of
a new world, and, on the other hånd, classical ideas like giants attacking
heaven, the chariot and the horses of the sun, nymphs and goddesses of
fate and so on, Eddie mythology can by no means be representative of
the bloody, murderous worship of the Northern heathens (Adelung
1797a: 113-19). His conclusion was that the whole of Eddie mythology
was the sheer invention of idle minds, who had collected their material
at random from wherever it might be found.53 Solarljod gives an unam-
biguous example of a blending of heathen and Christian ideas (1797a:
118), and the remaining religious poetry is to be understood in a similar
vein. Adelung was not only a historian, he was an outstanding linguist as
well, and from the faet that the language of the Edda was still intelligible
in Iceland he inferred that the texts could not be very old (1797a: 123).
As a historian Adelung must be praised for his criticism of the sources,
but he is led rather by a general scepticism than by a thorough philolog-
ical discussion (cf. Sickel 1933: 126).
Adelung’s disdainful expression, “eine bloBe Dichtung mtiBiger
Kopfe” (a sheer invention of idle minds), echoing Huet’s “Répertoires
de fiction”, was felt by the romantic sensibility of the dawning century
as a venomous attack that had to be countered.
52 Cf. Sickel 1933: 132-44.
53 “Wer kann sich nun noch des Schlusses erwehren, daB dieses ganze, so oft bewunderte
System, so wie alles iibrige, eine bloBe Dichtung mtiBiger Kopfe ist, wozu man den Stoff
auf Gerathewohl aus allen Winkeln zusammen getragen, ohne sich darum zu bektimmem,
ob alles das auch zu den sonst bekannten rohen Begriffen eines so wilden und ungesitteten
VolkespaBte, odernicht” (Adelung 1797a: 121-22).