Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Blaðsíða 60

40
Part One
and could be taken as a genuine expression of the heathen Norsemen’s
ideas of their gods.27 He also wondered whether Riihs would not have
been less critical of the value of Eddie mythology if it had not been tak-
en as evidence for ancient history (Muller 1811: 89). On the other hånd,
referring to Suhm, he underlined the distinetion between poetical
mythology and religion (1811: 90), and was well aware that some poems
were probably composed in Christian times.28
In this work Muller was primarily concemed with mythology. Even if
the myths were genuinely heathen, it was of course still possible that the
poems treating these myths might be late. The authenticity of the mytho-
logy was a necessary if not sufficient precondition for an early dating of
the poems, however, and if this point were conceded, the most important
foundation for Riihs’s criticism was cleared away. Muller also rejected
the idea that sporadic coincidences between Eddie mythology and
Christianity could only be explained as loans in Christian times.29
In 1817 Muller published the first volume of his important discussion
of Old Norse prose literature, Sagabibliothek.30 In the second volume
(1818) he retumed to the question of the date of Eddie poems, this time
including heroic poetry. Sagabibliothek is a description and philological
examination of the whole saga corpus and is concemed with Eddie
poetry only in connection with the discussion of Vglsunga saga. His
view is now that the Eddie poems in general originated in the period be-
fore and under the reign of Haraldr hårfagri, i.e. in the 8th and 9th cen-
turies; but since he believed that the content of the legends could have
been preserved only in poetic form, the extant poems had to be founded
on older poems from the period of the Great Migration in the 4th to the
27 “Eines ist die Untersuchung, ob die Mythen des Nordens historisch sind, und wieweit
man aus ihnen eine Kentnis von dem Zustande der Skandinavier in den ersten Jahrhunder-
ten unserer Zeitrechnung schopfen kann; ein Anderes, ob sie in der That das darstellen,
was man im heidnischen Zeitalter von den Gottem glaubte, und ob sie zugleich die Art und
Weise andeuten, wie die Dichter sie ohne Einwirkung des Christenthums bearbeiteten. Nur
die Entscheidung der letzten Frage gehohrt zu einer Priifung der Aechtheit unserer Asa-
lehre” (Muller 1811:21).
28 Cf. p. 55 n. 16 below.
29 “Waren einzelne Uebereinstimmungen mit jiidischen und christlichen Traditionen
hinlanglich, die Unachtheit einer Mythologie zu beweisen; so wiirde iiber die religiosen
Sagen der meisten nichtchristlichen Volker der Stab gebrochen” (Muller 1811: 11).
30 Once more he was translated into German before the work had appeared in Denmark.
The first volume of Sagabibliothek was published in Berlin the previous year (Muller
1816), translated by the young Karl Lachmann (cf. Mobius 1856: 15).