Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Síða 72

52
Part One
son’s view, and rejecting - like Lindfors - the extreme Goticist views,
asserted that the poems reached far back into an obscure past.10 The
main point is that they can be relied upon as “pure sources for the faith
and lore of the Pre-Christian Germano-Gothic peoples of the North”
(Die åltesten norrånischen Lieder als reine Quellen tiber Glauben und
Wissen des germanogothischen vorchristlichen Norden), as he put it in
the subtitle of his translation (Studach 1829). Even if Vgluspd has noth-
ing to do with the Erythrean sibyl, it represents an age-old tradition, and
is by no means from late heathendom in Scandinavia, still less from the
Middle Ages. For practical purposes of interpretation, the distance to
Goransson is not so important.
“Alteinfach ...”
The most influential history of Old Norse literature to appear in the first
half of the century was probably Koeppen’s Literarische Einleitung in
die Nordische Mythologie (1837). In matters of dating he followed Mul-
ler, praising him for having made the general development of Icelandic
literature “perfectly clear” (Koeppen 1837: 176). By summarizing what
appeared to be the common opinion at the time, his book achieved some
of the same authority for the German public as Muller’ s had.
In a rhetorical appraisal of the characteristics and worth of Icelandic
literature, Koeppen struck a note that would often be repeated. The
world-wide importance of Icelandic literature is comparable to that of
Greek and Indian, he wrote, not on account of its creativity, which was
limited, but in its capacity as a recipient and preserver of the language
and poetry transmitted from the past. Like an old retired statesman, re-
flecting over his past and writing his memoirs, the Icelanders provided
the Northern peoples with their historical identity. At the remotest limits
of the old world the spirit of the Germanic past, expelled from the whole
10 “Wenn man auch nicht der Meinung Schimmelmann’s oder Goransson’s sein
darf, dass die Edda das reine Wort Gottes oder das alteste Buch der Welt sei, oder dass sie
schon zu Moses Zeit verfasst und geschrieben, drei hundert Jahre vor Troja gebaut schon
in Schweden sich gefunden, unter der Konigin Disa Regierung, in Erztafeln gegraben;
oderRunolf Johnson’s, Resen’s, Gudmund Andersson’s, die Voluspå sei von
der Erythraischen Sibylle vor dem trojanischen Kriege verfasst: so reichen die Lieder doch
in ein dunkles Alter hinauf ’ (Studach 1829: viii-ix).