Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Blaðsíða 122
102
Part One
that the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, as they had been developed
by men like Schlozer and in the early 19th century by Riihs, are taken as
the point of departure. Later these “enlightened” ideas had been over-
come by a romantic reaction, represented first and foremost by the
Brothers Grimm. But now Jessen’s and Bugge’s generation - and Bran-
des’s - aimed at overthrowing this reaction.
Brandes’s leetures were entitled “Hovedstrømninger i det 19de
Aarhundredes Litteratur” (Main currents in the literature of the 19th
century) and the “current” or “stream” metaphor underlying his title is
characteristic of his programme of opening Scandinavian literature to
influences from modem Europe. The metaphor is echoed in Bugge’s
intemationally oriented approach to the question of dating Eddie poetry,
as shown in the quotation above (p. 99), and in a comment on the first
Helgi lay, where Bugge expanded his metaphors in the same vein: “This
poem was not, therefore, first composed in the stillness of a mountain-
ous Norwegian valley, nor on the lonely shores of an ice-bound sea, but
in the heart of Northern Europe - where Norsemen and Danes, Irish and
English were assembled together, under the pressure of great events, on
soil which, from early times, had been inundated and made fertile by the
culture of the south” (Bugge 1899: 205).54
The men of the “modern breakthrough” obviously sympathized with
the cosmopolitan spirit of the Vikings. “As a scholar, Sophus Bugge is a
Viking himself,” his friend Moltke Moe said in a popular essay portray-
ing Bugge, “making raids on the shores of one country after the other, he
gathers new thoughts and spreads them anew, and then he is on his way
to another shore - changing activity is his rest. He has moved horders,
54 The imagery is somewhat reduced in Schofield’s translation, cf. the original wording:
“Denne Digtning er altsaa ikke bleven til i en norsk Fjælddals Stilhed og ikke ved Ishavets
ensomme Strande, men i Hjærtet af Nordeuropa; hvor Nordmænd og Daner, Irer og En-
gelskmænd mødtes under store Begivenheders Drøn paa en Jordbund, som den sydlandske
Kulturs Bølger fra gammel Tid af i bred Strøm havde overskyllet og befrugtet” (Bugge
1896: 192). - It is worth noting that also for Henrik Schiick, who was an admiring critic of
Bugge, the stream metaphor is typical (cf. Johannesson 1972: 135-36; Gustafsson 1983:
164-67): “Från Italien slog humanismen sina kraftiga vågor ofver Europas nordligare lan-
der, och denna rorelse, hvars betydelse for folken norr om Alpema af aldre literaturhistori-
ker jamforelsevis svagt betonats, borjar nu att tilldraga sig en alt starkare uppmarksamhet”
(Schiick 1889: 74).