Why did Norse mythology become popular?

Despite the great variety of mythologies in the world, general interest is reserved for a few and, after classical mythology, the one that receives the most attention is Norse mythology. Although Egyptian may be the only one to overshadow it, the Norse epic has a loyal following. But how did this interest arise and did it influence the representations?

Search for identity

The cause of its popularization stems from the opposition to the ancien régime and classicism. With this there was also a rejection of the authoritarian Olympian gods of licentious behavior. It is a time when the modern sense of nation and, following the ideas of the good savage of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the interest in finding the origins of each people, returning to the primitive, and establishing their identity. One of the first examples in literature was the Ossian cycle, based on the mythical past of Scotland, which caused a furor in Europe.

Iceland

In Iceland, the prosaic Edda was known for centuries only from mentions in Snorri's 13th century Edda. That changed in 1642, when Icelandic scholars discovered the Prosaic Edda in the Codex Regius. However, in the rest of Europe only fragments of it would be known until the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when the first complete translations were published. Previously, from the middle of the 18th century, the influence of Norse mythology in Europe was due to translations of Snorri's Edda, such as that of Paul Henri Mallet in 1755/1756, which was very widespread among European intellectuals.

Scandinavia

Inspired by the romantic current, European peoples were concerned with finding their roots in order to renew their culture and rediscover their heroes. Nordic heroes and gods reappeared in Scandinavian literature and art in the second half of the 18th century, as in the case of the Danish poet Johannes Ewald, who reintroduced the public to their myths with Rolf Krake (1770), a historical drama, and Balders Død (1773); Thomas Grey with the poem The Descent of Odin (1768), based on Baldrs draumar from the poetic Edda, or the painters Nicolai Abildgaard and Johann Heinrich Füssli, whose works are ubiquitous whenever Norse mythology is discussed and who offered alternatives to the usual classical subject matter.

In the 19th century, the number of authors who employed this subject matter in their works increased, and Adam Oehlenschlänger published a dissertation defending this paradigm shift, as they stimulated patriotism and were more open to interpretation than classical mythology. Furthermore, like other authors, N. S. F. Grundtvig argued that the Norse myths dealt with the struggle between civilization and barbarism, good and evil.

However, Norse mythology had a problem that classical mythology lacked: how did they represent the characters in it? Until the end of the century, Viking ships and tombs were not found, so their iconography was unknown. For this, the artists started from what was detailed in the texts, working on the known Greco-Roman and medieval base, seasoned with details of popular culture that could have been preserved since then. As critics pointed out, the result was more classical than Nordic. An obvious example is Bengt Erland Fogelberg's sculptures, although they were well received. However, the criticism of Hermann Ernst Freund, especially in his sculpture of Loki, is more unanimous among critics, as it clearly shows the personification of evil that he was then considered to be. By the end of the 19th century, representations would continue to develop with more dynamic motifs, such as great battles between the gods. However, with the arrival of realism, these themes were abandoned.

Germanic peoples

In the German states, they had a similar beginning but, except for Tacitus' Germania discovered in the 15th century, they had hardly any sources on which to base their identification. Therefore, just as in Scotland they compared the Celts with the Greeks, they needed an equivalent of the Teutons, which they found in the Nordic peoples.

When the first translations of the Eddas arrived, the goddess Iðunn, guarantor of divine youth and wife of Bragi, god of poetry, was taken as a symbol of the cultural and aesthetic renaissance of the new regime. Johann Gottfried Herder, who wrote a treatise on her, establishes Norse poetry as a predecessor of German poetry, which led Germany to appropriate the Norse gods. In fact, Herder himself states that Germanic literature has this right of appropriation.

Contemporaneously, the Nibelungenlied, which was related to the poetic Edda, was also discovered, gaining attention in Germanic studies, which sought German identity. Concerned about the relationship of this and the Old Norse sources, Wilhelm Grimm declared that the Eddic poems were a shared property, which came to extend to all mythology. In this way, he could make sense of his own mythology in his book Deutsche mythologie. Despite this, by the end of the 19th century scholars recognized that, despite their commonalities, they were independent mythologies.

What would make a notable difference in this case was its extension beyond academia, where it gained momentum. The main person responsible for this was Richard Wagner with Richard Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung (1876), where he combined material from the Völsunga saga with the names of the Nibelungenlied.

Political use

With the formation of Germany, the identification and association with Nordic myths increased. Otto von Bismarck already promoted an aggressive colonial policy in his "Hoedur speeches" in 1885, in which he warned of the threat of endangering the rejuvenation of the German people as Höðr threatened Baldr. Almost a decade earlier, the jurist and historian Felix Dahn also positively compared German imperialism to Thor's hammer. During the Wilhelmine period (1890-1918), the scope of the myths and the association between the Norse and the Teutonic increased, owing many of the stereotypes of the Vikings and their gods to this era.

The magnificence of the myths became the magnificence of the German people. The past was mixed with modern works or facts, comparing Wotan/Odin with Goethe's Faust or the late Bismarck with a heroic Einheriar entering Valhalla. Since mythology was not part of the school curriculum, these stories of gods and valiant heroes were popular especially among the middle classes, inclined to this type of literature.

Of course, the "Teutonic" mythology was a wonderful motif for the nationalist propaganda, both political and religious, of the Völkish movement, which discarded classical mythology or Judeo-Christian influences. Then, the idol was no longer Iðunn, but Baldr, who was treated as a messianic character who would bring light to Germany; the blacksmith Wayland (Völund), with whom a national renaissance was expressed, or Heimdall, dwelling-keeper of the gods. Of course, this set of beliefs was in line with the defense of a pure and united Germany, to whom the gods, valkyries and even the jotunn Þjazi himself offered protection, as if they were saints.

Comercial use

Despite this, it represented only a fraction of the references to the old Nordic myths. Being a synonym for modernity, any product, company, service, magazine, vehicle or tool could refer to them. In general, except in examples such as Thor light bulbs or the Ägir battle cruiser, there was hardly any more relationship between the name and the item bearing it than the desire for renewal. At the same time, repeated ad nauseam, advertising settled the stereotypical images of Nordic entities.

Sources

• Ljøgodt, K. (2012). ‘Northern Gods in Marble’: the Romantic Rediscovery of Norse Mythology. Romantik: Journal for the Study of Romanticisms, 1(1), 141-166.
  
• Zernack, J. (2011). Old Norse–Icelandic Literature and German Culture. Iceland and Images of the North, 157-86.