Gods, Heroes, and Mythologists: Romantic Scholars and the Pagan Roots of Europe’s Nations

Abstract

AbstractThis article traces the scholarly interest in Europe’s non-Classical mythologies, from the rise of Edda studies in late eighteenth-century Denmark to the appropriation of Celtic origin myths in Spanish Galicia, and the flourish of overlapping Baltic mythologies between Tallinn and Vilnius, in the decades before 1900. Mythological studies attracted many important scholars (most notably Jacob Grimm, who published his benchmark Deutsche Mythologie in 1835), reached large readerships and inspired many artists, writers and composers. The progress and spread of this field of knowledge production is, however, extremely difficult to trace because it remained a cultural pursuit and never quite became a scholarly discipline. Its methods were heterogeneous and contradictory, combining the comparatist historicism of the New Philology with a tendency to leap from documentation to fanciful interpretation. The failure of the mythological pursuit to achieve academic consolidation stands in intriguing contrast to ...