The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of the Monstrous (review)

Although Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Kinderund Hausmärchen is the best known to folklorists of the Grimms' many works, Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie (or James Stallybrass's nineteenth-century translation of it, Teutonic Mythology) is arguably the most influential. This work has been especially important for the study of mythology and folk religion. In Deutsche Mythologie, Jacob Grimm outlines his rationale for the reconstruction of ancient Germanic mythology and religion, and this rationalization has been used by many scholars from the nineteenth century and later in their own re-creations of Germanic and other European mythologies.

In essence, Grimm believed that Christianity was never really a part of folk culture. Instead, he argued, it was a thin layer over the ethnic religion and mythology of the people, and thus one could, by removing the Christian layer, recover pre-Christian mythology and folk religion. Grimm's argument has been powerful for scholars of pre-Christian religion and mythology. It allowed them to use materials from the Christian period, even modern materials, in the study of the pre-Christian religions—even if these religions had few or no attested pre-Christian texts.

For all of the book's influence, however, Grimm's assumptions and methods in Deutsche Mythologie have never been given the critical attention directed at the other work by him or his brother. Indeed, many of Grimm's underlying assumptions clearly need to be rethought if the work is to have contemporary relevance. Was there, in fact, a Germanic mythology or religion? Can they be recovered from Christian sources? What is the relationship, if any, between modern folk belief and early Germanic folk belief? The contributors to The Shadow Walkers attempt to reevaluate Grimm's work in light of more recent research and establish a more accurate representation of the evidence for a distinct, pre-Christian Germanic mythology and religion.

After an introduction by Tom Shippey, which sets Grimm's work in the context of the nineteenth-century revolution in the philological study of the Germanic languages, the essays in The Shadow-Walkers discuss various beings and topics in Germanic mythology. Paul Battles examines dwarves in Grimm's work and in the early Germanic tradition, and Randi Eldevik and Martin Arnold each discuss trolls. Tom Shippey writes on elves, Philip Cardew on Grendel, Jonathan Evans on dragons, Joyce Tally Lionarons on the female characters of Germanic mythology, Peter Orton on theriomorphism (deities in the form of animals), and Sarah Higley on werewolves. The volume closes with a brief afterword by Shippey.

While The Shadow-Walkers is an important contribution to the study of Germanic mythology and the work of the Grimms, it does have weaknesses. Some of the essays seem overly long and lose their argument amid an overabundance of examples. There is an overall problem with a lack of definition of key terms, such as myth and legend. Many contributors have a poor command of folklore sources and methods and can be rather dismissive of folklore, which is unfortunate given Grimm's view of the importance of folklore in reconstructing Germanic mythology. Some authors' deficient knowledge of the history of folklore and nineteenth-century intellectual history prevents them from fully contextualizing Grimm's work historically, while other contributors clearly know both the older Germanic and modern folklore primary materials, as well as scholarship on them. Shippey's essays are excellent, while Randi Eldevik's is among the weakest.

Even though Grimm had, for his time, an extraordinary command of the medieval and modern sources for Germanic folk religion and mythology, by the late nineteenth century many of his sources had been superseded and many new sources had been discovered. Deutsche Mythologie was pioneering work, so this was to be expected; this also means, though, that anyone using Grimm's work, even if they have a good command of the Germanic sources, has to be very cautious. The essays in The Shadow...