The Pre-Christian Religions of the North. Research and Reception, vol. 1: From the Middle Ages to c. 1830 ed. by Margaret Clunies Ross (review)

We have reached a stage at which even the most diligent among us are doomed to draw inspiration from surveys and abstracts. Until roughly World War I, active scholars knew practically everything about their field. This is no longer the case: what was a river has become a deluge. Predictably, the ever-increasing number of articles, books, and dissertations is not proportional to the emergence of new ideas. Our penchant for theorizing is a natural byproduct of this state of affairs. After all, it has been known for a very long time that staðr did not undergo umlaut, that sagas are full of inconsistencies, and that Óðinn, as Snorri informed us, died in Sweden. Our lot is to interpret such phenomena and events, and we keep doing it, sometimes with the perseverance worthy of a better cause.

Against this background, one cannot but admire Margaret Clunies Ross’s tireless efforts to edit volume after volume (be it skaldic poetry, myths, or all of Scandinavian and medieval literature, with their prolonged echoes) and make the achievement of hundreds of researchers available to the whole of the profession. For this volume she found an international team of authors and translators, wrote six chapters herself, and translated several others from Danish. No doubt, she read the entire huge book in manuscript and in proof, because one encounters extremely few foreignisms in the parts contributed by non-native speakers of English. Even if a computer was entrusted with compiling the name index (authors, artists, and their works), the subject index required the input of a careful editor. What a joy to read in the Acknowledgements: “Through the long process of editing and revision of the chapters in this book, all twenty-two contributors to this volume have been a delight to work with, and have never complained when asked to make revisions.” A rare experience indeed!

The eight parts of the book are as follows: “Looking in: The Non-Scandinavian Perspective” (p. 3–89); “The View from Inside: Medieval Scandinavian Reception” (pp. 93–184); “The Humanist Reception” (pp. 187–245); “From Humanism to the Romantics” (pp. 249–313); “The Romantics” (pp. 317–418); “The Reception in Drama and the Visual Arts from c. 1750” (pp. 421–578); “Enabling Philology” (pp. 581–591); and “The Early Grundtvig” (pp. 595–622).

In planning this gigantic survey, Clunies Ross kept in view not only specialists in the religion, literature, and art of the North but a much broader audience of historians, philologists, and perhaps even lay readers. This is made clear by the inclusion of a section in which it is said what such terms as “Old Norse,” “Edda,” “skaldic poetry,” and a few others mean. Perhaps a few more should be included. For instance, on p. 99, euhemerism is suddenly explained, though it, quite naturally, occurs earlier and more than once elsewhere.

Sometimes a good idea could not be realized. Thus, three chapters in Part 1 are called “Anglo-Saxon Responses to Scandinavian Myth and Religion,” “Finno-Ugric Neighbours,” and “Celtic-Scandinavian Contacts,” but the available material is so scanty that the authors had almost nothing to say. By contrast, a few chapters seem to be a bit overcrowded, almost like monographs compressed into essays.

Seeing how many people contributed to the survey, the reader cannot expect stylistic uniformity in the volume, but the style sheet has been observed rigorously: every chapter concludes with a detailed bibliography. The multiple references (in one case ten pages long, but six- and seven-page-long lists also occur) again remind us that nowadays almost any subject has become an area open only to narrow specialists. Given this situation, today hardly anyone would dare to compete not only with the author of Deutsche Mythologie but even...