Periodic Reporting for period 1 - RUNEKITSCH (Runic Kitsch: Medieval Modernity, Modern Medievalism, and the History of Philology)
Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2025-08-31
This project examined a history of views of Scandinavian paganism as a point of access to the primordial past, from the 1100s up to the early 1800s. As such, the project challenged and traversed a number of traditional boundaries of discipline, period, and region. The fundamental questions from which the project arose were questions of the history and interpretation of Medieval Old Norse texts – what could be called questions of philology. These questions expanded into an investigation of the origins and history of modern “Germanic” philology itself. This history begins with Central-to-Late Medieval antiquarian texts and both learned and popular practices of magic, continues into Early Modern scholarship on the regional Scandinavian past, and culminates in the birth of a “Germanic” past at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The project’s results bear implications not only for the discipline of philology that it historicizes, but also for broader concerns of intellectual and textual history, and for the theory and philosophy of history.
The project stemmed from unanswered questions raised during the researcher’s prior work on Old Norse textual and cultural history, particularly of a persistent association between the runic alphabet, magic, notions of paganism, and Old Norse eddic poetry in the Central and Late Middle Ages. But it also stemmed from a questioning of modern assumptions held by scholars of these subjects: examining representations of purportedly pre-Christian religion recorded centuries after the Christianization of Northern Europe, scholars have traditionally regarded the object of their study as the ancient pagan “core” to be discerned through a pernicious Medieval Christian “veneer.” This stance, in turn, tends to be coupled with an assumption that any Medieval practice of magic must necessarily preserve something pre-Christian. The point of departure for this project was the observation that the modern stance still bears something in common with the representations of paganism that it looks toward: it is a desire for the past that finds its object in past desires for the past.
In order to pursue these questions, it was necessary to formulate a research project which would cross a number of traditional boundaries of scholarship. In the first place, the Scandinavian textual material with which this history begins needed to be considered in a much wider context of Western Christian attitudes toward the pagan past, rather than dealt with as a special case as specialists in the field have tended to do. The project would also need to trace an ambitiously far-reaching history, which both crosses and calls into question the divide between the Middle Ages and “Early Modernity,” problematizing the supposedly absolute difference between Modernity and its Other.
The project stemmed from unanswered questions raised during the researcher’s prior work on Old Norse textual and cultural history, particularly of a persistent association between the runic alphabet, magic, notions of paganism, and Old Norse eddic poetry in the Central and Late Middle Ages. But it also stemmed from a questioning of modern assumptions held by scholars of these subjects: examining representations of purportedly pre-Christian religion recorded centuries after the Christianization of Northern Europe, scholars have traditionally regarded the object of their study as the ancient pagan “core” to be discerned through a pernicious Medieval Christian “veneer.” This stance, in turn, tends to be coupled with an assumption that any Medieval practice of magic must necessarily preserve something pre-Christian. The point of departure for this project was the observation that the modern stance still bears something in common with the representations of paganism that it looks toward: it is a desire for the past that finds its object in past desires for the past.
In order to pursue these questions, it was necessary to formulate a research project which would cross a number of traditional boundaries of scholarship. In the first place, the Scandinavian textual material with which this history begins needed to be considered in a much wider context of Western Christian attitudes toward the pagan past, rather than dealt with as a special case as specialists in the field have tended to do. The project would also need to trace an ambitiously far-reaching history, which both crosses and calls into question the divide between the Middle Ages and “Early Modernity,” problematizing the supposedly absolute difference between Modernity and its Other.
From the earliest stages of planning, this project has been geared toward the production of a monograph-length manuscript which would present the project’s research in a unified form with a unified argument. This was an ambitious task which required the synthesis of studies of disparate periods and regions of history, from the 1100s up to the early 1800s, as well as the analysis of texts in a number of different languages and cultural contexts: Old East and West Norse, Old English, Medieval and Early Modern Latin, and the modern Scandinavian and German languages.
The study focuses closely on individual texts and writers while also considering the changing wider historical context in great detail. It begins by identifying the variety of notions of the and attitudes toward the pagan past held by Central Medieval Latinate writers (particularly in the context of the “Renaissance of the twelfth century”), and closely analyzing Old West Norse manuscript texts and magical runic inscriptions dating from the 1100s to the 1300s within that wider context. It then traces the intellectual influence of these Central-to-Late Medieval representations of Scandinavian paganism on Early Modern writers: by taking representations of paganism as their object of study, the Early Modern scholars take a similar stance toward the past, and adopt similar practices of attribution to fictive sources of knowledge (particularly imagined or hypothetical runic texts). Finally the study analyzes the continuation and transformation of this attitude toward the past in the context of the early 1800s, and the birth of “Germanic” philology in the context of the revolution of historical linguistics. Altogether, this study required the analysis of numerous texts in various different languages, stemming from various different historical contexts. It is planned for the manuscript of this study to be published as a monograph with a leading open access publisher. In addition to focusing on this monograph manuscript, the project also produced multiple articles published in leading scientific journals on related topics in the history of Scandinavian philology and the philosophy of history.
The study focuses closely on individual texts and writers while also considering the changing wider historical context in great detail. It begins by identifying the variety of notions of the and attitudes toward the pagan past held by Central Medieval Latinate writers (particularly in the context of the “Renaissance of the twelfth century”), and closely analyzing Old West Norse manuscript texts and magical runic inscriptions dating from the 1100s to the 1300s within that wider context. It then traces the intellectual influence of these Central-to-Late Medieval representations of Scandinavian paganism on Early Modern writers: by taking representations of paganism as their object of study, the Early Modern scholars take a similar stance toward the past, and adopt similar practices of attribution to fictive sources of knowledge (particularly imagined or hypothetical runic texts). Finally the study analyzes the continuation and transformation of this attitude toward the past in the context of the early 1800s, and the birth of “Germanic” philology in the context of the revolution of historical linguistics. Altogether, this study required the analysis of numerous texts in various different languages, stemming from various different historical contexts. It is planned for the manuscript of this study to be published as a monograph with a leading open access publisher. In addition to focusing on this monograph manuscript, the project also produced multiple articles published in leading scientific journals on related topics in the history of Scandinavian philology and the philosophy of history.
The project’s results bring together an unprecedented combination of areas of knowledge and fields of the human sciences. The resulting study brings the relatively intellectually isolated field of Medieval Scandinavian textual history into contact with much wider scientific conversations – conversations it has traditionally tended to avoid. It also performs the reverse action: the results will make this field and the material it studies more visible to a wider scientific community, and shed light on the crucial yet entirely underappreciated role that the history of “Germanic” philology – which from the beginning largely relied on Medieval Scandinavian texts – has played in the wider history of ideas. The resulting study thereby contributes to the study and interpretation of the Medieval texts themselves, but also to discussions of the origins of modern attitudes toward the past. As a history of a certain stance toward the past, the study also contributes to current discussions of the theory and philosophy of history. As such, the project’s results go far beyond the limitations of a mere disciplinary history and constitute a uniquely wide-ranging study which forges connections between textual history, the history of ideas and the history of science, and the philosophy of history.