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.
