Nationalism, Philology, and Gre(e)nland

Abstract

This article traces the history of modern scholarship on Old Norse eddic poetry through a particular case study: the question of the provenance of two poems, Atlakviða and Atlamál, whose given titles in the Codex Regius manuscript appear to indicate that they were composed in Greenland. As the article shows, theories of the poems’ origin are closely intertwined with developing paradigms of European nationalism from the early nineteenth century onward, showing a tendency to pull the poems away from the periphery and toward a mythic national center. From Finnur Magnússon to Rudolf Keyser, P. A. Munch and Jan de Vries, a series of philologists and historians divulge an often contradictory set of interests, investments, and prejudices. The theories they present reveal recurrent underlying notions of identity and difference, inclusion and exclusion, center and periphery, history and prehistory, and colonialism and indigeneity. Finally, a recent study of Norse Greenland shows the form in which these attitudes have survived into the twenty-first century. These nationalist paradigms, the article shows, are inevitably dissolved by the scholars’ own attitudes, yet continually reassert themselves in ever more reactionary forms.