Hypothesis Islandica, or Concerning the initially supportive but ultimately subversive impact of the rediscovery of medieval Icelandic literature on the evaluation of Saxo Grammaticus as a historical authority during the heyday of Danish antiquarianism

Gottskálk Jensson Hypothesis Islandica, or Concerning the initially supportive but ultimately subversive impact of the rediscovery of medieval Icelandic literature on the evaluation of Saxo Grammaticus as a historical authority during the heyday of Danish antiquarianism Quae tempestas me in altum illud antiquitatum abripuerit mare, nescio; portum non video. Alea jacta est, utut fors ceciderit. ¹ Ole Worm (1588 – 1654) This paper is concerned in essence with the establishment of the academic discipline of Antiquitates Danicae in the early seventeenth century, the development of which it pursues, primarily in so far as this impinges on the reception of Icelandic literature in Denmark, into the eighteenth century. The creators of this branch of knowledge were Scandinavian royal antiquarians and historians, who with few exceptions were also professors at the two Danish academies of Copenhagen and Sorø. The history of antiquarian studies in Denmark is a worthwhile subject in its own right, but also forms the background to the monumental project of editing Old Norse-Icelandic texts for publication. This project began in earnest in Copenhagen after the foundation of the Arnamagnæan Commission in 1772. Before this time almost no Old Norse-Icelandic editions were produced in Denmark, while many more came out in Sweden and, despite the numerous obstacles, in Iceland itself.² Virtually all publications of Old Norse-Icelandic texts, both in Denmark and Sweden, were prepared by Icelanders, primarily because of the scarcity of lexical and grammatical tools, which made it virtually impossible for others than native speakers of Icelandic to master the medieval language.³ The absence of Danish editions from before 1772 stands in noteworthy contrast to the success of Danish authorities in procuring Icelandic manuscripts, which meant  »I know not what tempest sets me adrift on the deep ocean of antiquities; with no harbor in sight. The die is cast, whatever fate may befall.« From a letter to Bertel Knudsen Aquilonius (1588 – 1650), dated to 1626, when Worm was embarking on his antiquarian studies. Worm, Olai Wormii et ad eum doctorum virorum epistolae, 50.  The only major texts published in Denmark before this time were the Sorra-Edda in 1665, including the poems Völuspá and Hávamál, and the Konungsskuggsjá, published in 1768 on Icelandic initiative, which Finnur Jónsson calls »the first real edition«, Jónsson (1918).  Such aids first became available in the early 1800s, thanks to the Icelandic provost Björn Halldórsson (1724– 1794) and the Danish linguist Rasmus Kristian Rask (1787– 1832). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110638042-003 Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 14 Gottskálk Jensson that the greatest part of the important Old Norse-Icelandic codices was in the Danish royal collection by the late 1660s, or by 1720 in the considerably larger collection of the Icelandic-born professor and archivist Árni Magnússon (1663 – 1730). During the late seventeenth century antiquarians of Denmark and Sweden vied in collecting Icelandic literature, and in accordance with the patriotic spirit of the times invoked the Icelandic material as their own. Because the Danish held sovereignty over Iceland, many more manuscripts were exported to Denmark than Sweden. In 1685 King Christian V even prohibited outright the surrender of Icelandic manuscripts to agents of other countries. The scholars of the Swedish College of Antiquities nevertheless managed to recruit competent Icelanders to copy and translate medieval texts, and a number of Icelandic manuscripts were brought to Sweden directly or even through Denmark, e. g. the important collection of the Danish professor at Sorø, Stephen Stephanius (1599 – 1650), which was sold to Sweden by his impoverished widow. Noteworthy also is the successful expedition to Iceland on behalf of the Swedish authorities by the disgruntled Icelander Jón Eggertsson (1643 – 1689), which resulted in the enrichment of the Swedish collections by several important parchment manuscripts. After 1772 Copenhagen gradually became the center of Old Norse-Icelandic editorial philology, a preeminence it maintained for two centuries, until the historic transfer began in 1971 of a large part of the Icelandic manuscripts in Copenhagen to the University of Iceland.⁴ A quick estimate indicates that there are still over 1800 Old Norse-Icelandic codices in the Copenhagen collections, although most of them are post-medieval, besides important parchment books in Sweden and elsewhere. But in recent years the center of gravity of Old Norse-Icelandic philological projects has shifted towards Iceland itself, though the field is now very much an international area of study. However, the foundations of the discipline were unquestionably laid in Copenhagen, where an initial methodology for Old Norse-Icelandic philology was developed in collaboration between Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and German scholars. Arguably these origins have never been shed entirely. The foundational rationale of the academic discipline of Danish Antiquities could be described as yet another Renaissance transferral, a translatio antiquitatis, as it were; a shifting of the focal point of ancient studies from the Mediterranean to the North by adapting classical contents to a Scandinavian setting. The vestiges inevitably carried over from the study of the classical world were inherent, but not necessarily evident as such to the advocates of the new discipline, especially in the use of Latin as the scientific medium and in the Greco-Roman intellectual baggage that came with it. The motivation for the establishment of the discipline in Den-  During the first century or so, text editing in Copenhagen was mostly in the hands of publishing societies, beginning with the Arnamagnæan Commission. The Icelandic Literary Society was founded in 1815 by Rasmus Rask. The Royal Society of Nordic Studies was founded in 1825, also by Rask, though after the first three years it was led by Carl Christian Rafn (1795 – 1864). The Nordic Antiquities Society was founded in 1847. From 1771 to 1879 about 90 volumes of Old Norse-Icelandic texts were published in Copenhagen and many more in the following century (1879 – 1971). Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 15 mark arose out of the ideological necessity, felt most keenly by intellectuals close to the king, to give appropriate expression to the momentous breach with Rome that occurred in the Reformation. This cultural revolution provided the monarchs and princes of Northern Europe with an opportunity to take over the church by severing their ties with the Apostolic See. Elevated to head of the church, the heads of state appropriated enormous ecclesiastical resources that had been accumulated through the centuries. This great power seizure put an end once and for all to the medieval policy of libertas ecclesiae, i. e. the sharing of sovereignty between regnum and sacerdotium. The triumph over Rome demanded that the monarch and Council of the Realm take control of the history of the patria. Historiography had traditionally been the domain of church officials, and so it partly continued to be, but catholic universality was no longer viewed as being in the interest of the state. Regardless of the pragmatics of Realpolitik, the Roman Church had always seen itself in theory as independent of and celestially positioned above worldly governments, and citing Scripture it loudly polemicized against temporal pursuits. As always, Catholic history was Rome-centric, producing comparisons between states and cultures at the expense of the northern realms but favorably to the ancient Mediterranean empires (with the notable exceptions of Egypt and Mesopotamia). The northern realm and its inhabitants, who are barely mentioned in classical texts, were portrayed as barbarian and latecomers to civilization. Thus the history of the Germans and Scandinavians, seen through a Mediterranean lens, was that of savage tribes pacified by military expeditions and Christian missions from the south. After the Reformation, refashioning the Hyperborean Other into a respectable subject with an illustrious pedigree became a cultural imperative. This ethnic Care-for-the-Self, to use a Foucauldian phrase, showed itself with time to be a highly rewarding enterprise, especially when manuscripts were discovered in Iceland that could support the supposition that the Scandinavians had their own glorious ancient history, language, and literature. 1 The historiographical feud between the Danes and the Swedes The goal of Antiquitates Danicae was to construct a glorious Protestant antiquity for the Danish empire, and to provide ideological support for the ambition of the Danish monarch and the Councils of the Realm to rule the Nordic countries. With the Treaty of Kalmar of 1397, which stipulated the eternal union of Scandinavia under one monarch with separate Councils of the Realm (Rigsraad) for each country, Danish hegemony in Scandinavia was founded as a political ideal, although the new empire soon ran into serious difficulties as far as Sweden was concerned. Besides, the Danish monarchs from Christian I (king of Denmark 1448 – 1481, Norway 1450 – 1481, and Sweden 1457– 1464) were in fact Germans and members of the Low-German House Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 16 Gottskálk Jensson of Oldenburg (a port city on the North Sea). Apart from ruling Denmark, Sweden (including Finland), and Norway, they were also dukes of Schleswig (from 1460) and Holstein (after 1474), two duchies within the Holy Roman Empire. Nevertheless, modern historians argue that the political logic of the Kalmar Union was an attempt on the part of the aristocratic members of the Scandinavian Councils of the Realm to resist the power of the Hanseatic League and its growing influence over the Scandinavian economy. From a continental point of view, however, the whole of the Danish empire could well be viewed as a North-German vassal state. The continent to the south, whatever political constellations ruled the day there, had always been an exciting source of inspiration and innovation, while at the same time constituting a threat of domination, which made expedient various, mostly defensive, alliances between the Nordic kingdoms. Long before the Reformation, the great medieval chronicler Saxo Grammaticus had established a workable ideal of Danish / Nordic autonomy with his Behemoth of the Gesta Danorum (ca. 1200). The intention of this great project, defined and commissioned by Archbishop Absalon of Lund (d. 1201), was »to demonstrate convincingly that Denmark was an ancient Empire, every bit as distinguished and cultivated as the Roman Empire […] that Denmark was not and never had been a province of the Holy Roman Empire«.⁵ According to this imperial and patriotic construct, Denmark did not even – contrary to fact – owe its Christianity to the Continent. A strange allegory of history permeates Saxo’s work, according to which ancient Roman literature is used as a model for the contemporary culture of the Holy Roman Empire north of the Alps, i. e. Saxo’s posturing is aimed at neither ancient Rome nor the medieval Papal See, but at the Roman Empire immediately south of the Danish border. Nevertheless, in his twelfth-century classicizing Latin, Saxo appropriates the authoritative style of Greco-Roman poetic diction, and transfers it onto old »Danish« poetry in the sermo patrius. In practice this means translating and refashioning Icelandic skaldic and eddic poetry into Latin verses, which are in turn modeled on the poetry of the Roman classical poets, such as Vergil and Horace. As for Saxo’s carefully crafted narrative prose, this is likewise based on vernacular material, which he has polished in emulation of Silver Latin rhetoricians such as Valerius Maximus. In Saxo’s typically medieval mixture of verse and prose, however, the center of gravity of historical authority leans towards the poetic side, much as it does in Icelandic sagas, such as the Heimskringla. ⁶ Saxo’s Gesta Danorum, citing rune stones and Icelandic historical sources in the preface, reaches back into murky antiquity to trace the history of the Danish kingdom from its eponymous founder, King Dan, to the times of the Valdemars and Arch-  Knudsen (2000).  Friis-Jensen (1987). Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 17 bishop Absalon of Lund in the late twelfth-century.⁷ Its scope is unrivaled, no other medieval source of Scandinavian history gives an equally sweeping, detailed, and living picture of the earliest history of the North. Of major medieval chronicles on Scandinavia, only Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla is independent of Saxo, and can be placed alongside him, supplemented by the mythological chapters of the prose Edda. ⁸ The first edition of Saxo’s work was printed in Paris in 1514.⁹ It was a success in learned European circles. Erasmus of Rotterdam in a dialogue entitled Ciceronianus (1528) has one of the interlocutors express his surprise that such stylistic elegance and learning was to be found in a Danish author of that age.¹⁰ As is evident from the paratexts the editio princeps was motivated by a wish on the part of Christian II (1513 – 1523) to secure his position as ruler of the Kalmar Union, a position increasingly threatened by Swedish attempts to break away from the alliance. Saxo’s grand history was interpreted as an emphatic statement of Danish power.¹¹ In the years following the first printing, tensions between Denmark and Sweden grew, culminating in the notorious Massacre of Stockholm in 1520, in which a number of Swedish noblemen, prelates, and burghers were killed by Danish royal agents. Three years later, Christian II was forced into exile and the Kalmar Union dissolved. Hence it is not surprising that anti-Danish sentiment among Swedish intellectuals should find expression in attacks on the glorious construct of Saxo’s Gesta Danorum as presented in the edition of 1514. Indeed, this publication prompted a grand  Saxo provides the names of about 60 Danish kings up to Gorm the Old, the last pagan king, and an additional 15 Christian ones, including Valdemar the Great. He does not fix the reign of Dan with respect to Roman chronology, but his succession of Danish kings puts Dan 22 generations before King Frothi the Peaceful, who is supposed to be Augustus’ contemporary. Accordingly, it has been suggested by the latest editor of the text that Saxo imagined the brothers Dan and Angel, his parallel for England, to be contemporaries of Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome. Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, ad loc. In dating the Peace of Frothi to the days of Augustus Saxo is following the Icelandic Skjöldunga saga, the genealogy of which goes back to the first Icelandic historian Sæmundur Sigfússon (d. 1133). Guðnason (1981), 88.  The Zealand Chronicle of the thirteenth century and the Jutland Chronicle of the fourteenth century take Saxo as their obvious point of departure. Likewise, when Ericus Olai in Uppsala in the 1470s wrote his Chronica regni Gothorum, and when Albert Krantz in Hamburg a few decades later compiled the history of the Saxons, Vends, and Nordic peoples, they, too, derived most of their knowledge from Saxo, Johannesson (1978), Johannesson (1982).  Saxo Grammaticus, Danorum Regum Heroumque Historiae.  Erasmus admired Saxo for »his lively and burning genius, his rapid, flowing speech, his wonderful wealth of words, his numerous aphorisms, his wonderful variety of figures« (vividum & ardens ingenium, orationem nusquam remissam aut dormitantem, tum miram verborum copiam, sententias crebras, & figurarum admirabilem varietatem), and he couldn’t »wonder enough where a Dane of that age got so great a power of eloquence« (ut satis admirari non queam, unde illa ætate homini Dano tanta vis loquendi suppetierit). Erasmus’ approval of Saxo’s style was used as a blurb on the title page of the 1534 Basel edition, and again in the 1576 Frankfurt edition, at the end of the prefatory materials, facing the first page of Saxo’s text.  Friis-Jensen (1989). Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 18 Gottskálk Jensson Swedish counterstatement by the last Catholic archbishop of Sweden, Johannes Magnus (1488 – 1544). Magnus had been forced into exile when the new king of Sweden, Gustav Vasa, finally embraced the Protestant Reformation. He wrote his influential Historia de omnibus Gothorum Sveonumque regibus in Danzig and Venice. Although written around 1530 it was first printed posthumously in Rome in 1554 by the author’s younger brother, Olaus, who a year later also issued his own equally famous Historia de gentibus Septentrionalibus. Johannes Magnus’ Historia de regibus tells of Gothic and Swedish kings and their deeds from the earliest times, stretching back into Biblical antiquity, even further than Saxo had done. As historians in Denmark recognized early, Magnus’ grand construct was largely built on the Gesta Danorum by revising the identity of Danish kings and reapplying Saxo’s already grandiose claims on behalf of the Danes to Goths and Swedes. According to Magnus, who begins his narrative from the Deluge, Noah’s grandson Magog settled in Sweden and inaugurated a veritable Gothic Golden Age, long before the other empires of old. Magnus can name 143 Swedish kings from Magog to Gustav Vasa. Although his focus was ostensibly on his patria, the scope of his undertaking was catholic, since he concerned himself no less with the Goths beyond Sweden (extra patriam) than with the Goths in Sweden (in patria). The former, he says, emigrated from their northern Heimat as early as 1430 B.C. and eventually overpowered Greece and Rome. This was Gothicism at its chauvinistic extreme, based on early modern interpretations of Jordanes’ Getica, the sixth-century history of the Goths, which had been printed by Konrad Peutinger in Augsburg 1515 – a year after Saxo came out in Paris.¹² Magnus’ celebration of the ancient Goths also borrowed from the Germanistic movement, which was inspired by Tacitus’ description of the Germans in his Germania, another rediscovered ancient authority recently made available in print, indeed available in several editions before 1500. On the authority of Tacitus, German humanists could describe the character and moral habitus of the ancient Germans in positive terms and so counter the contemptuous accusations of barbarism frequently launched by Italian humanists.¹³ Thus Magnus’ Goths were given a share in these newly rediscovered ancient German virtues. Such incorporation into Magnus’ history of up-to-date knowledge, made available through the modern medium of printing, caused Magnus’ work to become something of a sensation in learned European circles. As for the historic Kalmar Union, Magnus regarded it simply as Danish tyranny. He expressed his vehement antipathy towards the Danes in a long polemical tirade, »A Speech Against the Danes« (Oratio contra Danos), with which he concluded his history. Most outrageous to the Danes, though, were Magnus’ claims that Denmark  On Swedish Gothicism in particular, see Lindroth (1961), Malm (1996). On Gothicism in general, see Svennung (1967).  On the Germanistic movement, see the modern standard work by Ridé (1977). Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 19 had originally been a set of unpopulated islands south of Sweden, settled by Swedish criminals around 2000 B.C., who were deported by the good King Erik I in an act of purging Sweden. These reputedly ignoble origins of the Danes then served the Swedish archbishop as une cause historique for certain repulsive character traits among the Danes, viz. cruelty and deceitfulness. The archbishop even prints a poem or song by King Erik I, where he boasts of his achievement in founding Denmark by purging Sweden of rogue elements. This ›Song of Erik‹, Magnus writes, »is in circulation throughout the fatherland [Sweden] in the vernacular for the appreciation of the entire population« (circumferuntur in tota patria ante publicum omnium conspectum carmina patrio sermone). Nevertheless, the song is represented on the pages of Historia de regibus in Latin Sapphic stanzas in emulation of Saxo’s classicizing style.¹⁴ This unique sample at the beginning of the work is designed to match up to Saxo’s elegant Latin versification; in the rest of the Historia de regibus, however, Johannes Magnus altogether drops such demanding metrical exercises. Although the Kalmar Union was dissolved in 1523, this event by no means marked the end of the Danish Empire. Denmark was still a political power to be reckoned with since the German Duchies, Schleswig and Holstein, together with Norway, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands continued to be united with Denmark in the Great Danish realm. In the early seventeenth century Greenland was rediscovered and eventually, in the early eighteenth century, it too became part of the Danish empire. The Danish monarch was both enriched and empowered by the Reformation, which, as noted above, eliminated the Roman church as a player in Danish politics. With only the nobles left as serious rivals within the institutions of state, Frederick III was able to claim absolute power in the 1660s. Historians of Denmark did not at first know how to rebut the fabrications launched against them by the »Great Goth« (Magnus Gothus) except by disavowing the calumnies and insisting on Saxo’s general reliablity in Danish history.¹⁵ Almost half a century later, in 1596 – 1604, the impressive 10-volume Danmarks Riges Krønike by State Chancellor Arild Huitfeldt (1546 – 1609) came out, which soon became the canonical account of the Danish past in the vernacular. The government’s efforts to produce a new history of Denmark in Latin for an international readership bore fruit in 1631, when the Dutchman Johannes Pontanus (d. 1639) published his  Skovgaard-Petersen (2008), http://www.renaessanceforum.dk/rf_5_2008.htm (last viewed: 4 July 2017).  Hans Svaning’s Refutatio calumniarum cuiusdam Joannis Magni Gothi from 1560 – 1561 was not a history of Denmark, although as an appendix the author added his history of King Hans (1483 – 1513), who ruled Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Svaning had in fact written a history of Denmark, but the Danish government decided against publishing it, probably in compliance with the paragraphs of the peace treaty between Denmark and Sweden of 1570 (at the end of the Seven Years’ War), which prohibited polemical writings between the countries. One of Svaning’s refutations of Magnus consisted in pointing out that it was the Danes who were the rightful heirs of the Goths, since Scania was Danish territory, Skovgaard-Petersen (1993), 114– 116. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 20 Gottskálk Jensson Rerum Danicarum historia. ¹⁶ Pontanus had been appointed to write the history of Denmark in 1618, the same year as the famous Leiden philologist Daniel Heinsius (d. 1655) was appointed by Gustavus Adolphus to write the history of Sweden. Pontanus had previously written on German tribes in the period of the Völkerwanderung, relying on classical and early medieval historians, a fact which no doubt contributed to his recruitment as historiographer to Christian IV. His Latin history cautiously attempted to exploit reliable classical and medieval sources to extend Danish history further back in time, and to provide it with the Biblical link that was missing in Saxo. The text therefore contains extensive discussions of the early migrations by Cimbri, Teutons, Goths, and Vandals, but for the history of Denmark proper Pontanus more or less follows Saxo and, where Saxo’s narrative leaves off in the late 1100s, Pontanus proceeds by following Huitfeldt. The foundations of Danish history laid by Saxo were therefore still in place even after Pontanus’ history became the standard narrative on the subject in international circles. This almost spellbound dependency on Saxo even went beyond Denmark. Johannes Magnus, in the introductory passage to his Historia de regibus borrows so heavy-handedly from Saxo’s introduction that the phraseology of the original remains visible in the text. As Skovgaard Petersen has shown, Magnus can be caught in the act of inventing his sources, the otherwise unknown ancient runic books of the priests of Uppsala, where he stitches together his patchwork of a text from an erroneous reading of the 1514 edition of Saxo, which has since been identified and corrected in modern editions. Saxo had claimed in his prologue to have used vernacular, i. e. runic, poetry sculpted on stones »as if it were« (ceu) ancient books (antiquitatis uolumina; cf. uoluminum loco in the same passage), but in the 1514 edition this had become a claim that Saxo had used runic inscriptions »or« (seu) ancient books – the difference amounts to a single letter.¹⁷ Moreover, Saxo had conceded that the source of »no small part« (haud parva pars) of his work was the »historical treasures« (thesauri historicarum rerum) of the Icelanders (Tylenses), while Magnus seems to know nothing of Icelandic sources, but claims to have based »no small part of his history« (non parua scribendæ historiæ materia) on poetry composed in the patrius sermo, which commemorates the deeds of his ancestors, which (like Saxo before him) he had found sculpted on the stones and rocks of his fatherland. Magnus then makes  The first volume of Pontanus’ history ended its narrative of events in 1448, and thus covered only a part of the missing period after Saxo. Volume 2 was not printed until a century after Pontanus’ death.  Karen Skovgaard-Petersen (2008), 6: »The seu-reading may well be taken to mean that Saxo indicates that he has used books written in the early Danish past. Johannes Magnus, I think, seized on this suggestion of an old Danish bookish culture, applying it (as he had done with the other sources mentioned by Saxo) to the older Gothic culture. And he then – a typical feature of his construction of the early past – elaborates on this vague suggestion by adding a number of precise circumstances: The Gothic priests in Uppsala were keepers of books written in Gothic with Gothic letters, and somehow – no details are given – Magnus was able to consult them.« Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 21 the statement mentioned that he has found »not a few very old volumes written in the Gothic language with Gothic letters [i. e. runes], relying on the authority of the priests of Uppsala« (non pauca antiquissima uolumina, quæ publica sacerdotum Upsalensium fide, & Gotico sermone ac charactere conscripta).¹⁸ In replying to Magnus, the antiquarians of Denmark early on rejected the ineffective rhetorical strategy of outbidding him in fabulous prehistoric claims.¹⁹ Such claims, they understood, would only contribute to undermining the historical authority of Saxo by altering his account of ancient history. As early as 1575 a Danish translation of Saxo was printed, the work of Anders Sørensen Vedel (1542– 1616), at the request of the king’s chancellor Christian Friis (1556 – 1616). Although the Danes were willing to compete with their neighbors in tracing their lineage back to the Creation and the Flood, an escalation of historical claims was considered a strategy inferior to professing disbelief in Swedish legendary lore and opening up the possibility, as did Pontanus, that reliable knowledge about the Danish past perhaps did not go further back in time than the late ancient and early medieval classical sources. Sources on early Scandinavian history were indeed scarce, until an unexpected new avenue of historical research opened up. This was the ancient poetry of Iceland, which at first promised to confirm the veracity of Saxo, although later, as it happened, the rich Icelandic material as a whole, as more of it came to be available, would begin to subvert the authority of Saxo’s early account of Danish history. 2 Ole Worm’s discovery of Ancient »Danish« poetry in Iceland In the decades before and after 1600, Icelandic medieval texts, both poetry and sagas, began to come to the attention of Danish historians and officials. At first this was through Danish translations of the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturluson (d. 1241), made by Norwegian humanists in Bergen, who could still read Old  Cf. Nilsson (2016), who gives a more appreciative account of Magnus’ runic sources.  The exception to this rule is the embarrassing Claus Christoffersen Lyschander (1558 – 1623/4), who was replaced by Pontanus as royal historiographer, but nevertheless allowed by Christian IV to continue his work. He was educated with David Chytræus (1530 – 1600) in Rostock and in Wittenberg. In 1619 he delivered to Chancellor Christian Friis (1581– 1639) a draft of a Synopsis historiæ Danicæ or Slectebog, which was published in 1622. In this vast study Lyschander provides Denmark with an early history comparable to the one Magnus had provided to Sweden. He begins the Danish royal succession with Adam, and employing supposedly local relationes he splices Saxo’s list of Danish kings together with biblical genealogies, elaborating the Danish royal genealogy along collateral branches in order to connect it with just about every royal and ducal family in Europe, hence the title Slectebog. The work was published in Danish and never had an influence beyond Denmark. Even in Denmark it never inspired a Gothicism like that which Magnus started in Sweden with his Historia de regibus. Among Danish historians Lyschander had a notorious reputation, Skovgaard-Petersen (2002), 118 – 120. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 22 Gottskálk Jensson Norse-Icelandic.²⁰ Subsequently, publications in Latin by the Icelandic humanist Arngrímur Jónsson (1568 – 1648), a priest working at Hólar, the northern episcopal see of Iceland, began to make available the contents of other Icelandic historical texts. Some of these were not printed until the twentieth century, and were originally intended simply as source material for Danish historians. Among them is the Rerum Danicarum Fragmenta, which retells the contents of the Skjöldunga saga (by then already fragmentary and now lost, apart from 6 leaves), and Knýtlinga saga (preserved in copies). These two Icelandic sagas from the early to mid thirteenth century aimed to present a complete history of the Danish kings. The much shorter earlier text, which largely diverges from Saxo’s account, begins from the first king, Skjöld (not Dan, as in Saxo), and gives an account of the pagan kings of Denmark from the earliest times. The latter more prolix saga compilation takes over from the first Christian king, Harald Bluetooth, and continues until the reign of Kanute VI and Archbishop Absalon at the end of the twelfth century, using Saxo and Heimskringla as sources, but adding much poetry and detail. As has been argued, in combination these two Icelandic histories of Denmark must be intended to imitate the Heimskringla, i. e. to achieve for Danish history what it does for Norwegian history. Indeed, both works are organized around the royal saint of each country, St. Olaf and St. Canute, whom they position at the center of the account. From 1594, Arngrímur’s Latin retelling was accessible to Danish historians, but made little impression on them, until in the 1630s, when it fired the interest of Chancellor Christian Friis (1581– 1639), who in his youth had sojourned in France and Italy, where he developed a keen sense of the uses of history in international relations. It was the Chancellor, who made sure that Pontanus’ Latin history of Denmark came out in 1631, and a year later he entrusted the Danish polymath Ole Worm (1588 – 1654), professor in Copenhagen, with the task of exploring whether historical poetry from the two great Icelandic saga compilations on Scandinavian history was still to be found in Iceland (neither the Danish version of Heimskringla nor Arngrímur Jónsson’s Latin rendering of Skjöldunga saga had the poetry). Worm wrote to Iceland and asked his friends there to provide him with historical poetry, but very little from these specific sagas came to light (most of the Heimskringla mss. were already in Denmark, and the others had disappeared again). Instead, the priest Magnús Ólafsson (1573 – 1636), who was one of the few Icelanders who could decipher the more difficult verse, sent Worm first one poem, and then  State Chancellor Arild Huitfeldt (1546 – 1609) himself was the first to arrange for the publication of a Danish version of the text, a free and abridged Danish translation of the Heimskringla by Mattis Störsön, printed in Copenhagen 1594 under the title of Norske Kongers Krønicke oc bedriftt indtil unge Kong Haagens tid som døde: Anno Domini 1263. Almost four decades later, Ole Worm edited another more complete translation in Copenhagen 1633, made by Peder Claussøn Friis: Snorre Sturlesøns Norske Kongers Chronica. The unfinished translation of Laurents Hanssøn from the middle of the sixteenth century was first printed much later by Gustav Storm in 1899. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 23 some more, accompanied with translations and commentary. From Worm’s correspondence, it is clear that receiving these poems caused a sensation in Denmark, for in them the Chancellor and the polymath recognized the remnants of Saxo’s ancient »Danish« poetry. In 1636 Worm could publish in Amsterdam a monograph on the origin of the runes and their use in ancient Danish literature, Runer [in runic typeface] seu Danica Literatura Antiquissima, vulgo Gothica dicta. In an addendum to the book, »Appendix Literarum Runicarum, in poësi usum uberius declarans« (›A supplement of runic literature, providing a fuller explanation of their use in poetry‹), two »runic« poems were published, »Krákumál« (›The Lay of Kraka‹) from Ragnars saga loðbrókar and »Höfuðlausn« (›Head Ransom‹) from Egils saga, both with Latin translations. The poet of »Höfuðlausn«, Egill Skallagrímsson, was according to his saga an Icelandic-born farmer and Viking raider, who died of old age shortly before Iceland was Christianized in 999. The occasion of the composition is as follows: after suffering shipwreck in Northumbria and falling into the hands of his arch-enemy, King Eiríkr Blóðöxi (›Bloodaxe‹) of Norway, the poet awaits his death in captivity; given a last chance to redeem his life he composes a panegyric in praise of his captor, a poem that might uphold his enemy’s renown for posterity. Yet this otherwise captivating story made litle impact when first published in Denmark in 1636. Entirely different was the reception of the poem »Krákumál«, composed according to tradition by the ninth-century viking Ragnar Loðbrók (›Shaggy-Breeches‹), because here the poet was reputedly one of the Danish kings of old. Worm in his short introduction to »Krákumál« (p. 196) says that he is printing this »ancient example« (antiquum paradigma) »so that you [the reader] will not think that our Poetry is the invention of modern men« (Ne nostram Poesin modernorum inventum esse existimes), and then he refers to Saxo’s discussion in book 9 (ch. 4) of a poem resembling »Krákumál«, where King Ragnar is the speaker, recounting »with a brave voice« an entire catalogue of his military achievements, while his heart is being slowly eaten into by an ormr (›snake‹) in the snakepit of King Ella of Northumbria. The poem is an honorific (self‐)laudation (drápa) of 29 stanzas, 10 lines each, complete with refrains. Saxo even cites a phrase that corresponds fairly accurately to a passage in the Icelandic poem. Although »Krákumál« is not among the poems which Saxo represents in full, translated into classicizing Latin verses, the recovery of the ancient »Danish« poem of »Krákumál« was as direct a proof as could be expected that the Danish historian Saxo (unlike the Swedish historian Johannes Magnus) had not invented his ancient runic sources. Danish antiquarians could now entertain a reasonable hope that some of the impressive ancient songs in the patrius sermo that Saxo had claimed to have translated / adapted into his classicizing Latin metres, and which were considered a major source of the legendary first part of his prosimetric history, could still be recovered in Iceland.²¹  Finnur Jónsson argues in his literary history that the poem cannot be older than the twelfth cenAuthenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 24 Gottskálk Jensson Important for this early reception of Icelandic poetry in Denmark was also the Catalogue of Poets (Skáldatal), which Worm had found in Peder Claussøn Friis’ (1545 – 1614) Danish translation of the Heimskringla and printed together with the whole in 1633. In this list Ragnar Loðbrók is featured among the first poets. Worm included the Catalogue of Poets in his Literatura Runica, where it was placed after the two Icelandic poems and provided with a Latin translation. The Catalogue, which as a text is closely related to the Heimskringla, arranges Icelandic skalds or poets according to the kings and dynasts for whom they composed their poetry.²² In his edition Worm reordered the first group of the original (which consisted of undifferentiated Danish and Swedish rulers) by removing the Swedes and placing them at the back in a separate category after the kings and earls of Norway. Worm also presented the Catalogue as a list representing Danorum celebriores Scaldri [sic] (›the famous skalds of the Danes‹). In accordance with Danish imperial ambitions, Worm sometimes used »Danes« and »Danish« as a term to refer to all Scandinavians and to the whole spectrum of medieval Scandinavian dialects respectively. In calling the Icelandic vernacular »Danish« Worm nevertheless agrees with the practice of some medieval Icelandic texts, such as the twelfth-century First Grammatical Treatise (transmitted in Codex Wormianus, AM 242 fol., c. 1350) and the prologue to the Heimskringla (which he had in Danish translation). However, the Icelandic humanist Arngrímur Jónsson in his seminal discussion of the importance of the Icelandic language, in a chapter of his general history of Iceland, Crymogæa (Hamburg 1609), a major source for Worm’s Literatura Runica, had made a point of not collapsing all contemporary Scandinavian idioms into one, but differentiating the unique case of Icelandic from the »corruption« suffered by the ancient Scandinavian tongue in Norway and Denmark.²³ tury, because h in an initial position, before l and r, was not dropped in earlier spelling, either in Iceland or Norway. Some of the poetic paraphrases argue for a similar dating, e. g. »ægis asne« (›the donkey of the sea‹ = ship) and »odda messa« (›the mass of the points‹ = battle) which cannot be older than the twelfth century, and may well be later. Word forms such as »rendr«, for the older »randir«, reveal the same late composition. As for the place of composition, a skillfully made poem like this was most likely made where the poetic tradition stood strong, i. e. in Iceland, or possibly Norway, but excluding Denmark, where no evidence supports the supposition that there was a strong vernacular skaldic tradition. The provenance of the manuscripts is Iceland, where the fascination with past history, and the art of making historical poetry and sagas in the vernacular was particularly developed. The occasional missing h before l and r could speak for a Norwegian poet, but although this particular phonetic development was not Icelandic, there are numerous examples of this spelling in Icelandic manuscripts, in imitation of Norwegian spelling, probably because it was considered more sophisticated and courtly, Jónsson (1923), 154.  Worm also knew the »Catalogue« from the famous Kringla manuscript, the primary witness to the Heimskringla text, which was destroyed in the fire of Copenhagen in 1728 (copies were made which survive). On the »Catalogue« and its significance in Heimskringla, see Nordal (2001), 120 – 130, Petersen (1944), 287.  On Arngrímur Jónsson’s sources and the details of his hypothesis about the singularly close relation of contemporary Icelandic with Gothic and runes, see Jensson (2008). Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 25 In his Literatura Runica Worm thus in a way indulged in a conception of the great antiquity of modern Danish, and the unification of Scandinavians under a Danish identity, while suppressing any mention of Sweden or Swedish in this context.²⁴ Stephen Hansen Stephanius (1599 – 1650) was Worm’s close collaborator in antiquarian studies. Stephanius had like Worm traveled widely in his youth and worked in Leiden with the illustrious classical scholars Gerhard Johann Vossius (1577– 1649) and Daniel Heinsius, who in 1618 was hired as historiographer of Sweden by King Gustavus Adolphus, as was mentioned already. From 1630 Stephanius was professor at Sorø Academy and was fully engaged in work on a new edition of Saxo’s Gesta Danorum, including a detailed commentary, which drew for the first time on Icelandic sources to explain Saxo’s Latin text. Among Stephanius’ Icelandic collaborators was the learned Brynjólfur Sveinsson (1605 – 1675), later bishop of Skálholt, who from 1632 to 1638 was conrector of Roskilde cathedral school. With his help Stephanius was able in his Saxo commentary of 1645 to print several pieces of runic poetry, among them a short fragment of the original skaldic verses of one of Saxo’s best loved classicizing Latin poems, »Bjarkamál hin fornu« (›The Ancient Lay of Bjarki‹). In book 2 (ch. 7) Saxo narrates the downfall of King Hrólfr Kraki at Lejre (Hleðra), the Danish royal seat in Zealand, through a stratagem – certain »evil contrivances« (diris commentis) invented by a woman no less – perpetrated by a Swedish vassal of the Danes, Hjartuar, and his men. Under the guise of bringing Swedish tax to the Danes they load their wagons with weapons instead of valuables and take care not to drink too much at the lavish feast offered them by King Hrólfr, the better to be able to attack and kill the Danes as they sleep after the drinking feast. Saxo’s poem, which has no title in Latin (incipit: Ocius evigilet), consists of 298 hexameters. It is cast as a dialogue between two of Hrólfr Kraki’s best warriors, Hjalti (Hilt) and Böðvar Bjarki (hence the title of the poem, »Bjarkamál«). It opens with Hjalti realizing that they are under attack, and attempting to rouse his fellow berserkers from their slumbers. The Icelandic fragment of »Bjarkamál«, taken from the opening of the lost original, runs as follows: »Vekka yðr at víni / né at vífs rúnum, / heldr vekk yðr at hörðum / Hildar leiki« (›I wake you not to wine / nor to women’s runes [i. e. converse], / but rather to the hard / game of Hild [i. e. battle]‹). The contents of the poem »Bjarkamál« are paraphrased in Hrólfs saga kraka, where they correspond well with Saxo’s fine Latin epyllion, if we reckon with the additions of classicizing elements in the Latin text.²⁵ The lost vernacular, which is nev-  That the Icelandic language and literature are »Danish« in the eyes of Worm no doubt reflects the contemporary scholarly rivalries between the Danes and the Swedes. For a discussion of Worm’s Icelandic sources and his Danish bias, see Wills (2004).  Saxo has apparently combined motifs from the original Icelandic poem with motifs from Book 2 of the Aeneid, where Aeneas tells Dido about the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans. The section of the Latin epic is roughly the same length as »Bjarkamál«, and has some of the same narrative situations: the employment of guileful trickery; a sort of Trojan horse, through the concealment of Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 26 Gottskálk Jensson ertheless referred to in several sagas, was apparently well known in the twelfth and thirteenth century. According to Fóstbrœðra saga (the thirteenth-century ›Saga of the Sworn Brothers‹) the national saint of Norway, King Ólafr Haraldsson, had his Icelandic bard Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld recite »Bjarkamál« to rouse the martial spirit of his outnumbered army on the morning of the Battle of Stiklastaðir (29 July 1030), where both men fell. Compared to the Icelandic fragment and the complete Icelandic paraphrase, Saxo embellished the original but did not otherwise transform its contents. In Saxo’s account the Swedes are at first successful in their stratagem but afterwards the Zealanders are quick to regroup, and slaughter Hjartvar and his men. In the context of the seventeenth century the poem would have been read as a historical allegory, revealing the treacherous character of the Swedes, while the Danes could now claim to have confirmed its authenticity, based on the Icelandic fragment. The discovery of such fragments of Danish poetry in Iceland played into the hands of the Danes in their feud with the Swedes. »Bjarkamál« seemed to provide unambiguous support for Saxo’s veracity, and »Krákumál«, an even greater sensation in Denmark, was understood as the authentic composition of one of the great Danish kings of old. »Ragnar Loðbrók’s Death Song«, as it came to be known, had greater influence on how the ancient »Danes« (later Vikings) were characterized by posterity than most other works of literature. As it was printed in Worm’s edition, this short text defined the notion of the fearless Danish warrior for centuries to come. The dying Ragnar recalls his lifelong proficiency in armed struggle and at the end invokes Odin’s Valkyries, whom he expects to welcome him to Valhalla, where he fancies that he will drink mead from the skulls of his dead enemies. The idea that there were skull cups in the »Palace of the Dead« appealed greatly to generations of scholars.²⁶ The discovery of »Krákumál« had repercussions even beyond the narrow circle of antiquarians who could read Worm’s Literatura Runica, which has never been translated into a modern language. In connection with its revision and republication in 1651 Worm enlisted Christen Berntsen Viborg (d. 1670), chaplain at Aarhus cathedral, to translate »Krákumál« into contemporary Danish based on the Latin translation. Viborg’s metrical rendering appeared in 1652 as Bildur Danskum, det er, den danske bilde eller Kaarde presenterende en gamle Kiempe Vise om danske Mands tapperhed oc mandelige gierninger, dictet aff Regner Lodbrog (›The Danish Blade, that is, the Danish Blade or Sword representing a giant-ballad [i. e. folk song] about the fortitude armed men / weapons; and when attacked the victims (Trojans, Danes) are fast asleep after drunken festivities. Friis-Jensen (1987), 64– 101.  It was only in 1814, in a commentary on the poems of Ossian, that the Copenhagen-based Icelandic scholar Finnur Magnússon (1781– 1847) was able to clarify that the underlying poetic kenning, »bjúgviðir hausa«, which in Worm’s runic study had been translated as concavi crateres craniorum (the hollow drinking cups of skulls) was more accurately understood as denoting common drinking horns, i. e. »curved trees of heads«. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 27 and manly deeds of the Danes, composed by Regner Lodbrog‹), a title which underscores its patrotic reception. 3 Torfæus’ Icelandic Hypothesis The runic poetry of Worm and the Saxo commentary of Stephanius inaugurated the new discipline of Antiquitates Danicae, which developed into a full-blown academic field as the seventeenth century progressed, especially during the reign of the first absolute monarch, King Frederick III (1648 – 1670), who was greatly interested in antiquarianism. The king and his counselors were no doubt willing to exploit the potentials of the antiquarian revolution for monarchical propaganda. Frederick III founded his own antiquarian collection, which was later to become the Royal Library, and he was the first to establish the position of royal antiquarian (antiquarius regius) in Denmark. The Dano-Swedish War, and the popularity of Frederick III with the clergy and the burghers after the Danish success in the siege of Copenhagen by the Swedes, enabled the king and his ministers to carry out a constitutional revolution in Denmark. The prerogatives of the oligarchic Council of the Realm, which in 1648 had elected the king while at the same time severely limiting his powers, were completely revoked and all political powers were transferred onto the person of the hereditary and absolute monarch of Denmark and Norway. In the Royal Law (Lex Regia) of 1665 he was decreed to be in the eyes of his subjects »the most perfect and supreme person on earth […] standing above all human laws and having no judge above his person, neither in spiritual nor temporal matters, except God alone«.²⁷ The man who first occupied the office of royal antiquarian for the government of King Frederick III of Denmark was Þórarinn Eiríksson (d. 1659), a former priest from Iceland, who had been deprived of his ministry for fathering a child out of wedlock. He was sent back to Iceland to deliver orders from the king to hand over manuscripts for preservation in the new royal library. Þórarinn Eiríksson translated a short text from one of these manuscripts into Latin for publication in Copenhagen in 1658 under the title Historia de Haldano cognomento Nigro, Rege Oplandorum in Norego (i. e. Hálfdanar þáttr svarta). The manuscript in question was the stately codex in folio, Flateyjarbók (Reykjavík, The Árni Magnússon Institute, GKS 1005 fol., 1387– 1394), which had been shipped to the king two years before by Brynjólfur Sveinsson, whom we have already met above. This former conrector of Roskilde, now appointed bishop of Skálholt, the southern diocese of Iceland, was considered the greatest antiquarian of Iceland. He had ambitions to publish Old Norse-Icelandic monuments,  The author of the law, Peder Schumacher Griffenfeld (1635 – 1699), was in France when Louis XIV assumed absolute power. Bizarrely the Royal Law, the first written law of its kind, was kept a state secret until 1670, when it was read to the Privy Council (Gehejmeraad) upon the succession of Frederick’s heir, Christian V. The whole text was not made public until 1709, Ekman, (1957). Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 28 Gottskálk Jensson but was refused permission by the king to set up a printing press at the episcopal see in Iceland, apparently because of the jealous protectionism of the other Icelandic bishop, Þorlákur Skúlason (1656 – 1628), who already had a printing press at his disposal, which however was used only for printing religious literature and books for the Latin trivial schools. Soon after receiving the refusal of permission to print antiquities in Iceland, Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson began to receive demands from the king to furnish the new Royal Library with manuscripts. Some of the greatest Icelandic codices of the Royal Library were sent to it by Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson, such as the abovementioned Flateyjarbók, which probably came to Copenhagen in 1656 together with Copenhagen, The Royal Library, NkS 1824b 4to (c. 1400), the main witness to »Krákumál«. Later, in 1662, the bishop sent the Codex Regius of the Elder Edda (Reykjavík, The Árni Magnússon Institute, GKS 2365 4to, c. 1270), the single source of most of Icelandic eddic poetry. When Þórarinn Eiríksson, who in addition to his lustfulness struggled with a drinking problem, was sadly found drowned in a defensive ditch in Copenhagen 1659, another young Icelander by the name of Þormóður Torfason or Torfæus (1636 – 1719) succeded him as antiquarius regius. This is the man who would later become famous as the most important historian of Norway after Snorri Sturluson. Torfæus was recommended to the king by the royal huntsmaster (jægermester), who had taken a liking to him, and he also enjoyed the goodwill and recommendation of the Norwegian-born Danish State Admiral and governor of Iceland, Henrik Bielke (1615 – 1683). Torfæus was 24 years old when he was taken into the royal palace to translate the Icelandic manuscripts in the Royal Collection into a more readable language for the court. He was educated in Skálholt, where he had the erudite Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson as one of his teachers, who confirmed the young man’s natural talent for literary studies by giving him excellent recommendations. But he was only 18 when he left Iceland for Denmark to study theology in Copenhagen, and his knowledge of the medieval language, especially the difficult diction of skaldic poetry, was therefore limited. Accordingly, later in life he burnt many of his early translations, on the recommendation and with the assistance of Árni Magnússon, who had become a close associate of his from the time they first met in Copenhagen in the autumn of 1688. Regardless of the fact that Torfæus’ translations later did not meet the high standard of Árni Magnússon, he was well liked at the palace, and King Frederick III showed great interest in his work, personally supervising and directing it. In addition to theology and Tycho Brahe’s (d. 1601) writings on astronomy, the king was in this important period, when he was bringing about constitutional changes in the DanishNorwegian state, most interested in Danish antiquities, and was passionate about his collection of art and rarities, especially books. The king visited Torfæus’ study in the palace regularly to discuss Danish antiquities, and on these occasions Torfæus discussed the progress of his work and expounded his ideas about early Danish history based on Icelandic sources. According to Árni Magnússon, who did not waste his praise on the undeserving, Torfæus had a felicitous sense of genealogy and chronology, as well as an energetic genius for plotting the contemporaneity of events related Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 29 in different sagas and weaving them into a proper historical narrative. Besides, he was a likable fellow, tall and vigorous, pleasant in appearance and manners, and, although rather over-confident, very industrious, loyal, and helpful to his friends. Thus he once used his considerable influence at court to help his father out of difficult legal problems. This royal goodwill towards him was even inherited by King Christian V, the first anointed hereditary monarch of Denmark. Torfæus had not long been engaged in translating the texts preserved in the manuscript Flateyjarbók, the abovementioned great compilation of sagas and poetry centered around Norwegian history, when he noticed, in the right hand column on folio 4r, two Icelandic genealogies involving Danish kings which assigned another name than had Saxo to the first king of Denmark. The king’s gracious treatment of Torfæus had given him access to the rest of court. In an idle moment, when discussing Danish antiquities with one of the king’s ministers, Torfæus came to state liberally that the ancient histories of the Icelanders demonstrated quite reliably that the first king of Denmark was not called Dan, as Saxo had maintained, but Skjold. The minister brought the matter up in conversations with the king, and at first the statement was considered heretical, or rather it was viewed as absurd to use any other basis for the succession of rulers in Denmark than Saxo, whose history was accepted as canonical. Such matters were by no means idle concerns in the seventeenth century, since the cornerstone of hereditary monarchy was the royal succession, which was fundamental to the king’s claim to have inherited his right to rule. At stake was the whole absolutist ideology (if not theology) and the new constitution under construction. However, Torfæus could cite the Danish historian Sven Aggesen, an older contemporary of Saxo, who agreed with the Icelandic historians that Skjold was the first king of Denmark. Sven Aggesen also knew the name of the earliest dynasty of Denmark as the Skjoldungs, and had this knowledge from Icelandic poetry, he says, while Saxo himself claimed in his preface to have gained much of his historical knowledge from the Icelanders. Given such apparently strong evidence, some doubts began to arise about Saxo’s account of the origin of the Danish monarchy.²⁸ It has further been argued that Torfæus claimed that his evidence from the Icelandic sources showed that Denmark had been a hereditary kingdom from the earliest times, a  The succession of Danish kings according to Icelandic sources had actually been presented to Danish scholars seventy years earlier by the Icelandic humanist Arngrímur Jónsson in his Rerum Danicarum Fragmenta (1594), a work that was first printed in the twentieth century, but was found in 1662 in manuscript copy at the University Library, as may be seen from the library catalogue of that year. As mentioned above, Arngrímur Jónsson’s survey of the early history of Denmark according to Icelandic sources was mainly based on the now lost Skjöldunga saga, incomplete already at that point in history, as well as the Knýtlinga saga, which survives in copies. Although known to such early historiographers as Niels Krag and Arild Huitfeldt, it had had very little impact on the canonical account of Danish history by the time of Torfæus. Arngrímur’s manuscript was destroyed in the fire of 1728, and would have been lost entirely, had it not been for Thomas Bartholin Jr. (1659 – 1690), whose copies are the basis of the modern edition, Jakob Benediktsson (ed.), Arngrimi Jonae opera latine conscripta, 181– 185. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 30 Gottskálk Jensson hypothesis which if proven would obviously have added grist to the absolutist mill.²⁹ The outcome was that King Frederick III commissioned Torfæus to write in Latin a treatise on the royal succession of Denmark according to the Icelandic sources. To begin with, all went well for Torfæus. He was shipped off to Iceland to consult Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson on the problem of the diverging royal successions of Denmark and to collect material for his research by buying or otherwise acquiring more Icelandic literary monuments for the royal collection. He had an intimate knowledge of Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson’s book holdings, and, equipped with letters to Icelandic state officials and authorized to act as a royal representative, he was able to hoard great treasures of Icelandic literature for the king. He arrived in Iceland on the same warship that brought the State Admiral Henrik Bielke to Iceland to demand homage from the Icelanders in acknowledgement of the hereditary rights of the royal house of Denmark to rule Iceland. The meeting in Iceland was held on 28 July 1662 in Kópavogur, and the point was to have the Icelanders accept any heir of the royal family as their king, without prior election by the Council of the Realm, which had until then been required. Icelandic annals remember this event for the great festivities that followed, including fireworks and cannon shots. Absolutism required more effort than elective monarchy, both in constructing ideological justification and in shrouding the arrogation of political power in spectacle and theater. Back in Denmark, via Glückstad, Hamburg, and Lübeck, Torfæus finished his work and presented a clean copy to King Fredrick III: Series dynastarum et regum Daniæ a Skioldo Othini filio ad Svenonem Estridium juxta monumentorum Islandicorum harmoniam deducta & concinnata. Opera et studio Thormodi Thorfæi Islandi. Hafniæ. Anno MDCLXIV (›The succession of dynasts and kings of Denmark from Skjold the son of Odin to Svend Estridsen, drawn from and arranged in accordance with Icelandic historical works. The work and research of the Icelander Þormóður Torfæus. Copenhagen 1664‹). With energy and enthusiasm Torfæus argues that the Icelandic tradition, like the Icelandic language, is of great antiquity and therefore highly reliable, while the tradition of Adam of Bremen and Saxo Grammaticus is more recent and shaky. Against the royal succession of Saxo, starting with Dan, he sets that of the Icelandic sources, beginning with Skjold, and then discusses the succession, generation by generation, all the way to the historical Svend Estridsen (c. 1019 – 1076), presenting his reflections on the diverging versions of the two sets of sources, e. g. on King Gorm and Queen Tyre.³⁰ The manuscript copy of the Series made specially for the king (Reykjavík, The Árni Magnússon Institute, GkS 2449 4to) was bound in fine leather with a silk lace, gilded, and adorned with the insignia of King Frederick  Hermannsson (1954), 82; Jørgensen (1931), 143 – 144.  Jørgensen (1931), 143. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 31 III, who received it graciously, according to Árni Magnússon’s uncharacteristically fulsome biography of Torfæus.³¹ This was at the beginning of 1664, but then something went wrong for Torfæus and caused him to fall from grace with the king and be expelled from court. With a royal letter, dated 10 July 1664, he was appointed a provincial accounts checker (cammerarius) in the district of Stafanger, and shipped off to Norway. None of Torfæus’ biographers can explain exactly what happened. The most common account is that he was involved in a tavern brawl and, to defend a fellow Icelander, he accidentally killed a Dane, while there are others who blame his fall primarily on the slander of envious elements at court. Both versions may be true, or their telling could be colored by the better documented disaster that befell him in 1671, when he certainly did kill a Danish innkeeper on the island of Samsø, running him through with the blade of his sword, for which he was summarily sentenced to death. After two years, the job as tax collector had become tiresome to Torfæus, which led him to seek rehabilitation from Frederick III who, being well disposed towards him after their many friendly conversations about Danish antiquities at the palace, in July 1667 appointed him antiquarius regius to continue his translations of Icelandic sources. He was also to write a historical study on the constitution of Denmark, most likely to argue for the hereditary nature of the ancient monarchy of Denmark according to Icelandic sources. Torfæus, however, who resided far away from Copenhagen and the manuscripts, did not achieve anything in this appointment, and when King Frederick III died in February 1670 the arrangement was automatically annulled and Torfæus was out of a job.³² A strong reason for his reinstatement as antiquarius in 1667 was no doubt the establishment of the Antiquities College in Stockholm in 1666, and the first publications in Sweden of Icelandic sagas, beginning with Gautreks saga and Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar (Gothrici & Rolfi Westrogothiæ Regum Historia Lingua antiqua Gothica conscripta, Uppsala 1664), which were the work of Olof Verelius (1618 – 1682) and his Icelandic assistant Jón Rugman (1636 – 1679). Torfæus had in the meantime married a wealthy widow in Norway, a woman whose second marriage had been to the maternal granduncle of the Norwegianborn historian and professor of Copenhagen University, Ludvig Holberg (1684 – 1754). When he became unemployed, Torfæus sailed to Iceland to collect his inheritance from his affluent father and brother, who had recently died. On his way back to Norway, via Amsterdam, he suffered shipwreck off Skagen, the northernmost tip of Jutland. Crew and passengers were saved, but upon continuing across to Zealand, another ship he sailed on was forced to seek shelter from bad weather on the island of Samsø. There Torfæus spent the night at an inn, where a drunken Icelander threat-  Jónsson (ed.), Árni Magnússons Levned og Skrifter, vol. 2, 131– 132. Hermannsson (1954), 82 and 93, argues that the biography was written as supportive documentation to Torfæus’ application to get his salary paid by the Royal Treasurer.  Eiríksson, Thormod Torfesens Levnetsbeskrivelse (2009), 70 – 75. The biography was first published in the journal Minerva in installments from November 1786 to January 1788. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 32 Gottskálk Jensson ened to kill him and his companion. He then sought protection from the innkeeper, who instead of helping him reputedly joined the drunken Icelander in harassing him. Next Torfæus fled to the innkeeper’s bedchamber, where his wife was sleeping, and locked himself in. But the Icelander and the innkeeper broke into the bedchamber, and when the latter attacked Torfæus, he was run through by Torfæus’ sword. At least this was the account of events given by Torfæus, who was nevertheless sentenced for murder in February 1672. However, the case was appealed to the High Court and to King Christian V, who accepted the argument of the defence that Torfæus had acted in self-defence, and altered his sentence to a moderate fine, including a public penance in a church. After sitting in jail on Samsø for a year, Torfæus on 3 October 1673 performed the penance in the church of the Christianshavn quarter of Copenhagen. As the story goes, he later requested an audience with the king, who is purported to have said to him: »You are quite murderous«; to which the other replied: »I’ve always preferred killing others to being killed by them.«³³ For a whole decade Torfæus now lived with his wife in Norway as a simple farmer.³⁴ The rampageous and destructive lifestyle of Torfæus and his predecessor, Þórarinn Eiríksson, at court may well have undermined for a while the positive reception of Icelandic medieval literature in Denmark, but another factor was certainly the unwillingness of Danish historians even to entertain the idea that the history of the realm could be based on anything other than Saxo’s Gesta Danorum. For almost forty years Torfæus’ revolutionary hypothesis concerning a new list of Danish kings and regents, based on Icelandic sources, circulated in multiple manuscript copies. It was even translated into Danish by Frands Mikkelsen Vogelius (1640 – 1702).³⁵ It was finally printed under a modified title in Copenhagen in 1702, by then heavily edited by Árni Magnússon, and became known as the »Icelandic hypothesis« (hypothesis Islandica). Although Torfæus had concluded his preface to the king by reassuring him that his intention in the pamphlet was not to render suspect the authority of the most celebrated of historians (hoc qualecunque Opusculum, quod non eo fine conscripsi, ut celeberrimorum scriptorum fidem suspectam redderem), the difficult fate that awaited the work may be taken as a reliable indication of how bitter a pill its message must have been for many Danish officials and patriots. Even as a printed book, commissioned by King Frederick III and printed under the auspices of his grandson Fredrick IV, as the title page declared in oversized red typeface, its message took almost thirty years to win general approval among Danish historians. The acceptance in Denmark of the Icelandic hypothesis was first possible after the death  Hermannsson (1954), 76.  At least, this is how Torfæus himself liked to refer to these years in his life, when he lived without an office of any kind. In 1681, however, he defended the last woman in Norway accused of witchcraft, and managed to get her acquitted of all charges, Mauland (1911), 137– 145.  It was read in Danish by Peder Dyrskøt (1630 – 1707), a literate Danish farmer, whose great outrage it provoked. Klitgaard (1979 – 1984), http://denstoredanske.dk/index.php?sideId=288998 (last viewed: 28 June 2017). Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 33 of the militant King Charles XII of Sweden in 1718, and the Treaties of Stockholm 1719 – 1721, which marked the conclusion of the Great Northern War. In 1731 one of the main authorities on historical matters in Denmark, Professor Ludvig Holberg, successor to Árni Magnússon at the University of Copenhagen, gave a public lecture at the University of Copenhagen, where he stated his approval of Torfæus’ thesis with modifications: he follows Torfæus until King Sigvard Ring, and thereafter Saxo to Gorm the Old.³⁶ This meant rejecting about half of the fifty kings that Saxo narrates in the first nine books of the Gesta Danorum. In the late eighteenth century the Icelandic hypothesis became the prevalent account of early Danish history, a state of affairs that lasted until the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the weaknesses of the Icelandic sagas as sources of early history were exposed with the rise of modern source criticism.³⁷ But by that time Saxo’s early books had long been written off as fabrication and medieval fables, though his narrative of the eleventh and twelfth centuries was still believed. 4 Resen’s Edda Islandorum While the discovery and publication of the poems »Krákumál« and »Bjarkamál« by Ole Worm and Stephen Hansen Stephanius in the first half of the seventeenth century had seemed to give unqualified support to the historicity of Gesta Danorum, further publications of Icelandic poetry by Peder Hansen Resen (1625 – 1688) and by Thomas Bartholin Jr. (1659 – 1690) now began to debase the metal of Saxo’s currency as an independent source of history. Unlike the medieval historian, the new editions and treatises both cited the original texts and made them attractively intelligible to learned men by printing beside them fairly accurate parallel translations in Latin, translations which were in turn used as the basis of new translations into modern languages. In contrast, Saxo’s heavily stylized, almost baroque mediation of Icelandic poems, which had appealed to the Renaissance, now seemed only to accentuate the derivative nature of his text. Peder Hansen Resen (1625 – 1688) inherited from Stephanius an almost readymade edition of Snorri’s Edda in manuscript, including translations into Danish  Holberg, Solutio Problematis de hypothesibus Historiæ Danicæ, in Collatione honorum Baccalaureatus publice recitata in Dom: Consistor: 1731, 430: »Relicto igitur Saxone, sequor hypothesin Islandicam à Regni conditore Skioldo usque ad Siguardum Ring, et rursus relicta hypothesi Islandica, redeo ad Saxonem à Siguardo Ring usque ad tempora Gormonis Truculenti, ubi terminatur schisma historicum.«  According to Hermannsson (1954), 85, the final blow to Torfæus’ hypothesis was inflicted by Edwin Jessen (a descendant of Jón Eiríksson) in his 1862 University of Copenhagen doctoral dissertation, Undersøgelser til nordisk Oldhistorie. Whether it was Jessen who dealt Torfæus’ hypothesis the decisive blow may be questioned, but it is certain that the early history of Denmark, according to Saxo and the Icelandic sources, came to be seen as unprovable and unscientific in academic circles around this time. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 34 Gottskálk Jensson and Latin mostly by the Reverend Magnús Ólafsson of Laufás (1573 – 1636) but also partly by Þormóður Torfæus. Basically, Resen only needed to write his longwinded and extremely erudite ›Introduction‹ to the Edda Islandorum (Copenhagen 1665).³⁸ Bartholin, for his part, with the aid of his expert Icelandic amanuensis Árni Magnússon was able to turn his Antiquitates Danicae de causis contemptæ a Danis adhuc gentilibus mortis, in three books (more on this work below), into a veritable storehouse of authentic samples of Icelandic poetry and sagas, which offered everything an antiquarian could dream of in terms of prototypes from antiquity to strengthen the moral stamina of an exhausted cerebral class living in a condition of absolutist servility. Building on the theme of the »Krákumál«, i. e. ›The Death Song of Ragnar Loðbrók‹, the disease-ridden young author (Bartholin died of turberculosis a year after the publication, 31 years old), struck a chord in northern European hearts with his widely read and highly praised study of death-worship, a self-help book for a war-torn Scandinavia, which had been at swords’ points for well over a century and a half. Resen had, like Stephanius, sojourned in Leiden, where he studied philology and law. He was a scholar with international connections. When he left the Netherlands he traveled to France and Spain, and only stopped short of crossing over from Gibraltar to Africa out of fear of being kidnapped by the »Turks«. He continued back along the Mediterranean coast, reaching Padua, where he studied law for a year. He even at one time represented Padua before the Doge and Council of Venice. His educational touring of Europe is reminiscent of Worm’s before him. Resen then traveled to Rome, Naples, and Florence, and intended to visit the Orient, when after six years abroad he was called back by his father’s death. With this European background Resen would color his antiquarianism and transform the Icelandic literature he published into something much more universal than had been envisioned by Worm and Stephanius. Stephanius’ fascination with Icelandic poetry had prompted him, a classical philologist, to attempt to learn the poetic language. In his letters to Worm, Stephanius complained about the utter lack of tools to do this, and to ameliorate the situation Worm urged his Icelandic friends to produce wordlists that would focus on the difficult poetic diction. The Reverend Magnús Ólafsson began the work, which after his death was finished by his successor at the Laufás church-farm in northern Iceland. The results were published by Worm in Copenhagen in 1650 as Specimen Lexici Runici Obscuriorum quarundam vocum, quæ in priscis occurrunt Historiis & Poëtis Danicis, enodationem exhibens (›A sample of a runic dictionary with some obscure words, found in Danish histories and poems, including a demonstration of their de-  It is worth noting that the same year as the Old Norse-Icelandic mythology was rediscovered by Resen, the Dutchman Franciscus Junius issued an edition of the Codex Argenteus, the editio princeps in Dordrecht 1665, containing Wulfila’s Gothic Gospel translation. For the first time the learned world could get acquainted with true Gothic, in Junius’ newly made Gothic fonts, and discover that this was something other than the Icelandic texts Danish and Swedish antiquarians had been mistaking for Gothic. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 35 cipherment‹).³⁹ Only a year later, Worm had the first Icelandic grammar printed, Recentissima antiquissimæ Linguæ Septentrionalis incunabula (›A brand-new cradle of the very ancient language of the north‹). It was the work of Runólfur Jónsson (1620 – 1654), a recent Icelandic graduate of the University of Copenhagen, who about this time was the appointed rector of the Latin trivial school of Kristianstad (now in Sweden). These schoolbooks for studying Icelandic that Worm took care to publish were basically the only aids available for the purpose until the early 1800s. The initial plans to publish Snorri’s Edda, an early thirteenth-century source book and manual for understanding the difficult poetic language of the skalds, should be seen in the context of these attempts to make tools available for the study of the diction of Icelandic poetry. Originally it was Arngrímur Jónsson who in 1608 – 1609 had requested from Magnús Ólafsson that he produce a modern and rationalized edition of Snorri’s Edda, for the purpose of facilitating its practical use for antiquarians, but also for the use of contemporary Icelandic poets. As a basis for this new and improved Edda, which came to be known as Laufás-Edda after the church-farm where Magnús Ólafsson was minister, they used the Codex Wormianus (Copenhagen, the Arnamagnæan Institute, AM 242 folio, ca. 1350), a manuscript belonging to Arngrímur Jónsson himself.⁴⁰ Magnús Ólafsson’s redaction consisted primarily in providing the medieval text with new headings, dubbing the works apologi or dæmisögur (in Resen’s printed Latin and Danish translations they are referred to as mythologiæ and fabler respectively), as well as giving them numbers. In addition, the rather chaotically arranged kennings (poetic paraphrases) and heiti (alternative names) in the second section of the original, »Skáldskaparmál«, were now reordered by him and alphabetized.⁴¹ In Resen’s printed text, each dæmisaga is followed first by its Danish translation and then by its Latin translation. It was likely not Stephanius’ intention to publish Snorri’s Edda critically, as an »ancient« text, but rather to treat it as a still viable handbook and tool for studying Icelandic poetic diction. But this initially practical and rationalizing aim of the Laufás-Edda, which suited Stephanius’ needs, underwent alterations in the hands of Resen, whose erudition and cultural ambitions were different.⁴²  The lemmata in this unique dictionary were impressively, but not very practically, set in runes, though they were transcribed into Latin letters immediately after the runic display, see Magnús Ólafsson of Laufás. Specimen Lexici Runici and Glossarium Priscæ Linguæ Danicæ.  In 1628 Arngrímur Jónsson lent the ms. to Worm, who interpreted this as a permanent loan and never returned it, hence its name.  Two versions of Snorra Edda from the 17th century, vol. 1, 17, 26.  Magnús Ólafsson‘s Edda, because of its more accessible arrangement, had a lively transmission in Icelandic manuscript copies, and it is today extant in many more exemplars than any medieval redaction. Stephanius’ preference for the Laufás-Edda over the medieval redactions is evident from the fact that the latter were also available to him when he was preparing his edition: Uppsala Edda or Codex Upsaliensis (Uppsala, Uppsala University Library, DG 11 4to, beg. of fourteenth Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 36 Gottskálk Jensson As Resen himself explains, Stephanius’ manuscript was lent to him by the royal historiographer Vitus Bering. When Stephanius died in 1650 his entire library had been sold to Sweden, but for some reason this particular manuscript had been deposited at the University Library. This was then the same as the Royal Library, because at the time the king was considered the owner of the University Library, which accordingly was at the time generally known as the Bibliotheca Regia. Although Frederick III started a new royal collection about 1661, the buildings to house it were not completed until 1673.⁴³ Þormóður Torfæus, who at this moment in history was experiencing his first rise and fall in favor at the Danish court, was also involved in preparing the manuscript for publication. He translated dæmisögur 68 – 78 into Latin, probably worked on the notes, and according to Árni Magnússon’s catalogue of Torfæus’ manuscripts (Copenhagen, the Arnamagnæan Institute, AM 435 b 4to, 1712) he also had a hand in the Danish translation. However, Torfæus’ role in the project is somewhat eclipsed in the final printed text, perhaps because at the time of printing he had recently fallen out of favor at court. Resen’s original contribution to Edda Islandorum lies, as mentioned, mainly in the introduction, which is divided into two parts, if we exclude the 12-page addenda at the end, containing a mixed bag of additional material acquired after the sheets with the introduction had been printed. The first part is an erudite and very long dedication, of 54 pages, addressed to the bibliophile absolute monarch Frederick III. It is best characterized as an essay on comparative literature, a discussion of ancient wisdom literature, and the forms in which ethics and moral teaching appear in literature, packed with references and citations to mostly Greek and Latin texts, but also to Hebrew, Arabic, and Egyptian sources, although only rarely to Old Norse-Icelandic material. The point of the demonstration is to argue that, ever since the ancient classics, wisdom literature has served to teach ethical principles by imbuing humanity with figures of thought, mental concepts, and illustrative parables. This contextualization of Icelandic poetry is partly governed by the circumstance that Resen was a professor of ethics at the University of Copenhagen, but partly also cent.) arrived in Denmark soon after the Codex Wormianus, together with the later Icelandic bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson, conrector of the cathedral school of Roskilde (1632– 1638). When he left Denmark in 1639, he gave the manuscript to his friend Stephanius, who was professor at the nearby Sorø Akademi. Despite this, Stephanius was in 1642 nonetheless engaged in preparing an edition of Laufás-Edda. The ms. of Snorri’s Edda that is today considered the most important from a text-critical point of view, Codex Regius (Reykjavík, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, GKS 2367 4to, beginning of the fourteenth cent.), came to Denmark with Torfæus in 1662, when Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson gave it as a present to Frederick III. It has been argued that Worm, who was otherwise not the best of critical editors, could see the limitations of the Laufás-Edda as the basis of an edition, compared to his own Codex Wormianus, with which he collated it, because he advised Stephanius in a letter dated 18 May 1642, »to publish the second book [i. e. Skáldskaparmál] on the basis of his own exemplar«, Worm, Breve fra og til Ole Worm, 354– 355.  See Two versions of Snorra Edda from the 17th century, vol. 2, 71, Birket-Smith (1882) and Kålund (1900), vii – viii, xxxvi. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 37 by the fact that for learned men in the seventeenth century there could be no other route into the strange new world of Old Norse-Icelandic mythology than through Greco-Roman or Oriental antiquity. By chosing to take Snorri’s mythologiæ seriously as ethics and religion worthy of comparison with the ancient classics and Scripture, Resen can be said to have founded the discipline of Old Norse mythology, which would have an explosive development in the following centuries, even before classical mythology became a recognized area of study. To the Renaissance humanists, in contrast, myths had been seen either as pagan fables or philosophical allegories. Resen’s introductory essay was also intended to provide an ethical background for the publication of two pagan poems from Iceland, »Hávamál« and »Völuspá«, printed there for the first time. The proper introduction to these poems, however, comes in the somewhat shorter second part of the introduction, entitled Præfatio ad lectorem. Here Resen almost comically sets out by assuring the reader that he has no liking for verbose prefaces (non quia velim verbosas facere præfationes), but because the knowledge of names precedes the knowledge of things, he says, he must begin with the etymology of the word »edda«. Presenting all the hypotheses, starting with Magnús Ólafsson’s derivation from the Latin verb ›edo, edere‹, which is now accepted by many scholars, he concludes by opting for all of them combined as an explanation of the meaning of the word here: »Edda« is the name of a particular book, which relates the poetic mythology of the Northern people in the Icelandic language, the book being given this name because it is, as it were, the womb or source of Poetry, i. e. a kind of first mother or grandmother of poetic names and paraphrases (Nomen libri peculiaris, qui Mythologiam Arctoæ Gentis vel Nationis Poëticam in linguâ Islandicâ tradit: ita dicta quasi matrix & origo Poëseos, atque prima Mater vel Atavia verborum copiæ & paraphrasium, g4v). Thus Resen does not select among the possibilities but includes all that are known to him, which is quite characteristic of his general method. He proceeds to explain that there are two Eddas, an older and genuine Edda in poetic form by Sæmundur Sigfússon, and a younger or vulgar Edda by Snorri Sturluson. In giving an account of the Elder Edda, he discusses »Völuspá« and »Hávamál«, which are indeed cited repeatedly in Snorri’s Edda. Resen published these poems under the titles Philosophia antiquissima Norvego-Danica and Ethica Odini respectively. While the Laufás-Edda in its entirety was dedicated to King Frederick III, each of the poems was, rather avuncularly, dedicated to one of the king’s two legitimate sons, the princes Christian and George. The poems are translated into Latin but, unlike the main text of Snorri’s Edda, not into Danish. The Icelandic poet Stefán Ólafsson (1619 – 1688) translated »Völuspá« and an unknown Icelander »Hávamál«.⁴⁴  Faulkes, Two versions of Snorra Edda from the 17th century, vol. 2, 82, does not exclude the possibility (»it is conceivable«) that the Latin translation of »Hávamál«, apart from the section »Runa Capitule«, was made by Guðmundur Andrésson (1614– 1654), who is the author of the notes. »Völuspá« was again published in 1673, on the basis of a manuscript from Resen’s collection, with Guðmundur Andrésson’s Latin translation and notes. In 1683 Resen published another work by GuðmunAuthenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 38 Gottskálk Jensson According to Árni Magnússon, Torfæus, too, worked on the edition of »Völuspá«, when he was employed by the king to translate Icelandic texts.⁴⁵ Resen reads »Völuspá« as the utterances of the well-known Erythraean Sibyl of classical antiquity, but »Hávamál« he understands as an example of ancient gnomic poetry, which is the subject of the longish first part of his introduction, dedicated to the king. In accord with the title, »Hávamál« (›Sayings of Hár‹, an alternative name of Odin), the poem was thought to have been composed by a magician called Odin, who was not the original Odin. The poem has a final section on runes, Runa Capitule, as it was called, which made it especially interesting in the seventeenth century. Here the speaker »Odin« recounts how he attained wisdom and discovered the runes; he also lists eighteen magical verses and explains their effects. This gives Resen an occasion to explain the arrival of Odin and the Asians in the North. According to Resen, the original Trojan Odin was beset by a desire to leave Turkey. Traveling with a great army of men and women, and taking along great treasures, he first arrived in Saxony, which he subjugated to a large extent and left to his sons Vegder, Beldeg, and Hengir. Then he moved north to Cimbria (i. e. Denmark), which it pleased him to subjugate entirely. He made his son, named Skjold, the ruler of this Cimbria / Denmark, and dur Andrésson, a new attempt at producing an Icelandic-Latin dictionary, entitled Lexicon Islandicum. This publication was, like the Edda, based on a manuscript Resen had acquired from others, probably Guðmundur Andrésson’s own manuscript, now lost, and not the still extant copy Resen bought at an auction in 1665, Andrésson, Deilurit, xx – xxi, Andrésson, Lexicon Islandicum, xi–xix. Guðmundur Andrésson experienced the ups and downs of fortune like many of the Icelanders who became amanuenses to Danish and Swedish antiquarians in the seventeenth century, and his biography held such fascination that it was printed at the front of both the second, revised »Völuspá« edition (1673) and the Lexicon Islandicum (1683). In 1649 this talented graduate from the trivial school of Hólar in northern Iceland had been released from the notorious prison of the Blue Tower in Copenhagen, where he was held as a political prisoner because of a dissertation he wrote, Discursus Oppositionis, criticizing the so-called »Storedom« (›Ultimate Judgment‹) in Iceland, i. e. an extremely harsh set of laws specifying punishments for incestuous relationships and begetting children out of wedlock. While a prisoner in the Blue Tower, a building adjacent to the royal palace, Guðmundur Andrésson was apparently forgotten by the authorities, until he accidentally fell from the tower (he was reputedly inspecting the stars from one of the windows) and landed on the balcony of the royal nursery, into which he wandered confused, filthy, and dressed in rags. The mishap gave his friends in Copenhagen an opportunity to appeal to Ole Worm to intercede in his case, and Worm was able to procure his pardon from King Frederick III. From then on Guðmundur Andrésson lived in Copenhagen as Worm’s assistant – he was freed from prison on the condition that he refrain from further criticizing the authorities and not return to Iceland – and for five years he worked for Worm as an antiquarian, until he died in the epidemic of 1654, as did in fact Worm himself and Runólfur Jónsson. Guðmundur Andrésson’s papers ended up with Resen, who donated them with his large collection (including several important Icelandic manuscripts) to the University Library, where it was destroyed in the fire of Copenhagen 1728. A large catalogue was printed in 1685, a 385-page monument to this great loss: Resen, Petri Johannis Resenii Bibliotheca Regiæ Academiæ Hafniensi donata, Wad/Knudsen (1940), 402, Two versions of Snorra Edda from the 17th century, vol. 2, 10.  Jónsson (ed.), Árni Magnússons Levned og Skrifter, vol. 2, 94; a modern Icelandic translation in Magnússon, Ævi Sæmundar fóða (1690), 148. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 39 from him the family of the Skjoldungs is descended, the kings of Denmark (Tunc Odinus iter Septentrionem versus direxit & venit in Cimbriam, sibique totam illam terram pro lubitu subjugavit. Huic præfecit filium Skiold dictum; unde orta est familia Skioldungorum, qui sunt Regum Danorum). From here, then, Odin migrated to Sweden, which is the setting of the »Gylfaginning« section of Snorri’s Edda. Resen goes on to discuss Saxo Grammaticus’ account of Odin, explaining how Saxo’s Odin is not the same as the Odin he has just told the reader about, but another one, the so-called Middle Odin, and on this account he refers to the explications of Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson of Skálholt. Much of this is taken directly from Stephanius’ Notæ Uberiores in historiam Danicam Saxonis Grammatici (Sorø 1645), and Arngrímur Jónsson’s printed writings and Worm’s runic publications are also mined by Resen for his introductory essay. For Resen there appears to be no conflict or contradiction between Saxo’s account and the Icelandic narrative he relates about Odin’s arrival in the North. Indeed, he seems to shun any reference to the polemics of Torfæus’ hypothesis Islandica. Even though he presents the basic tenets of Torfæus’ hypothesis, i. e. Skjold not Dan was the first king of Denmark, Resen has chosen to suppress any mention of Saxo’s first Danish king, the eponymous Dan, so that the contradiction between the Icelandic source and Saxo never comes up. Resen’s manner of presenting this controversial material seems curiously lacking in critical or analytical consistency. Rather, he comes across as an antiquarian omnivore, for whom everything can be harmonized with everything else, either through polyglot etymologizing or the excavation of exotic parallels from obscure ancient sources. With the communicative fluency of early absolutism, Resen drops Worm’s and Stephanius’ cumbersome attempts to represent old texts with runic typefaces, and uses common Fraktur (blackletter) to display Icelandic. There is an exuberance of learning in Resen’s introduction, and its amassing of data becomes almost decorative, as if there was an underlying indifference to the facts of the matter and the point was to indulge the reader in a parade of erudite associations for the sake of showing off the academic capital of the monarchy, generously made available to the subjects by the well-schooled minions of a superhuman, absolute ruler. In 1666, a year after the publication of Edda Islandorum, the Danish historian Jens Dolmer (c. 1611– 1670), together with a protegé of Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson of Skálholt by the name of Oddur Eyjólfsson (1632– 1702), later rector of the cathedral school of Skálholt, published the thirteenth-century Norwegian codex of court rules, Hird-Skraa (Hirðskrá), accompanied by an almost verbatim Danish translation.⁴⁶ The  The point of the word-for-word translation seems to have been to emphasize the closeness of the Danish and Norwegian languages, even to deny, as it were, the status of Old Norse as an independent language, different from Danish, suggesting instead that it was just an older stage of the same language, thus to strengthen the claim of the Danish monarch to rule Norway on the grounds that these peoples were essentially the same (i. e. as evidenced by the language). This seems in any case to have been the understanding of the Icelandic scholar Jón Eiríksson, professor at Sorø Academy, in drawing Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 40 Gottskálk Jensson aim of this edition was to give ideological support to the Lex Regia of 1665, and to impart royal propaganda about Norway’s character as a hereditary monarchy (corresponding to the contents of the first section of the Hirðskrá), as is explained in Dolmer’s dedicatory letter to Frederick III at the beginning of the edition. Subsequently Dolmer translated the text of Hirðskrá into Latin in order to promote its message to an international readership of learned men, but this translation was first published by Resen in 1673, when he had the Old Norse text reprinted with both it and the Danish translation (Jus Aulicum Antiquum Norvagicum). The occasion for Resen’s re-publication was the activation in 1670 of the Royal Law of 1665, when Christian V was anointed as the first hereditary monarch of Denmark-Norway. This edition shows how Old Norse-Icelandic literature became relevant to the Danish authorities in this period because it could contribute to the ideological underpinnings of absolutism and legitimize the Danish monarchy’s ambitions for power. However, there were very few medieval texts in existence that seemed as supportive of the institution of unrestrained monarchy as Hirðskrá. Accordingly, despite the great collections of manuscripts in Denmark, virtually no medieval Icelandic texts were published for a whole century. Danish absolutism was Europe’s most thoroughly carried out; there were no societal institutions independent of the monarchy, no aristocratic or other milieus which could formulate corrective criticism of the regime. As many functions of state as possible were centralized in Copenhagen. The only discourse tolerated was hyperbolic praise of the king and the church. All printed matter was strictly controlled, the subjects were bombarded with the message that the king’s wisdom was unsurpassed; this was regularly proclaimed and preached, most extensively in the churches, the royal Lutheran evangelical church being highly effective in indoctrinating subservience in the subjects towards the government. When antiquarian publication finally began again in 1768, the text chosen for print was the Norwegian work that most closely resembled in spirit the Hirðsskrá, viz. the thirteenth-century Konungs skuggsjá or Speculum Regale, a didactic dialogue largely concerned with the proper conduct of different social classes in the Norwegian monarchy. The initiative for this came from far away Hólar in Iceland, from Rector Hálfdan Einarsson (1732– 1785), while the work was almost entirely carried out by an Icelandic professor at Sorø Academy, Jón Eiríksson (1728 – 1787). It was not until the prolonged political depression of absolutism culminated in the execution in 1772 of the German intellectual Johann Friedrich Struensee (1737– 1772), who had briefly attained dictatorial power in Denmark in his capacity as private doctor to the mentally ill Christian VII, that Danish political culture began to recover, and the publication of Old Norse-Icelandic medieval literature became possible again, in particular after the foundation of the Arnamagnæan Commission in 1772. a parallel to his own very close translation of a related text from the Norwegian court, Konungs skuggsjá or Speculum Regale (1768). Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 41 5 Meanwhile in Sweden and Iceland … The early publication of Old Norse-Icelandic texts in Denmark stopped abruptly soon after it began, but in Sweden and Iceland new texts continued to be edited. In connection with the invasion of Zealand in 1658, the Swedes were not only interested in military gains. At least one large library, that of the judge Jørgen Seefeldt (1594– 1662), located at the former monastery of Ringsted, Zealand, was taken and transported to Sweden. This was facilitated by the Danish nobleman Corfitz Ulfeldt (1606 – 1664), who opposed Frederick III’s plans to abolish the Council of the Realm and was therefore willing to aid King Carl Gustav of Sweden. The collection included an important Icelandic manuscript (Holm perg 5 fol., 1350 – 1365), now in Stockholm, which Seefeldt had received as a gift from Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson of Skálholt. Another related incident that happened under the Swedish invasion of Zealand involved a Danish merchantman sailing from Iceland, which was taken captive and brought to Gothenburg. Onboard was a young Icelander, Jón Jónsson of Rúgstaðir in northern Iceland, who was traveling with handwritten copies of Icelandic sagas in his luggage, amongst them Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, Bósa saga ok Herrauðs, Gautreks saga, and Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar. The Icelandic captive, who in Sweden would call himself Rugman after the farm where he grew up, was eventually sent to the University of Uppsala, where the Swedish antiquarian Olof Verelius (1618 – 1682) needed assistance to comprehend Icelandic. Rugman was employed as his copyist and translator at the College of Antiquities (Antikvitetskollegium), which was then in the process of being established. In 1662 Verelius was appointed professor antiquitatum patriæ and two years later he initiated the Swedish publications of medieval Icelandic texts with an edition of Gautreks saga and Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar (Gothrici & Rolfi Westrogothiæ Regum Historia Lingua antiqua Gothica conscripta) with the Icelandic text set in Antiqua, the Swedish translation in Fraktur in a parallel column to the right of the original, and Latin endnotes, which set a standard for the early Swedish editions. In 1665 Verelius and his Icelandic assistant again published a short fragment of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, and in 1666 Bósa saga ok Herrauðs with the original in the left column and the Swedish translation in the parallel right columns, and at the end an index of names and Latin notes.Finally, in 1672, they published in a similar style Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks (Hervarar saga på Gammal Gøtska). Verelius also compiled an Icelandic wordlist with translations, aided of course by Rugman, which was published under the title Index linguæ veteris scytho-scandicæ sivæ gothicæ (1691). In choosing texts for publication, the Swedish antiquarians were primarily interested in narratives about the early history of Scandinavia, which they used to support their own version of who had ruled in these regions in ancient times and what they had been up to.⁴⁷ According to Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík (1705 – 1779), who as a  Jón Rúgman and / or Olof Verelius probably also had a hand in preparing the edition of Þorsteins Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 42 Gottskálk Jensson young man worked for Árni Magnússon in Copenhagen, his master believed that the Swedes were only interested in Icelandic sagas because they were looking for precedents in the territorial possessions of ancient Swedish kings in Scandinavia, in order to be able to renew their claims on districts belonging to Norway and Denmark.⁴⁸ Although Jón Ólafsson does not wish to speculate whether Árni Magnússon held this opinion of the Swedes in earnest, the comment at least shows that such political use of literature was by no means considered absurd in Scandinavian antiquarianism. Jón Ólafsson’s reservation probably relates only to the question of whether the Icelandic professor thought that the Swedish interest in Icelandic sagas was motivated by land-grabbing ambitions alone (ea tantum de causa), not whether it was in some way politically motivated, which seems to have been almost self-evident for both parties in this period. By the mid-eighteenth century Swedish antiquarians had published most of the thirty or so extant ›legendary‹ or ›viking‹ sagas, a group of texts which later became known as Fornaldar sögur Norðrlanda after the title of Carl Christian Rafn’s (1795 – 1864) three-volume edition of 1829 – 1830. These sagas about the early history of Scandinavia have a clear connection with the narratives of Saxo’s Gesta Danorum, in particular three of them, Hrólfs saga kraka, Völsunga saga, and Ragnars saga loðbrókar, and as such they should have held a great interest for the Danish antiquarians. The most important Swedish edition of this genre was the large one-volume collection of Erik Julius Biörners (1696 – 1750), Nordiska Kämpa dater (Stockholm 1737), which made thirteen such texts available in print for the first time, among them the three »Danish« sagas. The publishing of such ancient texts (they were considered extremely old) in Sweden strengthened saga Víkingssonar (Thorstens Viikings-sons Saga på Gammal Gøthska, Uppsala 1680), which was published by the royal antiquarian Jacob Reenhielm (1644– 1691) with a Swedish translation, wordlist, and notes in Latin. Reenhielm published Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar by Oddr of Þingeyrar with a Swedish translation in a parallel column and a Latin translation at the foot of the page, and Latin notes (Saga Om K. Oloff Tryggwaszon i Norrege […] af Odde Munck, Uppsala 1691). In 1693 Petter Salan (1670 – 1697) and Olof Rudbeck (1630 – 1702) published in Uppsala Egils saga einhenda ok Ásmundar berserkjabana (Fostbrödernas, Eigles och Asmunds saga af Gamla Gøtiskan Uttolkad), and soon after the Icelandic antiquarian Guðmundur Ólafsson (1652– 1695) was responsible for the publication of Sturlaugs saga starfsama (Sagann af Sturlauge hinum Starf-sama, Uppsala 1694) and Illuga saga Gríðarfóstra (Sagan af Illuga Grydar fostra, Uppsala 1695); each with a parallel Swedish translation but without notes. During what remained of the seventeenth century, Ketils saga hængs, ÖrvarOdds saga, Gríms saga loðinkinna, and Héðins saga ok Högna came out under the auspices of Olof Rudbeck (1630 – 1702), most of them with Latin translations by Ísleifur Þorleifsson, a former protegé of Jón Eggertsson, who was never in Sweden. These editions were made in Rudbeck’s private printing workshop, and they are now extremely rare, Busch (2004), https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-fau/front door/index/index/docId/45 (last viewed: 27 June 2017), Gödel (1897), Wallette (2004), Lindroth (1975).  Reykjavík, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, AM 434 fol., 29v: »Sed varius esse censeo assertum b. Arnæ Magnæi quod Sveci ea tantum de causa desiderassent perspecta habere contenta Historiarum Islandicarum, si forte pervestigare quædam possent occasiones prætentionum in loca quædam, ac regiones Norvegiæ vel Daniæ, quæ avita possessione ad Regnum Sveciæ quondam pertinuissent. Sed huic asserto fides sua sit, nec id intensius rimari volupe est.« Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 43 the impression in Denmark that through Icelandic sagas one could get direct access to historical sources that predated Saxo. As text editions the early Swedish publications were of very poor quality, usually based on a single late manuscript copy, and printed with contemporary Icelandic orthography. It could not have been otherwise, when the best manuscripts were in Copenhagen. A major part of the Icelandic paper manuscripts still in Stockholm derives from the Icelanders who in the 1600s sojourned in Sweden to prepare text editions there. The accompanying translations, however, are correct for the most part, except for the verse, which was often corrupt, and in any case from the outset difficult to decipher. There is, however, at least one exception to this rule of poor textual quality in the Swedish editions, and that is Johan Peringskiöld’s (1654– 1720) deservedly famous editio prima of the original text of Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla (Stockholm 1697– 1700) in two monumental folio volumes with both Swedish and Latin translations. For this edition Peringskiöld used a manuscript copy made in Copenhagen by Jón Eggertsson (1643 – 1689) of the important Kringla manuscript, which was kept at the University Library. The manuscript was later destroyed in the fire of 1728, apart from a single leaf (now at the National Library in Iceland). Peringskiöld’s Heimskringla edition thus preserves readings from a lost manuscript of great text-critical value, although its importance as textual witness is somewhat undermined by the fact that to constitute the text Peringskiöld also used other sources.⁴⁹ In translating the text into Latin Peringskiöld could build on the earlier Danish translations as well as on a recent Swedish translation made by Guðmundur Ólafsson. In Iceland Bishop Þórður Þorláksson (1637– 1697), Brynjólfur Sveinsson’s successor, was able to establish his own printing press at the see in Skálholt with a privilege he obtained in 1688 from Christian V to print historical texts. Þórður Þorláksson was a well educated man, widely traveled for his time, and had been the rector of the cathedral school of Hólar from 1660 to 1663. He was interested in natural sciences, geology, and geography, and the considerable wealth of his family enabled him to study abroad in Copenhagen, Rostock, Strasbourg, and Wittenberg, and to visit Paris and travel to Belgium and Holland on his way back to Copenhagen. In 1669 he sojourned with his kinsman Þormóður Torfæus at Karmøy in Stangeland, Norway. In 1688, when he had been bishop of Skálholt for 14 years, he acquired his licence to publish antiquarian works, and in the same year issued three fundamental texts for Icelandic history: Landnáma, the book of origins on the settlement of Iceland, Ari Sigfússon’s Islendingabók, the first vernacular history of Iceland from the 1130s, and Kristni saga, on the introduction of Christianity to Iceland. In the following two years, he published in two volumes Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, the copiously expanded saga of King Olav Tryggvason of Norway, the first part in 1689 and the second part in 1690. This last publication is deceptive, because, although they are not named on the title page, it contained four other important sagas, whose  Jónsson (1918), 29 – 34. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 44 Gottskálk Jensson texts were published together with it, in part or whole: Grænlendinga saga (about the Norse settlers of Greenland), Færeyinga saga (on the early history of the Faroe Islands), Jómsvíkinga saga (on the foundation of Jomsborg / Wolin, now in Poland, by the Danish viking Palnatoke), and Orkneyinga saga (on the Norse history of Orkney), in addition to 26 shorter narratives (so-called þættir); the reason for these bonus texts, as it were, is that the long redaction of Ólafs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta is expansively interpolated, especially the redaction used by the Bishop Þórður Þorláksson and his assistant, Einar Eyjólfsson (c. 1642– 1695), which was a copy at some removes of the famous codex Flateyjarbók. The text quality of the Skálholt editions was superior to anything that had been seen before in print – the bishop had for instance cast new letter types in order to reproduce more precisely the archaic language of the early twelfth-century Íslendingabók – but since the Skálholt editions were intended for the domestic market they were not accompanied by Danish or Latin translations. This was criticized in Denmark, but the speed and high quality of the Skálholt editions nevertheless did not fail to impress antiquarians in Denmark and Sweden. 6 Thomas Bartholin’s Antiquitates Danicæ The early publications of the Swedish antiquarians provoked only irritation and envy in Danish patriots. Despite some good intentions, expressed in official letters and the tasks assigned to royal antiquarians, the Danish consternation did not translate into new efforts to publish antiquarian texts in Copenhagen. Apart from the country’s suffering the combined effects of war and absolutist oppression, it seems to have dawned on Danish antiquarians that medieval Icelandic literature was giving Saxo Grammaticus some competition for the last word on ancient history. Danish conservatives wanted Saxo to remain fundamental, and these were difficult times for the Danes, with great territorial losses to Sweden on the east side of the Øresund. Thus there were pressing reasons to long for a return to the good old days of Worm and Stephanius. Against the naive exuberance of the – in their opinion – hyperactive Swedish antiquarians, the Danes began to cultivate their intellectual negativity, or, depending on how one views it, their critical acumen. Historical skepticism developed, influenced by the new school of French diplomatics and paleography – but coupled with a sense of nostalgia and, worst of all, morbidity.⁵⁰  Bartholin and Árni Magnússon were well aware of the new French school of source criticism, an important development of this period, e. g. Pierre Bayle (1647– 1706), professor of philosophy and history at Amsterdam, who in 1684 started the review journal Nouvelles de la république des lettres, to which Bartholin subscribed. A significant inspiration was the French Benedictine Jean Mabillon (1632– 1707), who with his De re diplomatica libri sex (Paris 1681) established methods for paleography and diplomatics. Bartholin had Mabillon’s books in his library and refers to him in the Antiquitates, as does Árni Magnússon in the introduction to his Sjællandske Krønike (1695). Ólafur HalldórsAuthenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 45 These are indeed the paradoxical sentiments that characterized the next great achievement of Danish antiquarianism, Thomas Bartholin Jr’s (1659 – 1690) Antiquitates Danicæ de Causis Contemptæ a Danis adhuc Gentilibus Mortis […] ex vetustis codicibus & monumentis hactenus ineditis congesti (Copenhagen 1689), which can be translated as ›Danish antiquities concerning the causes for why the Danes disdained death, while they were still pagan‹, a more than 700-page monograph in three Latin libri. Bartholin, who was something of a Wunderkind, finished Latin school at fourteen and had published two books already as an eighteen-year-old, when he was designated professor politices et historiæ patriæ, which meant that he was promised the position of professor in due time, when a fitting chair would become vacant. In the following years he prepared himself by visiting universities in Leiden, Oxford, London, Paris, and elsewhere. When his father died in 1680 he was called back to Denmark, but was taken ill and in order to recover he was forced to remain in Flensburg for an extended period. Once he had reached Copenhagen, he again took to traveling and spent some time in Leipzig in 1682. Bartholin was appointed professor of law and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen in 1684, by then only 25 years of age, and, more importantly for our purposes, he was made secretary of the royal archives (Gehejmearkiv), which at that time were located in Rosenburg Castle in Copenhagen. He was also appointed antiquarius regius, thus succeeding the Icelander Hannes Þorleifsson, who had only held the office for a year when he perished off Langanes in 1682. He had imprudently chosen to transport an unknown number of manuscripts, which he had collected for the king in Iceland, by sea in October, when the weather in the North Atlantic is unpredictable. For seventeen years, ever since Torfæus was expelled from the royal palace in 1664, there had been no significant work done on the Icelandic codices in the Danish king’s possession. The worries of Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson seemed to be coming true, which he voiced in a letter, dated 10 July 1656, to the royal librarian Villum Lange (1624– 1682), that there was a real danger (after his application to the king for a licence to print antiquities in Skálholt had been rejected and many important manuscripts sent to Copenhagen) that the Icelandic manuscripts would be rendered son writes: »Wherever Árni traveled, he searched in libraries for sources about the ecclesiastical history of the North and the history of the North in general, and he noted everything that he found on the subject, both printed and in manucript. His notes are preserved in [Copenhagen, the Arnamagnæan Institute,] AM 909 4to A – E. He not only gathered information about texts useful to the history of the northern countries, but he also made a point of learning how Europan scholars dealt with these materials. Árni seems to have been especially impressed by the way in which the French Benedictines (the Maurists), especially Jean Mabillon (1632– 1707), created a scientific basis for the gathering of sources and historical research, and he used them as a model«, Halldórsson (1998), 38. The related movement in Germany, Pyrrhonismus Historicus, was named after the Greek skeptic Pyrrhon of Elis (c. 365 – 272 B.C.); its most important representative in the second half of the 1600s was the polyhistor Hermann Conring (1606 – 1681), see Völkel (1987), 110ff. Conring was an advisor to King Frederick III, and had published Tacitus’ Germania in 1678, an edition which Árni Magnússon collated line for line with the editio prima of 1470, Jónsson (2012), 110. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 46 Gottskálk Jensson into mute objects in foreign libraries (in bibliothecas exteras codices mutos compingere) when removed from their competent readers, to the greatest detriment of science – indeed, the Icelandic bishop added, this would not be to safeguard them but to annihilate them (id vero antiquitates non conservare sed extinguere est)! The bishop emphasizes in the same letter that what had been achieved so far in the field of antiquarian studies (he refers to Worm and Stephanius) was owed to the assistance of Icelanders, and that they alone, indeed a select few among them, could publish Icelandic antiquities. But, he adds on a more upbeat note, when antiquarians throughout Europe get the opportunity to read the contents of the Icelandic manuscripts – he assures the royal librarian that there will be plenty of buyers for their editions – the fame of the monarchy will spread far and wide.⁵¹ Then, in the early 1680s, the Danish authorities were finally provoked out of their lethargy by what was happening in Sweden. The catalyst was no doubt primarily the potent mixture of the mythomaniacal Atlantica (Atland eller Manheim) by Professor Olof Rudbeck (1630 – 1702) of Uppsala University, the first volume of which came out in 1679. Something just had to be done about Rudbeck’s claims that Sweden was the cradle of civilization and Swedish the original language of Adam, and his fantastical identification of his patria with Plato’s Atlantis! With the boisterous frivolity and ease of association created in a consciousness almost never weighed down by the complexity of historical facts, Rudbeck treated the Icelandic Eddas, recently published by Resen, as his sandbox and playground, like an allegorical puzzle waiting to be cracked by a great scientist such as himself. His lively imagination may even have been triggered a little by Resen’s impressive tour de force through comparative World Literature in the ›Introduction‹ to the Edda Islandorum, although, if so, the outcome proved quite different. Rudbeck’s treatise certainly attracted criticism and ridicule both in and out of Sweden,⁵² but its effect on the Danish authorities was to give a new boost to antiquarianism. In practice, this meant employing some Icelanders to match up to the Swedes. But when Hannes Þorleifsson was appointed royal antiquarian and sent to Iceland in the summer of 1682 to collect manuscripts, the Swedes already had a reply ready, because they sent their own agent, Jón  Úr bréfabókum Brynjólfs biskups Sveinssonar, 72.  Danish and Icelandic antiquarians and historians (e. g. Þormóður Torfæus, Thomas Bartholin, Árni Magnússon, Hans Gram, Ludvig Holberg) were of course highly critical of Rudbeck’s writings, and although he had many followers in Sweden he was also ridiculed there as early as the seventeenth century by the philosopher and philologist Andreas Kempe (1622– 1689), and in the eighteenth century by such Swedish scientists as Olof Celsius (1670 – 1756) and Carl Gustaf Nordin (1749 – 1812). Rudbeck’s ideas were rejected as fraudulent from the outset by Italian and French intellectuals, e. g. the learned Italian diplomat Lorenzo Magolotti (1637– 1712), and the French intellectual and playwright poet Jean-François Regnard (1655 – 1709), who visited Sweden around the time when Rudbeck began his Atlantica project. Most famously, perhaps, Rudbeck was scorned by Denis Diderot in an entry on »Etymologie« in the Encyclopédie, where Diderot used Rudbeck as a negative example to point out the deceptive association of etymology with historicizing mythography, Bandle et al. (2002), 109. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 47 Eggertsson, a disgruntled Icelander who had fought a prolonged legal battle against the corrupt Icelandic authorities. Indeed, he was more resourceful than his countryman Hannes Þorleifsson and mangaged both to buy valuable manuscripts in Iceland and to deliver them to Sweden – actually by handing them over upon landing in Helsingør / Elsinore, Denmark, to a couple of other Icelandic agents for the Swedes. This was in the autumn of 1683, and for it (and / or some other offences against the authorities) he was thrown into prison in Denmark.⁵³ Þormóður Torfæus, who by his own account was rotting away as a peasant in Norway, was now rehabilitated through an appointment as royal historian of Norway. The arrangement, which was made on 23 September 1682, should also be seen as part of the Danish response to the continued successes of Verelius, Rudbeck, and their Icelandic assistants.⁵⁴ Torfæus, who had a nose for politics, knew how to play on the fears of the Danish government in his application to the king, dated 18 August 1682.⁵⁵ A part of his assignment, according to Jón Eiríksson’s biography of Torfæus, was to prove that Christian V was descended from the Norwegian royal family, and was thus a rightful heir to the crown of Norway according to the laws of royal succession. What now happened was unexpected, because Torfæus virtually emptied the collections in Copenhagen of Icelandic manuscripts (the Flateyjarbók, Morkinskinna, Hrokkinskinna, Tómasskinna, both the Eddas, Konungsannáll etc.), which he took with him to Karmøy, Norway, at great risk of losing them, and kept them there for over two decades to write the history of Norway. Indeed, Torfæus  He was only released after procuring a letter from the Swedish Antiquities Collegium stating that he had not handed over any manuscripts to them. The letter is dated 29 September 1686. He never returned to Iceland, and finally went to Stockholm in 1689, even then bringing Icelandic manuscripts to the Swedes: Ólason (1950), 86 – 87.  A brief history of the Icelandic antiquarians working in Sweden was written already in the early eighteenth century: Dal, Specimen biographicum de antiquariis Sveciae.  He pointed out that, since he had last worked as an antiquarian for the king, the Swedes had established the Antiquities Collegium with a free printing press, and they had hired an Icelander, whom they paid well; they hunted down whatever they could find of Icelandic antiquities, and had already published several books for which they had won great fame. Even he would have to correct his book on the Danish royal succession in several places, so superior had the Swedes’ access become to the sources of Danish and Norwegian history. Thus it was beginning to seem that the honor which in the greatest part ought to belong to the Fatherland was being appropriated by Sweden alone. He himself had even been approached by the Swedish king with an offer to join his service, which he had rejected out of sheer love of the Fatherland, though he had not during the last twelve years enjoyed any relief beyond the livelihood of a simple peasant. He therefore applied for the position of historiographer of Norway, including a special permission to borrow the necessary Icelandic manuscripts in the king’s collections in Copenhagen, to take with him to Norway where he would write in Latin the history of Norway. To make his Norwegian history presentable abroad, he had to acquire a research library of the most important works on the history of the neighboring countries Denmark, Germany, Sweden, England, and Russia, but especially France; in addition he needed to hire an Icelandic copyist. All of this would require a double salary, compared to what he had been given earlier, Eiríksson, Thormod Torfesens Levnetsbeskrivelse (2009), 88 – 89. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 48 Gottskálk Jensson was unwilling to return the Icelandic manuscripts to Copenhagen, and postponed their delivery repeatedly until King Frederick IV in person paid him a visit at the farm in Norway, in the summer of 1704, and politely took the manuscripts from him and transported them back to Copenhagen. Many of the names that the Icelandic parchment books go under to this day were given them by Torfæus, whose systematic copying of manuscripts turned out to be invaluable, especially when some of them were destroyed in the fire of Copenhagen in 1728. Although Torfæus’ private antiquarian workshop in Norway was not exactly what Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson had envisioned in his letter to the royal librarian, especially since Torfæus’ aim was not to edit the texts for publication as such, but to use them as sources for historiography, at least this way the manuscripts were being read and studied by those who could comprehend their contents. As a historian Torfæus also turned out to be no less productive than he had been as a translator in the king’s service in Copenhagen.⁵⁶ Indeed, a considerable part of his historical writings consists of retellings and translations of Icelandic sagas, the contents of which were thus made available. When Thomas Bartholin was appointed antiquarius regius in 1684 his formal assignment was to »collect all the most important Icelandic historical writings, which could be had, and to prepare them for printing« (›at samle alle de fornemste Islandske Historiske skrifter, som ere at bekomme og dennem til trøken at forfærdige‹), as is stated in a letter from Christian V, which is dated 4 April 1685 and addressed to Governor Christopher Heideman (c.1653 – 1703) in Iceland. At the same time, Icelandic-Swedish antiquarianism was to be stifled at source by issuing a ban against »written histories or other such treatises about the country [Denmark] being sold to foreigners or exported« (›skrefne historier eller andre deslige Tractater om landet, vorder der fra til fremmede forhandlede eller udførte‹); with the justification that it had been brought to the king’s attention »how a great deal of manuscripts from our country, Iceland, reputedly have already been exported, which foreigners have  Some of his more important publications include the histories of the north Atlantic colonies of the Norsemen: Commentatio historica de rebus gestis Færeyansium seu Færøensium (Copenhagen 1695), Orcades seu rerum Orcadensium historiæ (Copenhagen 1697), Historia Vinlandiæ antiquæ (Copenhagen 1705), Gronlandia antiqua (Copenhagen 1706; new ed. 1947). These works were originally intended as sections of his magnum opus on the history of Norway, which grew too voluminous under his pen. The main text was finally published in four volumes under the title Historia rerum Norvegicarum (Copenhagen 1711). Two of these publications have an explicit political agenda: In the Orcades Torfæus argues for the Danish king’s continued right to redeem Orkney, which was pledged in the times of Christian I, despite the fact that this right had been waived already in 1590. In Historia Vinlandiæ antiquæ Torfæus goes even further and claims Canada on behalf of the Danish crown, though he may not have been backed by the Danish government in making such a claim. As for his book on Greenland, Gronlandia antiqua, he was in the middle of writing it when the king visited him on Karmøy in 1704, and his discussions with the king and the state official who arranged the visit, Governor-General Frederick Gabel (d. 1708), may well have stimulated interest among them in the rediscovery of Greenland, which was recolonized by the Norwegian priest Hans Egede (1686 – 1758) in 1721, Petersen (1929), 799. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 49 repeatedly published in print« (›hvorledis een stoer deel Manuscripter fra vort land Island allerede skal vere udførte, hvilche fremmede i trochen tid efter anden lader udgaae‹).⁵⁷ There is hardly any question of the irritation in the tone of this royal letter, i. e. that the envy aroused by the Swedish publications of Icelandic antiquities had eclipsed any acknowledgement of the scientific achievements of a rival people, so the Swedish text editions were seen solely as infringing on Danish interests.⁵⁸ Thomas Bartholin Jr. died of tuberculosis at the age of 31, but while struggling with his fatal disease he, together with his not much younger Icelandic assistant Árni Magnússon, was able to publish the book that would make him famous. Into the morbid central argument of Bartholin’s Antiquitates Danicæ were embedded numerous bits and pieces of texts from unpublished Icelandic sagas and poetry, both eddic and skaldic, made available here in a hitherto unseen variety and richness, both in original texts and accompanying Latin translations. This work set a new standard for how medieval Icelandic and Norwegian texts ought to be published.⁵⁹ At the end of the book we find a list of the source material, naming about 90 works, including 21 eddic poems. A good deal of the philological excavation of text examples and their translation into Latin was no doubt carried out by Árni Magnússon, whose expertise in this area is demonstrated at the beginning of the volume with 22 strophes of skaldic verse, in the meter dróttkvætt, typical of Icelandic court poetry. The piece is  Kongelige Allernaadigste Forordninger og aabne Breve, som til Island ere udgivne af de Høist-priselige Konger af den Oldenborgiske Stamme, 220.  The resentment is even more obvious in the letter of the young antiquarius himself that he sent to the king to request the royal injunction. In the letter, which bears the same date as the king’s letter, and was first printed in Eiríksson, Thormod Torfesens Levnetsbeskrivelse (1788), 22– 23, Bartholin writes: »Since Your Royal Highness has most graciously appointed me as royal antiquary, and I am entrusted in my letter of assignment with preparing for printing the best of Icelandic historical writings; to which end I have not only with me here industrious Icelandic students, who are accomplished in the old language, but have even dispatched one to Iceland, whose assignment it is to collect old documents; and since it is well known that our neighbors have acquired from there a good deal of beautiful manuscripts, which they publish in print every year to our greatest disadvantage; therefore I most humbly request that Your Royal Majesty instruct his governor in Iceland […] to issue orders that he not only prohibit and oversee that no written histories and documents from that country be handed over to foreigners, but also that he collect what manuscripts he can get, and send them hither for Your Majesty’s services« (»Eftersom Eders Kongelige Majestæt mig allernaadigst har antaget til at være Antiqvarius Regius, og det i min Bestallings-Brev mig bliver befalet, til Trykken at forfærdige de fornemste Islandske historiske Skrifter; til hvilken Ende jeg ei allene her haver hos mig dygtige Islandske Studentere, i det gamle Sprog velforfarne, men endog een affærdiget til Island, som gamle Documenter der skal indsanke. Men saasom det vitterligt er, at vores Naboer en stor Deel skiønne Manuscripter derfra haver bekommet, hvilke de aarligen til vores største Nachdeel i Trykken lader undgaae; da beder jeg allerunderdanigst Eders Kongelige Majestæt vilde lade sin Landsfoged paa Island […] befale, at han ei alleneste forbyder og tilseer, at ingen skrevne historier og Documenter der af Landet til fremmede bliver afhandlede, men ogsaa indsanker hvis [dvs. hvad] Manuscripter han kan bekomme og hidsende til Eders Majestæts Tieneste«), Gödel (1897), 176, Petersen (1929), 777, Kristjánsson (1975), 377– 378, Jónsson (2012), 63.  Jónsson (ed.), Árni Magnússons Levned og Skrifter, vol 1, 1, 14, Jónsson (2012), 85. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 50 Gottskálk Jensson a panegyric to Bartholin, who is praised to the skies for his philological achievements through the whole gamut of syntactical artifice, kennings, and alternative names (heiti) so characteristic of skaldic poetry. Árni Magnússon would later, with a fair bit of ironic self-deprecation, tell his amanuensis Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík (1705 – 1779) that this modern drápa was so learned that he himself would no longer immediately be able to decipher its meaning without some research. Following Verelius’ example, the Icelandic texts are printed in Antiqua, as is the Latin main text, with only a few citations in Danish represented in Fraktur. The use of Icelandic poetry as a proof of erudition resembles the use of Latin poetry in the learned Neo-Latin treatises and text editions of the period, indicating that Icelandic had now been accepted as the Nordic equivalent of the classical languages.⁶⁰ Bartholin criticized Rudbeck’s fabulous misreadings of Old Norse-Icelandic literature and his poor historical research, but he himself enjoyed a greatly superior access to the sources in Copenhagen, which enabled him to represent accurately the poetry and sagas he had selected to prop up his essentially chauvinistic argument in the Antiquitates Danicæ about the Stoic fearlessness of the Ancient Danish warriors.⁶¹ Despite his hands-on intimacy with the medieval sources,⁶² Bartholin can hardly be considered an innovator in constructing this argument, or to have opened up new avenues in the interpretation of Icelandic literature. On the contrary, he adopts as his premise a reading of Icelandic literature developed by a generation of scholars  See Jensson (2008).  Another controversy may have played a role in the mutual dislike of Bartholin and Rudbeck, who worked at two universities that had competed with one another ever since they were founded in almost the same year 1477 / 1479. In 1652 Thomas Bartholin Sr. (1616 – 1680), the father of Bartholin Jr., had published his findings about the lymphatic system, which he in fact was first to name (vasa lymphatica in homine nuper inventa). A year later Rudbeck, who also did medical research, claimed that he, too, had made the discovery of the peripheral lymphatic vessels, and wrote an accusatory letter to claim the honor of the discovery. In Sweden Rudbeck was subsequently credited with the discovery, which he is supposed to have presented at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden in the spring of 1652, although he only published his findings after he had had access to Bartholin’s study in print, Natale/Bocci/Ribatti (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/joa.12644 (last viewed: 30 June 2017).  Bartholin is also remembered for preserving Danish historical documents. In 1687 he used his influence with the king to demand from officials of church and state throughout Denmark that they deliver old documents to him. Thus he received various medieval diplomas, annals, monastic chronicles, and liturgical books; at the same time he searched out and copied documents in collections both private (e. g. that of Resen) and public in Copenhagen, especially at the University Library, where documents from generations of royal historians had been deposited. In this manner he compiled a great collection of copies, 25 large volumes in folio, Bartholin’s Collectanea, nine of which contained ecclesiastical history, arranged by years, the Annales Bartholiniani, reaching to 1552. Considering his poor health, this was quite an achievement, though he certainly enjoyed the assistance of others, among them his Icelandic amanuensis Árni Magnússon. Fortunately, the Collectanea had not yet been deposited in the University Library when it burnt down in 1728. They first came there in 1739, when purchased from the Bartholin family. They became the main source of Erich Pontoppidan’s Annales Ecclesiæ Danicæ Diplomatici (1741– 1752), in 4 vols., and the historical series Scriptores rerum Danicarum (1772– 1878), in 9 vols., begun by Jacob Langebek. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 51 who might have been his granduncles, revealing a conservative streak in his approach to the sources, which would become almost embarrassingly old-fashioned and irrelevant as time went on. The very title of Bartholin’s seminal work is inspired by the success of Worm’s publication of the »Krákumál« of Ragnar Loðbrók. In fact, Bartholin may be seen to have squandered his advantage over Worm, Stephanius, Resen, Verelius, and Rudbeck on amassing support for an essentially patriotic postulate with limited value as history or literature. Perhaps the most influential texts, often published here for the first time, were a selection of retrospective, autobiographical ›Death Songs‹, although here and there, together with the predominant theme, some erotic and comic passages also occur: »Gamanvísur Haralds harðráða« (›The Comic Verses of Haraldur harðráði‹), 155 – 157, »Ævikviða Ásbjörns prúða« (›Ballad of the Life of Ásbjörn the Gentle‹), 158 – 162; »Bjarkamál hin fornu« (›Ancient Lay of Bjarki‹), 178 – 182; a selection from »Hákonarmál« (›Lay of Hákon‹), 520 – 528, by Eyvindur skáldaspillir; »Darraðarljóð« (›The Poem of Dörruður‹), 617– 624; and »Baldurs draumar« (›The Dreams of Baldur‹), also called »Vegtamskviða«, 632– 640.⁶³ The view of Ancient Danish society indirectly drawn up by this one-sided selection of poems, in accordance with the argument of Antiquitates Danicae, is that of happily suicidal pagan warriors, who in many points resemble contemporary Danes and Swedes in their Protestant zealotry and self-sacrificing, militant patriotism. These poems, which aim to rekindle the spirit, conjured up by the poems in Worm’s Literatura Runica, were later translated into several languages, translations rarely based on the original texts but most often on Bartholin’s Latin translations, which must have been made by Árni Magnússon or at least have been dependent on his readings of the poems. These texts became the core of a new canon of about a dozen poems which were known in the eighteenth century as especially characteristic of the literary spirit of the North.⁶⁴ The fate of Bartholin’s monograph, together with Worm’s Literatura runica and Resen’s Edda Islandorum, was to become a source book for the eighteenth century’s fascination with the Nordic sublime, mixed up with the libertarianism of Montesquieu and the primitivism of Rousseau.⁶⁵  Page numbers refer to Bartholin’s Antiquitates Danicæ, Copenhagen 1689.  See e. g. Heinrichs (1991), Gunnlaugsson (2011).  A highly influential work, which disseminated knowledge from the seventeenth-century publications of Icelandic material beyond Scandinavia, was Monuments de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes, et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves (1756) by the professor of belles lettres in Copenhagen, Paul Henri Mallet (1730 – 1807), a text which in turn was translated into several other European languages, into German by Gottfried Schiltze (1765) and English by Thomas Percy (1770). In translating the Old Norse-Icelandic texts into French, Mallet enjoyed the assistance of Jón Eiríksson (1728 – 1787), who may be called the first modern Old Norse-Icelandic philologist in Copenhagen on account of his edition of Konungs skuggsjá / Speculum regale (Sorø 1768). Resen’s Edda and Bartholin’s Antiquitates were used as sources by Mallet, but continued nevertheless to be read and studied in their own right. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832) relates in Wahrheit und Dichtung that his first taste of the Edda was from the German translation of Mallet, but that he first learnt to appreciate Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 52 Gottskálk Jensson 7 Conclusion When Thomas Bartholin Jr. died in 1690, Árni Magnússon lost his patron. The royal historiographer Þormóður Torfæus, together with the powerful Danish nobleman Matthias Moth (1649 – 1719), supported him in the initial stages of establishing an independent career as an antiquarian in Copenhagen. Árni Magnússon traveled to Germany (1694– 1696) and was soon after designated professor at the University of Copenhagen, an office he received officially in 1701 with the apt title of professor antiquitatum Danicarum. He was the first Icelander promoted to professor in Copenhagen; four years earlier he had been made secretary of the royal archive at the Gehejmearkiv. In 1710 he was granted a seat on the University Consistorium, and from 1721 he was also in charge of running the University Library, which made Árni Magnússon for a time the most prominent antiquarian in Copenhagen.⁶⁶ In the preserved letters exchanged between Árni Magnússon and Þormóður Torfæus from 1688 to 1716, it is clear that publishing the manuscript of Torfæus’ Series dynastarum et regum Daniæ was considered by them to be a risky endeavor.⁶⁷ Nevertheless they reached the agreement that, if Árni Magnússon would edit the work for publication, Torfæus would in return bequeath his library to him. Árni Magnússon took the assignment very seriously, and labored on revising the work for years on end. The manuscript underwent major changes, and from the letters we can see that Torfæus is not always happy with the revisions, though he had full confidence in Árni Magnússon as his editor and ghost writer. However, there was a world of difference in the attitudes of the two men towards the sources and their reliablity. In the it when »Herder gave me Resenius in hand« (cited by Petersen, 1929, 776). Johann Gottfried Herder (1744– 1803) derived much inspiration from these publications and came to prefer Old Norse mythology to the Greco-Roman variety. He praises Bartholin in high terms for his erudition, and he translated a whole series of poems in his Volkslieder (1778 – 1779) from the Antiquitates. Bartholin’s work also had a great impact on the German circle in Copenhagen, i. e. the Nordic mythological poetry of Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg (1737– 1823) and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724– 1803). When Montesquieu (1689 – 1755) in L’esprit des lois (1748) mentions the Northerners’ belief in the afterlife, his source is the Antiquitates Danicæ, and the same holds true of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 1781), at the beginning of his Laocoon (1766), where he unfavorably contrasts the aloofness of northern heroism with the tearful expressiveness of Ancient Greek heroes. In England the reception of the Antiquitates was intense, involving such poets as Thomas Gray (1716 – 1771) and Thomas Percy (1729 – 1811), who published Five Pieces of Runic Poetry (1763), most of which are renderings of the Latin translations of poems in Antiquitates; he also translated Mallet into English as Northern Antiquities (1779). Sir Walter Scott (1771– 1832) also deeply immersed himself in Bartholin as a young man in order to imbibe the solitude and gloom of the northern spirit, which would later mark his work as a novelist. On the dissemination of Resen and Bartholin, see e. g. the succinct survey of Petersen (1929), 774– 782. On the general reception of Icelandic literature in this period, see Blanck (1911), Clunies Ross (1998), Shippey (1998), Henningsen (2007).  Bekker-Nielsen/Widding (1963), 36.  The correspondence is published in Arne Magnusson, brevveksling med Torfaeus (Þormóður Torfason). Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 53 end Torfæus suggests to Árni Magnússon that he should write the introduction, because by now he knows the work much better; he himself can hardly recognize the book in the revised form. The work was finally printed in 1702, by then many times the original length, yet Árni Magnússon had forced Torfæus to remove whole sections from the text, especially the retelling of Hrólfs saga kraka, which was printed separately later as Historia Hrolfi Kraki (Copenhagen 1705), and the whole final section on King Gorm the Old, Harald Bluetooth, and Svend Forkbeard, which were later also published separately as Trifolium historicum (Copenhagen 1707). In the printed work, which bears the full title of Series dynastarum et regum Daniæ, a primo eorum Skioldo Odini filio, ad Gormum Grandævum, Haraldi Cærulidentis patrem: Antea anno Christi MDCLXIV jussu Gloriosissimæ memoriæ Regis Friderici Tertii, secundum monumentorum Islandicorum harmoniam deducta & concinnata: Nunc recognita, multum aucta, et Augustissimi illius Nepotis Friderici Quarti auspiciis in publicam lucem emissa per Tormodum Torfæum Historiographum Regium (›The succession of dynasts and kings of Denmark from Skjold the son of Odin to Gorm the Old, father of Harald Bluetooth: Previously, in the year of the Lord 1664, at the demand of King Frederick III of most glorious memory, drawn from and arranged in accordance with Icelandic historical monuments: Now revised, and greatly enlarged, and published under the auspices of his grandson Frederick IV, written by Royal Historiographer Tormod Torfæus‹), the discussion spans the Danish royal line from Skjold to Gorm the Old, i. e. the whole series of pagan kings, while the Christian kings have been left out. As well as the extent of the royal succession, many sections of the text had changed greatly from the manuscript that Torfæus had presented to Frederick III thirty-eight years earlier. The first part, where we find an extensive survey of Icelandic sagas and a systematic evaluation of their usefulness as sources for the writing of history, together with a similar evaluation of Danish and Swedish historical sources, has undergone major revisions by Árni Magnússon. This part has justifiably been called the first ever attempt at historical source criticism in Denmark.⁶⁸ In sorting out the sagas, the ones that may be deemed reliable historical sources are distilled from the great mass of Icelandic literature; while the historical authority of this select group of texts is confirmed in no uncertain terms, an attack is launched on other historians, whether Danish or Swedish, who do not live up to the benchmark standard of historicity. Among the unworthy we find the notorious Danish mythomaniac Claus Christoffersen Lyschander, but the main offender is not unpredicably the Swedish historian Johannes Magnus, to whom Torfæus (and Árni Magnússon lurking behind his authorial persona) dedicates an entire Appendix, »Ad Seriem Regum Daniæ Appendix I. De Johannis Magni in describendo Daniæ Sveciæque Regum ordine callida Saxonis imitatione« (›On the clever imitation of Saxo in Johannes Magnus’ account of the royal lines of Denmark and Sweden‹, 447– 475), a devastating critique of the fa-  Petersen (1929), 797. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 54 Gottskálk Jensson ther of Swedish history which demonstrates how dependent Magnus was on Saxo, but also that antiquarianism in the seventeenth century was not always naive and uncritical. No comparable section is found in Torfæus’ original of 1664. The attack on Johannes Magnus was no doubt deemed necessary by Árni Magnússon in order to make the harsh critique of Saxo presented here more palatable to his learned Danish readership. He and Torfæus were anxious about the reception of the printed text, and Árni Magnússon argued that it was not wise to publish it in two parts, out of fear that the second part would not be allowed to come out, once the contents of the first one were known. Torfæus was also nervous because of a dream he had that the book would be badly received. In the preface, Torfæus assures the reader that his argument in many ways confirms Saxo’s account of history, and that his purpose is by no means to undermine the authority of respectable writers. But the truth was that Saxo’s early history was turned upside down in Torfæus’ treatment, yet no attempts were made to suppress the work or ban it. On the contrary, Torfæus won great renown for his work. A French reviewer expressed his surprise that »a Dane, who loves his country and serves his king as a historiographer, should strive only to discover the truth and break with old prejudice«.⁶⁹ Although the reviewer has a point, and one can certainly admire the scientific integrity of Danish antiquarians’ overthrow of their most revered historical authority, it should not be forgotten that Icelandic literature, too, was considered the possession of the king of Denmark (»our land Iceland« is how he refers to the country), and in any case most of the Icelandic manuscripts were already in Copenhagen. It had taken a long time, but the newly reestablished authority of medieval Icelandic literary texts, whether in published editions or as sources used in fanciful studies such as those by Rudbeck and Bartholin, could not fail to contribute indirectly to undermining the status of Saxo Grammaticus as the ultimate voice of Denmark’s ancient history. Already Resen and Bartholin had revealed the richness of the Icelandic corpus of historical poetry, which Saxo had accessed partly in oral form (as he explains in the preface to his 8th book) and partly in runic inscriptions.⁷⁰ As for  The first historian of Denmark to fully accept Torfæus’ Icelandic hypothesis for the period before the introduction of Christianity to Denmark was Andreas Hojer, who in 1718 published his Kurtzgefaszte Dännemärckische Geschichte, which for more than half a century was the only usable handbook covering the whole of Danish history. Ludvig Holberg, who is criticized by Hojer, eventually accepted Torfæus’ premise as well, and in Danmarks Riges Historie (Copenhagen 1732) he reluctantly joined Torfæus and Hojer, because the former’s hypothesis »has found approval with most of our learned men«. Accordingly, Holberg rejects with great satisfaction Saxo’s »bizarre and inhuman fables« and follows Torfæus and the Icelandic sources, unless they conflict with European historians at large, Petersen (1929), 798.  In book 1, chapter 11, Bartholin had cited Snorri Sturluson’s prologue to the Heimskringla in support of the author’s faith in skaldic poetry as a historical source, a view which, as he pointed out, was shared by the Norwegian historian Theodoricus, before him. Bartholin then states that the majority of the skaldic poets came from Iceland, and this circumstance, he says, accounts for Saxo’s praise of the Icelanders for their historical knowledge. Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM Hypothesis Islandica 55 rune stones, admittedly they are not found primarily in Iceland, but, as Bartholin adds, even though Worm and Stephanius had eagerly explored the runic material they did not gain much from it in terms of data for the study of Danish history – and neither had Saxo himself, for that matter, derived any significant historical information directly from the rune stones. Runic inscriptions are murky and unintelligible, despite the great efforts made by learned men to decipher them, and even if they can be read, they rarely turn out to contain anything of value for the writing of history. As for the vernacular poetry that Saxo had translated into Latin, this only amounts to a handful of poems, very little indeed compared to the copiousness of the Icelandic corpus, and because of their artful mediation in Latin verses they contribute but little to the study of history and absolutely nothing to the dating of historical individuals and events, according to Bartholin. Saxo himself had admitted that he built a large part of his Gesta Danorum on Icelandic sources, which underscored the authority of the Icelanders as the original historians of Scandinavia. Worm’s and Stephanius’ search for the sources of the Gesta Danorum in Icelandic literature had ultimately had the opposite result to what they had originally intended, viz. it had not strengthened the perception that Saxo was the fundamental source of Danish history; on the contrary, it had made Saxo into a secondary and derivative author in comparison with the vernacular poems and sagas on which he relied. It was these that had won the unassailable honor that belongs to originals alone.⁷¹  Ludvig Holberg describes the dogmatic belief in Saxo among Danish historians, points out the paradox of Saxo’s authority with respect to the Icelanders, and finally summarizes the impact of Bartholin on Saxo’s authority in his 1731 speech at the university: Holberg, Solutio Problematis de hypothesibus Historiæ Danicæ, in Collatione honorum Baccalaureatus publice recitata in Dom: Consistor: 1731, 413 – 415: »Sed tantæ auctoritatis erat Saxo Grammaticus, vel potius Archiepiscopus Absalon, sub cujus ductu et auspiciis historiam gentis Danicæ contexuit, ut omnes qui secuti sunt historici sc. Crantzius, Hvitfeldius, Pontanus, Svaningius, Meursius, aliique maximi nominis viri ne unguem quidem latum ab hypothesi ejus recedere ausi sint. Huc adde, quod cum tot tantisque subsidiis in præfamine Operis instructum sese testetur ipse Saxo, temeraria visa sit plerisque tanti fortiterque adeo armati viri censura. Sed id quod maxime invictum et inexpugnabilem historicum nostrum reddidisse visum est, autoritatem ejus maxime labefactavit. Nam cum ipse in proœmio operis sui testetur, se fidem veterum Thylensium sive scriptorum Islandicorum secutum, ac antiquarii nonnulli temporis nostri, examine monumentorum Islandicorum curatius habito, viderent toto ab iisdem distare cœlo historiam Saxonis, satis patuit, nunquam autores istos inspexisse, quorum vestigiis se insistere profitetur, quocirca credebant etiam idem judicium ferri posse de reliquis adminiculis, quorum magnifica apud eundem Saxonem fit mentio. E lapidibus Runnicis exiguum solatium hauriri posse docuit in Thesauro Antiquitatum Danicarum celeberrimus Thomas Bartholinus, cum obscuræ adeo sint pleræque inscriptiones, ut nulla ope et sagacitate humana sensus aliquis inde erui possit, Veteresque, quas Saxo latinè reddidit cantilenas paucas esse, parumque ad historiam, et nihil omnino ad doctrinam temporum facere.« Authenticated | gottskalk@hum.ku.dk author's copy Download Date | 8/1/19 11:34 AM 56 Gottskálk Jensson Bibliography Primary Literature Árni Magnússon, »Ævi Sæmundar fróða (1690)«, in: Í garði Sæmundar fróða, tr. by Gottskálk Jensson, ed. by Gunnar Harðarson / Sverrir Tómasson, Reykjavík 2008, 143 – 170. Bartholin, Thomas, Antiquitates Danicæ de Causis Contemptæ a Danis adhuc Gentilibus Mortis […] ex vetustis codicibus & monumentis hactenus ineditis congesti, Copenhagen 1689. Biörners, Erik Julius (ed.), Nordiska Kämpa dater, Stockholm 1737. Dal, Niels Hufvedsson, Specimen biographicum de antiquariis Sveciae: in quo Johannis Hadorphii, Eliae Brenneri & Islandorum curae enarrantur, Stockholm 1724. Dolmer, Jens / Oddur Eyjólfsson (ed. / tr.) Hird-Skraa Udi ded gamle Norske Sprok / retteligen ofversat paa Danske, Copenhagen 1666. Dolmer, Jens / Oddur Eyjólfsson / Peder Hansen Resen (ed. / tr.), Jus aulicum antiqvum Norvagicum Lingvâ antiqvâ Norvagicâ vocatum à Jano Dolmero Dano in Lingvam Danicam & Latinam translatum notisqve Danicis & Latinis illustratum, Copenhagen 1673. Faulkes, Anthony (ed.), Two versions of Snorra Edda from the 17th century. Rit Stofnunar Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi 13 – 14 (2 vols.), Reykjavík 1977 – 1979. Id. / Gunnlaugur Ingólfsson (eds.), Magnús Ólafsson of Laufás. Specimen Lexici Runici and Glossarium Priscæ Linguæ Danicæ. Orðfræðirit fyrri alda 5, London 2010. Finnur Jónsson (ed.), Árni Magnússons Levned og Skrifter (2 vols.), ed. by Finnur Jónsson, Copenhagen 1930. Guðmundur Andrésson, Deilurit. Íslenzk rit síðari alda 2, ed. by Jakob Benediktsson, Copenhagen 1948. Id., Lexicon Islandicum. Orðabók Guðmundar Andréssonar. Ný útgáfa. Orðfræðirit fyrri alda 4, ed. by Gunnlaugur Ingólfsson / Jakob Benediktsson, Reykjavík 1999. Guðmundur Ólafsson (ed.), Sagann af Sturlauge hinum Starf-sama, Uppsala 1694. Id. (ed.), Sagan af Illuga Grydar fostra, Uppsala 1695. Holberg, Ludvig, Danmarks Riges Historie, Copenhagen 1732. Id., »Solutio Problematis de hypothesibus Historiæ Danicæ, in Collatione honorum Baccalaureatus publice recitata in Dom: Consistor: 1731«, in: Kjøbenhavnske Samlinger af rare trykte og utrykte Piecer, ed. by Wille Høyberg, vol. 1, Copenhagen 1755, 403 – 434. Jakob Benediktsson (ed.), Arngrimi Jonae opera latine conscripta (4 vols.), Copenhagen 1957. Jón Eiríksson (ed.), Konungs skuggsjá / Speculum regale, Sorø 1768. Id., Thormod Torfesens Levnetsbeskrivelse, Copenhagen 1788. Id., Thormod Torfesens Levnetsbeskrivelse, Stavanger 2009. 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