Until the mid-18th century, the only pre-Christian pagan belief system taken seriously by European scholars was the Greek/Roman one of classical antiquity. Indeed, throughout the 19th century, the study of mythology remained to a significant extent a specialism for classical scholars (e.g. Karl Otfried Müller’s Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie, 1825). References to the pagan religions of northern and eastern Europe were dispersed in obscure sources; isolated references from medieval or early-modern chroniclers were, at best, picked up piecemeal by antiquarians interested in the ancient settlements of their countries.
This changed with the (re)discovery of the ancient Nordic pantheon and belief system following the publications of Monumens de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes, et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves, by Paul-Henri Mallet, a Geneva-born painter and amateur scholar who had been appointed Professor of Belles-Lettres in Copenhagen in 1752. Mallet’s digest of the Prose Edda and Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla coincided with Bodmer’s rediscovery of the Nibelungenlied, helped boost the success of Macpherson’s Ossian, and was translated into English by Bishop Percy as Northern Antiquities (1770). Within Denmark, it triggered a fresh edition of Snorri’s Heimskringla (1777-83) and an edition of the Poetic Edda (a more obscure text than the Prose Edda). In 1808, Rasmus Nyerup published his Edda eller Skandinavernes hedenske Gudelære (“Edda, or the Scandinavians’ pagan belief-system”), and N.S.F. Grundtvig his Nordens Mytologi, eller Udsigt over Eddalæren for dannede Mænd, som ei selv ere Mytologer (“The mythology of the North, or a survey of Edda lore for learned men who are not themselves mythologists”). Germanic mythology, as a counterpart to the classical repertoire, was hailed by the aging Herder in Zutritt der nordischen Mythologie zur neueren Dichtkunst (1803), and developed rapidly in the next decades, driven largely by national rivalries. Within the Nordic countries, Denmark and Sweden (and under the Danish and Swedish Crowns, Iceland and Norway) all saw themselves as the legitimate senior inheritors of the pagan prehistory of the North; meanwhile, German scholars claimed their stake, culminating in Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie of 1835. Grimm crucially dovetailed the ancient textual evidence for supernatural belief-systems with contemporary folklore: superstitions and fairy-tales involving supernatural agencies and non-human creatures and monsters (dwarfs, elves, giants) were considered by Grimm the worn-down vestiges of ancient epic wonder-tales and pantheons.
This close intertwinement between folk tales and mythology was not specific to the Germanic tradition following Grimm. In Ireland, folk tales about dwarfs and elves collected in the Grimm mode by Thomas Crofton Croker were correlated with ancient references to mythical non-human races inhabiting Ireland (Tuatha Dé Danaan, Fomorians, etc.), and Thomas Keightley structurally linked folklore and mythology in his Fairy Mythology of 1828 (a German translation appeared in the same year as Mythologie der Feen und Elfen). Even earlier, in 1804, a Slavic mythology by the Russian army officer Andrej von Kayssarow (Versuch einer slavischen Mythologie in alphabetischer Ordnung) explicitly argued that the richest sources for mythological material were to be found in Russian fairy tales (skazki) as well as epic texts such as the recently-edited Lay of Prince Igor’s campaign. Kayssarow, whose book appeared in Göttingen, was a student of the highly reputed antiquarian/philologist Schlözer, who had edited antiquarian material (the Nestor Chronicle) on early Russian history. Other important early chronicles mentioning the worship and mythical ancestry of the ancient Slavs were the Chronica Boëmorum (on the mythical Czech figures of Krok, Cech, and Libuše) and references in Saxo Grammaticus to Wendish temple-ruins (picked up by the Sorbian-German antiquary Karl Gottlob von Anton, in his Erste Linie eines Versuches über der alten Slaven Ursprung, Sitten, Gebräuche, Meinungen und Kenntisse, Leipzig 1783-89). Slavic mythological interest was inspired by the Nordic Edda rediscovery: Joachim Lelewel, then in the earliest stages of his turbulent career, gave Polish-language accounts of the Edda in 1807 and 1828. It was Lelewel, too, who dovetailed the antiquarian and an ethnographic approach: his book on Polish-Lithuanian folk customs Winulska sławiansczyzn (1816) opened mythological sight-lines later explored by his Vilnius student Teodor Narbutt. Slavic mythology was brought into the academic mainstream (which often meant: adopted into philological scholarship in the Grimm tradition) when 18th-century writings by the Polish cleric-antiquary Adam Naruszewicz were republished in Leipzig in 1836 as Mythologia Słowiańska, followed in 1842 by the more speculative-philosophical treatise of the Slovak-Austrian Ignaz Johann Hanusch, Die Wissenschaft des slawischen Mythus, im weitesten, den altpreussisch-lithauischen Mythus mitumfassenden Sinne (Lemberg/L’viv 1842). In the southern Slavic lands under the Habsburg Crown, an 18th-century antiquarian tradition (involving Anton Linhart and Matija Petar Katančić) was academically consolidated by Gregor Krek, Professor of Slavic Mythology at Graz, in his Über die Wichtigkeit der slavischen traditionellen Literatur als Quelle der Mythologie (1869). A Pan-Slavic synthesis consolidated itself between Konrad Schwenck’s Herder-inspired Die Mythologie der Slawen (1853), and the Mitologia słowiańska (1918) by the Pole Aleksander Brückner.
This Slavic mythological interest was itself folded into a larger Indo-European frame: from the days of Sir William Jones onwards, the various pagan deities had been functionally correlated, not only within Europe (Hermes/Mercurius/Odin, Zeus/Jupiter/Donar/Perkuns), but also with their Indian analogues (Vishnu, etc.). Much as the Germanic, Celtic, Slavic languages were part of an Indo-European complex (alongside Greek, Roman, and Sanskrit) so too it was felt that the oldest strata of Europe’s pagan belief system reflected a primordial Indo-European ethnogenesis, before, as the influential philologist Max Müller phrased it, “the primæval Aryan race […] broke up into Hindus, Greeks, Romans, Germans, and Celts”. Müller’s views were echoed in Natko Nodilo’s Stara vjera Srba i Hrvata, na glavnoj osnovi pjesama, priča i govora narodnoga (1885-90, “The ancient belief-system of the Serbs and Croats, based largely on songs, stories, and the vernacular”); the notorious “Slavic veda” forgeries (purportedly noted down from oral ballad-recitation in the Macedonian mountains, and published by the credulous Stefan Verković in 1874-81), relied on a similar Indo-European syncretic frame: they united Orpheus, Vishnu, and Alexander the Great.
Indeed, mythology (which, typically for Romantic Nationalism, tended to combine assiduous fact-gathering and wayward, speculative interpretations about the creative mind of the national collective) was prone to mystification, pranks, and forgery. The Bohemian mythical figures Croc and Libuše were supplemented with additional but falsely contrived characters, Zaboj and Slavoj, in the forged manuscripts “edited” by Václav Hanka; a flight of fancy on a Basque ancestral patriarch, Aitor, by Augustin Chaho was taken seriously by Basques in Spain searching for their ethnic roots, and a Frisian prank-forgery was, embarrasingly, taken seriously in some quarters. Lithuanian mythology, involving a love goddess Milda, fissioned out of a bi-ethnic Polish-Lithuanian antiquarian tradition partly as a result of speculative or poetical readings culled from the material collected by the credulous amateur scholar Teodor Narbutt (by the Lithuanian antiquary Simonas Daukantas and the Polish Romantic writer Józef Ignacy Kraszewski). The Macphersonian tendency to assemble oral balladry, folk songs and folk tales, into an epic, para-Homeric whole, involving heroes and supernatural powers, proved a persistent influence which allowed for a close conjunction between fact-gathering and flights of fancy, all for the greater cultural glory of the nation. In Swedish Finland, folk ballads were interpreted mythologically by scholars such as Cristfried Ganander; his Mythologia Fennica (1789), a dictionary-style list of deities from folk religion, often illustrated with stanzas from Finnish folk balladry, included names like Ilmarinen and Väinämöinen which were to feature as important protagonists in the later, folk-based Kalevala (1835), compiled by Elias Lönnrot as a Finnish national epic. In Riga, the young Romantic poet Kristjan Jaak Peterson published a German translation of Ganander’s Mythologia fennica for the Baltic-German periodical Beiträge zur genauern Kenntniss der ehstnischen Sprache (1822). In his notes, Peterson pointed out that Estonian folk poetry featured a mythical giant Kalewi-Poeg who was an obvious analogue to the Finnish Kalevi; this Kalevipoeg was to become the superhuman hero of the eponymous Estonian national epic, compiled from and inspired by folk balladry on the Kalevala model.
Cross-Baltic transfers converged around Riga, where medieval chronicle references to Baltic paganism were overlaid by influences from Estonian, Polish/Lithuanian, and Russian/Slavic mythology to inspire a syncretic Latvian type. Latvian mythology was academically bolstered by local German scholars, beginning with Garlieb Merkel (Die Vorzeit Lieflands, 1798-99) and culminating with the great folklore-collector and mythologist Wilhelm Mannhardt, a Grimm adept (Letto-Preussische Götterlehre, 1870). While ancient belief-systems were venerated as the most archaic and fundamental expression of a nation’s Weltanschauung, mythological interest was an incontinently transnational vogue. An extreme case is the adoption and ingestion of Irish mythology (which was thriving in the Irish fin de siècle as a marker of that country’s ancient Celtic roots and radical un-Englishness) by Galician cultural revivalists following the work of Manuel Murguía.
Mythology never became an academically instituted discipline. It collected its evidence from fields of knowledge that were methodically far apart and not easily combined: philology, ethnography, archeology. The scholars who took it upon themselves to inventorize and interpret such disparate and cryptic evidence were either amateur literati and belated antiquarians (Verković, Narbutt, Daukantas), trans-discipline monstres sacrés (Grimm, Max Müller), or experts in adjacent disciplines like comparative linguistics, ethnography, or ancient history, for whom mythology was a peripheral field of vision, a context rather than a focus. Always ancillary to the institutionalized disciplines, it never gained an independent foothold in the universities. Mannhardt, towering figure though he was (author of Germanische Mythen, 1858, and instigator of a vast questionnaire-based regional survey of folk traditions and supernatural tales, towards what he conceived as a “Monumenta Mythica Germaniae”), failed at securing a university appointment; and even with the great Jacob Grimm himself, people were uncomfortably aware of his tendency towards indiscriminate, unfocused anecdote-gathering. All this was exacerbated by the fact that myths, of all things, are fatally impervious to anything like falsification or source criticism; unlike textual editing or history-writing, mythology never quite survived the late-19th-century turn from Romanticism to a more positivistic factualism; even in the 20th century it remained the more or less speculative field of individual or idiosyncratic polymaths such as Sir James Frazer and Mircea Eliade.
Mythology was highly important in bestowing anthropological prestige on folk customs and folk literature, safeguarding these against the charge of triviality or vulgarity. Popular festivals, pastimes, tales, and ballads came to be almost habitually interpreted as vestiges of ancient pagan-religious practices and were considered venerable reminders and instances of the nation’s most authentic and primordial cultural bedrock.
In the field of cultural production, mythology made available – from obscure documentation and aided with a good dose of speculative guesswork – a reservoir of mythical narratives for cultural recycling and reproduction. The tales of Wodan, Balder, and Ragnarök, of Deirdre and Milda, of Libuše and Väinämöinen, of Aitor and Lāčplēsis the Bear-Slayer, became leisure reading for the educated bourgeoisie, and a thematic repertoire for painters, sculptors, composers, and storytellers. They tended to follow settled Romantic patterns'; a particularly salient one being the figure of “the last royal priestess of expiring paganism”. Bellini’s opera Norma (1831) is about the tragic fate of a Gaulish druidess under the shadow of the Roman conquest; Hermingard of the oak knolls (Hermingard van de eikenterpen, by Arnout Drost, 1832) is a Batavian heroine at the dawn of Christianity; Silvestris Valiūnas’s Romantic balladry around the figure of Birutė (1828), a Lithuanian princess fleetingly mentioned in medieval chronicles, casts her as the last priestess of a dying pagan cult; Bogomila, in France Prešeren’s elegiac Slovenian-national verse epic Krst pri Savici (1836, “Baptism on the Savica”), is the last priestess of the Slavic goddess Živa, but converts to Christianity. As late as 1879, Francisco Navarro-Villoslada’s historical novel Amaya o los vascos en el siglo VIII (1879) features Basque pagan priestesses guarding the secret Aitor cult. Thus, mythology provided a national repertoire of appealing and high-prestige themes and figures, not only to littérateurs, but also to painters (particularly in Scandinavia) and composers (Wagner’s Ring; Smetana’s Libuše; Stravinskij’s, Rite of Spring).
