One of the more surprising cultural expansions of the modern era has been the rediscovery of the pre-Christian mythology of the northern world and its associated pantheon: once all but completely forgotten, then known only to a small circle of Scandinavian scholars, now familiar across the Western world and beyond, in the form of comic books, mass-market films like Kenneth Branagh’s Thor (2011) and its sequel(s), and fantasy bestsellers like Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001).

At the end of the 16th century, the northern myths and gods were all but unknown. They survived vestigially in the names for the days of the week in Germanic languages, while scholars could read what was said about them by Christian chroniclers such as Bede in Britain and (after the first printed edition of 1514) Saxo Grammaticus in Denmark. Even in northern Europe, though, the memory of them had faded almost to nothing.

The exception was Iceland. There, some time in the 1220s, the author and politician Snorri Sturluson had compiled a work on Old Norse metre and poetic diction for the benefit of practising poets, fearing already that an established tradition was in danger of oblivion. Since the poetic diction relied heavily on mythical and legendary allusion, he gave a brief compendium of the former and some explanations of the latter. The “Deluding of Gylfi” section of what came to be known as Snorri’s Prose Edda includes a mythical account of the world from its creation to its eventual end at Ragnarök, and some twenty stories of the gods and the giants, including such now-familiar tales as the building of the gods’ home of Ásgard, the expedition of Thór and Loki to the giants’ stronghold of Útgardar-Loki, and Thór’s fishing trip with the giant Hymir, when Thór hooks but fails to land the world-encircling Midgard Serpent. Their un-classical mix of humour and grim defiance was to offer a new literary flavour to European palates. In his “Poetic Diction” section Snorri added further stories, including a brief summary of the Nibelung legend, which would also have far-reaching effects.

Knowledge of Snorri’s work was never quite lost in Iceland. Around 1600 the Icelandic priest Magnús Ólafsson of Laufás, was commissioned by the scholar Arngrímur Jónsson to make a re-organized version of the Prose Edda, now known as the Laufás Edda, which was printed in 1608-09 and then supplemented by Magnús’s own Latin translation in 1629. Dissemination outside Iceland began with Ole Worm’s Literatura runica (1636), which used Snorri’s work predominantly for patriotic motives, namely to argue that Old Norse poetry should be claimed for Denmark rather than Sweden. As was natural in a work on poetry, however, Snorri had quoted liberally from pre-existing poems, and in 1643 Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson found a manuscript which contained twenty-nine such poems in “Eddic” style, both mythical and legendary. He presented this manuscript, the Codex Regius, to the king of Denmark in 1662. Although several similar poems have since been found elsewhere, while there are more Eddic quotations, some almost amounting to completeness, in “sagas of old times”, the Codex Regius is the basis for what is now called the Poetic Edda, in analogy to Snorri’s Prose Edda.

Dissemination continued further with the Danish historian Peder Resen’s edition of Edda Islandorum in 1665. This was based on the Laufás Edda, with a Danish translation as well as Magnús’s Latin, but Resen also edited two poems from the Codex Regius, the wisdom poem Hávamál (“The words of the High One”, entitled by Resen “Ethica Odini”) and the poem recounting universal history called Völuspá (“The prophetess’s spell”, to Resen “Philosophia antiquissima”). Resen already shows the immediate, and patriotic, urge to give Old Norse myth continuing moral and philosophical importance.

Patriotic motives were at the same time responsible for the eager rediscovery and publication of saga materials, especially those which might have some bearing on the early history of the Scandinavian nations. In 1689, however, Thomas Bartholinus – though still with a pronounced Danish and anti-Swedish motivation – gave a new slant to views on myth. Bartholinus had been struck by the prevalence in Old Norse sagas and poems, many of them found for him by his then-assistant and manuscript collector Árni Magnússon. He collected and commented on them in his three books of Antiqvitatum Danicarum de causis contemptae a Danis adhuc gentilibus mortis (1689). In this Bartholinus translated such scenes as the death of Ragnar Lodbrók in the snake-pit and the execution of the Jómsvíkings, as well as scenes from the grave-mound such as the poem now called The waking of Angantyr or the vision of Gunnar in Njáls saga. Bartholinus remained a major resource for more than a century. His conclusion as to the causes of such fearlessness and defiance was that the heroes did not fear death because, according to Snorri, they hoped if they died heroically to join Ódin in “the halls of the slain” (now familiarly Anglicized as Valhalla), while an element of dauntless defiance was added because, according to Völuspá, they would march out at the end of the world with the gods to battle the giants and the monsters, and would be defeated. But (Tolkien’s words) they would find that defeat “no refutation”. Bartholinus’s explanation has remained dominant ever since, at popular even more than scholarly levels: it is a major theme of the famous 1954 movie The Vikings, starring Kirk Douglas.

Worm, Resen, and Bartholinus began to have an effect outside Scandinavia, as for instance in George Hickes’s Thesaurus linguarum septentrionalium (1703-05). The next and decisive disseminatory step was however taken by a Swiss scholar living in Copenhagen, Paul-Henri Mallet. He brought out his Introduction à l’histoire de Dannemarc in 1755, with a supplementary volume a year later, Monumens de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes, et particulièrement des ancien Scandinaves. The latter contained French translations of Snorri’s Gylfaginning, and of poems like the Krákumál or “Death-song of Ragnar”. A second expanded edition of both works came out in 1763, there was an anonymous German translation in 1765-69, and in 1770 Thomas Percy translated Mallet into English as Northern antiquities: there was an expanded edition of this as late as 1847, with notes by J.A. Blackwell and a contribution from Sir Walter Scott. Mallet’s chapters on religion continued the confusion of “Druidic” and “Gothic” seen in the sub-title of his Monumens, and did their best also to assimilate Norse mythology to Christianity, arguing for an original, if later corrupted, belief in a Supreme God, and pointing to the belief in the immortality of the soul and a future state with rewards for virtue and punishment for vice. Mallet, however, repeated Bartholinus’s stress on Valhalla for those who died sword in hand, and amplified grimmer aspects of the mythology from passages in the sagas and from poems like the Krákumál, many of which had by this time been printed. His work consolidated many of what were to become the cliché images of the Norse or Viking world: valkyries, Norns, fatalism, etc. With its emphasis on “the sublime”, moreover, especially prominent in the second edition, it harmonized well with the European enthusiasm for Ossian (1760 onwards: the author James Macpherson had read and used Mallet) and the taste for “the Gothic”. Mallet stimulated much poetry and art in both England and Germany. His translator Percy’s Five pieces of runic poetry (1763), and Thomas Gray’s poems The fatal sisters and The descent of Odin (1768), had many followers. In Denmark, Heinrich von Gerstenberg’s Gedicht eines Skalden (1766), based on Völuspá, attracted the attention of Friedrich Klopstock, later a major influence on German poetry and nationalism.

More serious scholars also began to be involved, notably Peter Frederik Suhm, whose Tabeller til den critiske Historie (1779), a supplement to his fourteen-volume history of Denmark, mark the acme of the (misguided) attempt to write history from the collated evidence of the sagas. His Om Odin og den hedniske gudelære og gudstjeneste udi norden came out in 1772. Hans Jacob Wille’s Norwegian Udtog af den nordiske Mythologie (1787) relies on Suhm and Resen rather than on Mallet. A scholarly edition of the entire Poetic Edda began to be published in Copenhagen from 1789. Rasmus Nyerup produced a Danish translation in 1808 with the assistance of Rasmus Rask, who then edited both Prose and Poetic Eddas in Stockholm in 1818. Swedish interest was shown by the formation of groups such as the Götiska Förbundet, which produced a journal named after the goddess Iduna (1811-24). Prominent enthusiasts included the poet Esaias Tegnér, Per Henrik Ling, who wrote a now-forgotten verse epic on the mythology, and Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom, who succeeded Ling as a member of the Swedish Academy.

However, once the mythological materials were known, the question of interpretation was bound to arise. Scandinavian scholars, in particular, faced something of a dilemma. All of them were Christians, often clerics, and well aware of the First Commandment. However, as patriotic Danes (usually), they were reluctant to write off the beliefs of their ancestors, however bloodthirsty, as mere paganism. Resen had led the way by pointing to the moral and philosophical elements of the mythology, Mallet had done his best to follow, and the theme was taken up by Peter Erasmus Müller, later bishop of Sjælland, in his Om Asalærens Ægthed (1811, German translation 1814). In 1800 the University of Copenhagen had set a competition for a prize essay, asking whether Norse mythology should be accepted by poets as an alternative to Greek myths. The winner answered “No”, but the runner-up, Adam Oehlenschläger, backed up his answer, “Yes”, with a string of poems based on Eddic myths, including Thórs Reise til Jotunheim (1806), Baldur hin Gode (1808), and the cycle Nordens Guder (1818). In 1803 Herder’s Zutritt der nordischen Mythologie zur neueren Dichtkunst argued for parity between classical and Norse mythologies.

A rather different route was influentially taken by Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig, whose Nordens Mytologi came out in 1808, with a very much expanded (and differently-spelled) second edition, Nordens Mythologi, in 1832 – by which time another major work had been added to the mythological mix, at least in Grundtvig’s mind, the Old English poem Beowulf, first edited in Copenhagen by the Icelander Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín (1815). Whether this poem has more than vestigial pagan-mythical content may well be doubted, but its first editor did his patriotic best to fit it into the cult of Ódin and the “teachings of the Æsir”. He related the name of the monster Grendel to the Old English word grindel, a bar or bolt; decided further that it meant “lock”; and connected this with the name of the Norse trickster-god Loki, the father of monsters; Grendel’s defeat by Beowulf could then be an echo of Loki’s punishment by Ódin, as could his diabolic attributes, for (said Thorkelín), “devotees of the cult of Ódin pursue Loki with no less hate than Christians their Lucifer”. The theory shows what would be a continuing urge to make northern mythology fit established religious patterns, also seen in Grundtvig’s multi-part poem on the end of paganism, Optrin af kæmpelivets undergang i Norden (1809-11).

Although Grundtvig clashed violently with Thorkelín on almost all aspects of the poem, he made Beowulf a major part of what was in effect his allegorical interpretation of the northern myths, once again with overwhelming patriotic motivation. Grundtvig’s agenda was populist, anti-classical, anti-materialist, dedicated to producing a spiritual revival for Denmark. While the first edition of his Mytologi was subtitled “a survey of Edda-teaching for cultivated men not themselves mythologists”, his second was no longer aimed at “the cultivated” but subtitled “the symbolic language of the North, historically and poetically developed and explained”. In this “symbolic language” the Norse gods stood for energy, the giants for matter, or for materialism. Loki, the trickster-god who seems to take both sides, represented rationalism, while his opponent Thór was the symbol of the Romantic idealism Grundtvig hoped to re-awaken. Myths were given detailed meanings, surely far from the intention of the original tellers: Týr putting his hand in the mouth of the Wolf Fenrir, as a hostage while the other gods bound it, represented the courage of youth, which makes possible the restraining of human bestiality, once innocence has died with Balder, by the immaterial bond of love. In Beowulf, Grundtvig saw the sleeping warriors in Heorot, unaware of the renewed assault of Grendel’s mother, as Denmark, unconscious of the renewed threat from Germany. Grundtvig’s mythology formed a major part of the teaching at the “popular colleges” set up under his influence, especially along the German border. Graduates of these schools would provide the backbone of the rifle associations which sprang up after the Prusso-Danish war of 1864.

Although Georg Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker was out of line with new developments on its appearance in 1810-12, volumes 5 and 6 of its second edition, written by Franz Josef Mone under the title Geschichte des Heidentums im nördlichen Europa (1819), tried to make up ground. By the 1830s several further accounts of Norse mythology were appearing, such as Grenville Pigott’s derivative A manual of Scandinavian mythology (1839) and a sequence of publications by Finnur Magnússon, including his edition of Eddic poems (1821-23), Eddalæren og dens oprindelse (1824-26), and in Latin for scholarly Europeans, Priscae veterum borealium mythologiae lexicon (1828).

However, Grundtvig’s great antagonist and competitor was Jacob Grimm. He and his brother Wilhelm had published their edition of Die Lieder der alten Edda in 1815, and Jacob brought out his long-lived and immensely influential Deutsche Mythologie in 1835, with expanded second and third editions in 1844 and 1854, and a posthumous fourth in 1875-78. In between, Jacob had also published his Deutsche Grammatik (1819), which revolutionized not only language study but the humanities more generally. The Mythologie may be seen as an attempt to do for mythology what the Grammatik had done for philology, and also as an attempt to exploit the ambiguity of the word “deutsch”: which could mean, in English terms, “German” – so the Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch, a dictionary of High German – but also “Germanic”. The underlying problem for Grimm was that most of the surviving material on early mythology was not German but Norse. Scandinavian scholars naturally did not take kindly to having Norse seen as a branch of “Deutsch”. (J.S. Stallybrass’s 1880-83 English translation of the work was tactfully entitled Teutonic mythology.)

What Grimm hoped to unearth was a full picture, using all available material, of the mythology which he assumed had once been a complete system understood across the whole northern world. His methodology was based on his own discovery of “comparative philology”, and involved three “buried theses” which he did not state explicitly: cognateness, continuity, and authenticity. Since languages like Old High German, Old Norse, and Old English were clearly cognate, sharing for instance the words for “elf” and “dwarf”, as well as the names of the gods (Wotan, Ódin, Woden), the concepts behind the words must have been cognate as well. Finding the original underlying concept was like finding the original form of a word in the linguists’ reconstructed language Proto-Germanic. Moreover, since there must have been an unbroken continuity in speech between, for instance, Old Norse and modern Danish, there must have been an unbroken continuity of narrative as well. Modern fairy tales might then well contain misunderstood fragments of ancient myth. It was the task of the mythologist to pick these out, aided by his own sense for genuineness, for authenticity.

One unspoken and probably unconscious motive was nevertheless to produce a mythological structure of the sort that the mythologist desired, in Grimm’s case a well-ordered one. His account moves hierarchically downwards, from God, the Supreme Being, to the individual Norse gods and goddesses (the reduced status of “half-goddess” being awarded to those neither wife nor daughter of a god). Next come figures such as Norns and valkyries, with further down, wights, elves, dwarfs, giants, and other figures of the “lower mythology”. Attitudes to the natural world were also considered, and the concept of fate was given special treatment. Grimm readily accepted Thorkelín’s view of Grendel as a Loki-avatar, and his disciple John Mitchell Kemble’s belief that Germanic origin-myths could be traced in Beowulf. In brief, Grimm’s mythology on the whole reinforced rather than challenged the social structures of his own time and place, while it also became a major part of the imaginative structure of a not-yet-united and as-yet undefined “Deutschland”.

It was accordingly received (outside Scandinavia) with enthusiasm. Karl Simrock’s carefully-titled Handbuch der deutschen Mythologie mit Einschluss der nordischen (1853-55) complemented Grimm, whose status as scholar and nationalist was by this time beyond challenge, while making the subject more accessible for German readers, as did Hermann Lüning’s Altnordische Mythologie (1859). Niels Matthias Petersen’s Nordisk Mythologi (1849) gave an account for Scandinavian readers, closely followed by the Northern mythology (1851) of Benjamin Thorpe, who had been trained in Copenhagen. It was at about this time (1848) that Richard Wagner began to work on what would become the opera-cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (completed 1874). Among Wagner’s many sources were both the Prose and the Poetic Edda, with German editions and commentaries: he also owned and used a copy of Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie in its second edition.

The most individual work in this area, in the immediate post-Grimm and post-Grundtvig era, was, however, the poet Ludwig Uhland’s Der Mythus von Thor nach nordischen quellen (1836). Its distinctive features were the belief that the myth was a nature myth, and the conviction that analyses of the names in Eddic myths could indicate their meaning. The Thór-stories of the Prose Edda certainly invited such an interpretation, for his name means “thunder”, and his hammer Mjöllnir could readily be seen as the lightning-bolt. Uhland went on to argue that the giants Thór fights against represent the natural forces which resist human endeavour, notably (in Scandinavian conditions) rock and stone. In defeating the giant Hrungnir, Thór conquered “the stone-world which resists the tilling of the earth”. The clay-giant Möckurkálfi, shattered by Thjalfi, stands for the clay at the foot of the mountains, while Thjalfi himself is a reminder that human labour is needed as well as divine favour. The stone left embedded in Thór’s head stands for the stones always turned up by the plough, even after the ground has been prepared. Örvandil is the seed protected by Thór from the ice of winter, and his lost toe stands for the seeds that sprout too early and are nipped by the frost. The witch Gróa, again as her name suggests, stands for the power of growth. Uhland’s work had considerable effect, both in its enhancement of Thór’s status against the earlier Odinic tendency, and through its methodology, which connected philology and mythology once again. George Stephens’s fantastic encomium on Thór forty years later, Thunor the Thunderer (1878), took Uhland to a new extreme.

By that time it was generally agreed that mythological studies in general were on a new and productive basis. Famously, in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72), the outdated pedant Casaubon’s search for a “key to all mythologies” (which seems to include nothing Norse or Germanic) is contemptuously dismissed by a younger relative: since Casaubon knows no German his “researches” are useless. A few years earlier Max Müller’s Comparative mythology (1856) had overtly asserted the connection with comparative philology and made the claim that a new and “scientific” study was now possible – further reinforced by Müller’s own researches into Asian mythology. Müller’s one-size-fits-all conviction that all myths were nature myths was guyed by Richard Frederick Littledale, whose The Oxford solar myth (1870) “proved”, using Müller’s own methods, that Müller himself was a solar myth. It was also answered more analytically by Andrew Lang, first in an essay in 1873 and then in his Modern mythology (1877). Lang, however, was still a keen follower of Grimm, as shown by his long “Introduction” to a translation of the Grimms’ Fairy-tales, issued separately in 1884 as Household tales: Their origin, diffusion and relations to the higher myths; this inter alia states strongly Grimm’s “buried thesis” of continuity.

The most disturbing development of mythical studies in the later 19th, and on into the 20th century, was, however, the transition from patriotic nationalism to racist supremacism, especially in Germany. In Jacob Grimm’s lifetime, Deutschland did not exist as a political entity, only as an ideal, its borders as yet unsettled, and the notion of deutsch (“German”? “Germanic”?) ambiguously elastic. One solution was the concept of the Volk, an abstraction which included a quest for origins and a belief in a former spiritual unity, of which the old “Germanic” mythology was the main expression.

An early German parallel to journals like the Swedish Iduna had been Friedrich David Gräter’s Bragur: Ein litterarisches magazin der deutschen und nordischen Vorzeit, of which seven volumes appeared between 1791 and 1802, with an eighth under the parallel title Odinna und Teutona in 1812. It was further continued as Idunna und Hermode (four volumes 1812-68). However, from the 1880s magazines celebrating German(ic) Kultur began to appear with titles such as Heimdall (the watchman of the Norse gods), Odin, and (for those who preferred Thór) Hammer, while an early and ominous enthusiast for Norse myth and saga was Kaiser Wilhelm II, who composed a “Song of Aegir”, first performed in 1896. It was translated into English by Max Müller, and also performed as part of the coronation entertainment for King George V in 1910. Guido von List added a belief in the occult power of runes. His concept of “Armanism” was reinforced by the concept of an “Aryan race”, which translated Indo-European linguistics as pioneered by Grimm into racial theory and the idea of a master-race of “Indo-Germanen”. Leopold von Schroeder, a Wagner enthusiast, produced two volumes on Arische Religion (1914-16). Societies were formed such as the Edda Society and, in 1918, the Thule Society, which included future prominent Nazis among its members, though it is not certain that Hitler ever joined. Heinrich Himmler was, however, a firm believer in mystic runes (seen on the collar-flashes of the SS), saw the swastika as a Thór-symbol, and supported pseudo-mythological researches. Such beliefs, and religions such as “Wotanism” or “Ariosophy”, remain current in white-supremacist circles, for instance among the white American prison population.

Access to versions of the myths themselves meanwhile became ever easier with the wide distribution of compilations such as Annie and Eliza Keary’s Heroes of Asgard (1857), poems like Longfellow’s The challenge of Thór (1863), and many derivative works. Such continuous dissemination reached the comic-book level with the Marvel Comics creation, which ran to more than six hundred issues, of “The Mighty Thor”, though by this time the influence of Eddic materials amounted to little more than a set of characters (Loki, Sif, etc.) and an extremely sub-Bartholinian heroic ethic.

More intellectual developments had been brought about, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, by the ever-increasing amount of ethnographic information about what Lang calls “savage life” produced by Europeans in the Age of Empire. This gave rise to such works as Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive culture (1871), but was given influential and long-lasting expression, as regards the study of myth, in James George Frazer’s The golden bough in its many editions and expansions from 1890. Frazer’s first and essential connection was between the old classical accounts of the priest of Nemi and contemporary accounts of king-sacrifice to ensure fertility in the non-European world. He and his followers applied the idea of fertility-deities, and survivals of ancient practice, very widely, not only to myth but also to history and to Arthurian romance, as in Jessie Weston’s From ritual to romance (1920). Volumes 10 and 11 of the twelve-volume third edition of The golden bough (both 1913) were entitled Balder the beautiful.

The impact of Frazer’s work in the literary world may be gauged from the respectful references to both Frazer and Weston in the first of T.S. Eliot’s notes on The waste land (1922). Since then much of 20th-century literature has shown an anthropologically-fed interest in mythical imaginative patterns, a trend bolstered, after Jessie Weston, by the work of H.M. and N.K. Chadwick and Joseph Campbell, to name but three. To sum up, both myth studies and myths themselves have now ceased to be the concern only of scholars, and have become a part of contemporary popular culture.