In the case of Iceland, a “rediscovery” of pre-Christian mythology did not have to wait for the advent of Romantic Nationalism. Stories and imagery from the “Poetic” and “Prose Edda” had remained in currency in the genre of popular poetry known as rímur (singl. ríma). This tradition of alliterate and rhymed poetry, the roots of which can be traced back to the 14th century, was actively alive into the 20th, and prevented the Eddas from becoming the forgotten treasure trove that such corpora had become elsewhere in post-medieval Europe, the Romantic-philological rediscovery of which could then be invoked for an ideal of national rejuvenation.

In 1786, Jón Ólafsson of Svefneyjar (1731–1811) won a prize essay from the University of Copenhagen with a treatise on Old Norse poetry, entitled Om Nordens gamle Digtekonst, dens Grundregler, Versarter, Sprog og Foredragsmaade (“On the old poetry of the North, its basic principles, prosody, language and mode of performance”). The importance of this work lies in the fact that it contributed to the revival of Eddic metres– notably the fornyrðislag, “old word metre” – in modern Icelandic literature. Jón preferred Eddic verse to skaldic poetry and propagated the idea that its stylistic simplicity indicated its proximity to mankind’s primordial poetic language. Jón had a great influence on his nephew Finnur Magnússon (Danish: Finn Magnusen; 1781–1847), who became an influential philologist, archeologist and runologist in Copenhagen, with several important works on Old Norse mythology.

Bjarni Thorarensen (1786–1841), often designated as Iceland’s first Romantic poet, was influenced both by Finnur Magnússon’s call for Nordic national art and by Adam Oehlenschläger’s poetic use of mythological motifs. The most prominent Eddic feature in Bjarni’s poetry is undoubtedly his frequent use of the fornyrðislag. He also used mythological themes in order to oppose a Nordic character to the balmy and decadent South. In Suðurlönd og norðurlönd (“Southern lands and northern lands”) this cultural dichotomy is primordialized through the creation myth from Gylfaginning (in the “Prose Edda”), and situated in a time “before Óðinn’s father was alive”, when Frost (Hrímið) moved southwards to encounter the sun. In other poems, Bjarni credited the sea god Ægir with having created the Icelandic national character, while Bacchus and Freyja – representing southern decadence and northern purity respectively – are contrasted with each other.

Eddic motifs remained relatively scarce in the Romantic poetry of the so-called “Men of Fjölnir” (Fjölnismenn), associated with the journal Fjölnir (1835-47). The group’s most prominent member, Jónas Hallgrímsson, turned to the Icelandic sagas in his quest for ancient themes, but hardly refers to the colourful gods of the Old Norse pantheon at all. The reason for this should perhaps be sought in the Eddas’ negative association with the aforementioned rímur tradition, of which Jónas was the most articulate critic. Even so, the naturalist Jónas was influenced by Finnur Magnússon’s idea of myth as a form of natural philosophy, and in some of Jónas’s scientific essays the cyclical world view of the Eddas is interpreted as proof of the ancestors’ great wisdom. The catastrophic events prophesized in the Völuspá were easily related to the violent geological events which had, according to the scientific teachings of catastrophism, been responsible for the vehement development of life on earth.

The full-scale poetic cultivation of Eddic motifs did not take off until later on in the century, when many Icelandic journals and periodicals – like Fjölnir, Iðunn and Skírnir – took their titles from the Eddas, and the next generation of Icelandic Romantics entered the scene. In the visual arts, painters from Sigurður Guðmundsson to Einar Jónsson drew inspiration from the Eddas. Similar, though divergent, influences were picked up by poets. The poet-philologist Grímur Thomsen (1820–1896), a supporter of the Pan-Scandinavian movement, considered the Eddic poems a pre-Christian “Quran of the Scandinavians”, the product of an oral tradition in which all the Nordic nations had been united culturally, linguistically and religiously. This image of pagan unity could, in Grímur’s view, offer a blueprint for future Scandinavian integration. He stressed the influence of the Nordic belief-system on the strong and independent spirit of the Nordic peoples. In his most elaborate poem dealing with the subject of Old Norse religion, Ásareiðin (“The ride of the Æsir”, 1895), the disappearance of the Old Faith is presented as a world-historical event in sublime diction. Hið nýja Ginnungagap (“The New Ginnungagap”, 1895), evoking the Eddic concept of yawning emptiness before creation, addresses the emptiness of the modern loss of faith.

In order to galvanize the Icelandic struggle for greater autonomy from Denmark with the revolutionary spirit of the 1848-49 Hungarian Uprising, the poet Gísli Brynjúlfsson (1827–1888) made the daring philological suggestion that the thunder god Thor was a euhemerization of the historical Attila the Hun – the primordial Hungarian; accordingly, the Russian armies are presented as the mythological giants from the east, to be smashed by Thor/Attila/the Hungarian people; in the process, Thor’s hammer becomes a positive symbol of revolution. Einar Benediktsson (1864–1940), less interested in foreign revolutions, sought the traces of mythical origins in the Icelandic landscape. Sumarmorgunn í Ásbyrgi (“Summer morning in Ásbyrgi”, 1893) sees the eponymous horse-shoe canyon in the north of Iceland as the footprint of Sleipnir, the eight-legged flying horse of Odin. Nothing suggests that pre-Christian Icelanders had previously made this connection, making this a good example of an invented mythological tradition.

The link between mythology and landscape is also important in the writings of the poet and scholar Benedikt Gröndal (1826–1907), who claimed the Eddic poems as a particularly Icelandic tradition, to the exclusion of the other Nordic countries and German mythologists claiming a common origin. Benedikt saw the echo of the country’s violent volcanic geology in myths like those about the apocalyptic Ragnarök, and uses mythical themes to proclaim cultural and political ideals for Iceland’s future (e.g. Brísingamen, “Freyja’s brooch”, 1871).

Around 1900, and especially after the establishment of the University of Iceland in 1911, the philological school emphasizing the Icelandic origin of the Eddic poems gained in strength. Björn M. Ólsen (1850–1919), philologist and first rector of the new university, maintained that much of the mythological material constituting the Eddas was of common Nordic origin, but that the “creative moment” in which these narratives were transformed into true poetry had sprung from the peculiar and unique character of medieval Icelandic history and society. This Icelandic character meant that the poems could still serve as a national repertoire of images and motifs for contemporary Icelandic artists. Ólsen’s emphasis on the Eddas’ Icelandic origin was largely inspired by the authoritative enthusiasm evinced by the German scholar Konrad Maurer (1823–1902), and by the climate of Iceland’s drive towards political and intellectual independence from Denmark. In these decades, the national interpretation of Old Norse mythology led to the introduction of Eddic given names – like Baldur or Óðin – and to an entire neighbourhood in downtown Reykjavík with pagan street names.