The German legal historian Konrad Maurer (Frankenthal 1823 – Munich 1902), son of a legal historian, spent part of his youth in Greece, where his father was on King Otto’s advisory council. During his legal studies (1840-46, in Munich, Leipzig and Berlin) he attended lectures by Jacob Grimm and developed an interest in folklore and in Germanic culture, but following his doctoral promotion in 1846 was appointed to the law faculty of Munich University, obtaining a chair in 1855. He published a monograph on Icelandic legal history (Die Entstehung des isländischen Staates und seiner Verfassung) in 1852, praising that country’s constitution as primevally democratic; indeed, as early as 1848 he had begun writing in support of Icelandic autonomy vis-à-vis Denmark, becoming, in the course of the following years, a strong supporter of Jón Sigurðsson’s political campaign. One of Maurer’s articles was translated into Icelandic and published in Jón’s own periodical Ný félagsrit; recycling many of Jón’s own arguments, its prestigious authorship gave them more weight. Maurer was appreciated as a powerful moral support, but his political sympathies rendered him unpopular in Denmark.

Maurer travelled to Iceland in 1858; following the example of his mentor Grimm, he recorded every orally transmitted folk tale he could get his hands on. The result was an impressive collection, eventually published under the title Isländische Volkssagen der Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1860); again, the scholarly endorsement from a prestigious foreign academic did much to raise the prestige of the folk material thus assembled, while raising the popularity of Maurer in Iceland. Maurer’s system of classifying the different types of Icelandic folk tales was admired by Jón Árnason, who was encouraged by Maurer in his own collecting activities. Jón structured his own voluminous anthology on Maurer’s model, and it was Maurer who made sure that the two volumes of Jón’s Íslenzkar Þjóðsögur og Æfintýri (“Icelandic folk tales and Legends”, Leipzig, 1862-64) were published by the same Leipzig publisher where his own collection had appeared.

Maurer’s (characteristically cultural-cum-political) dedication to the Icelandic cause is also reflected in his views on Icelandic philology and the origins of Old Norse literature, which he expressed in his lectures delivered in Munich, Oslo, and Copenhagen. He saw the Icelandic sagas first and foremost as works of literature, produced by the medieval minds who put the tales into writing, rather than as the end-product of a long-standing oral transmission. At the same time he discountenanced the general opinion that the sagas were historical accounts, documenting actual events taking place in Iceland in the Saga Age. This provoked German colleagues like Karl Müllenhoff, who saw Maurer’s Iceland-centred view as a diminution of the common-Germanic interpretations philologically enshrined ever since Grimm: while Germans could see themselves as the co-heirs of an common-Nordic oral-cultural root system, the specifically Icelandic literary genesis of the sagas as put forward by Maurer precluded such a claim. Maurer’s theory on the literary origin of the sagas – which would become known as the book-prose theory – influenced some prominent Icelandic philologists, like Björn M. Ólsen and Sigurður Nordal.