Cults and new fringe religions have been a topic of concern
in the United States for the past 30 years.[1] Although many
relatively mainstream cults have long exploited the communicative
power of the Internet, little systematic attention has been devoted
to the phenomenon of “cyber-cults” – loosely-knit fringe groups
that, for all practical purposes, exist only on the Internet.
For reasons that will be examined later in this paper, such cults
are prone to be more extreme than their “real-world” counterparts,
blurring the distinction between fantasy and reality in ways that
can pose real dangers to the cultists themselves, as well as to
those perceived as critical of their beliefs. This paper will
undertake the first serious examination of one such cyber-cult, that
has coalesced around the 19th-century Swedish novelist, Viktor
Rydberg, and his racial-nationalist fantasy, Undersökningar i
germanisk mythologi. Part One of the paper will provide a brief
historical overview of Rydberg’s life and career, while Part Two
will locate the Undersökningar in the historical context of
“Germanic” racial-nationalist ideology that reached its mature form
less than 45 years later in the Third Reich. The remainder of the
paper will recount the development of the modern cyber-cult based on
Rydberg and his work, and consider the legal landscape constraining
the activities of such groups.
I. THE
HISTORICAL
RYDBERG
It would be hard to imagine a writer less likely to register on the
fleeting attention span of Internet e-lists and chat rooms than
Abraham Viktor Rydberg (1828-1895). Although his imaginative fiction
and poetry enjoyed wide popularity in his home country during his
lifetime, over the past century Rydberg has fallen into
almost total obscurity outside Sweden. He does not receive so much as a
footnote, for example, in the massive, 324-volume Dictionary of
Literary Biography. If Rydberg is mentioned in Anglo-American
scholarship today, it is usually in conjunction with a gay studies
curriculum. According to the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality,
Rydberg, together with his long-time friend Pontus Wikner, played an
important part in the emergence of an underground gay culture in
Victorian Sweden under the repressive anti-sodomy legislation of
1864.[2]
As noted in GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian,Bisexual,
Transgender and Queer Culture, despite the legal ban on such
activities, Rydberg and Wikner were counted “[a]mong the important
Swedish cultural figures of the period who engaged in same-sex
sexual relationships,”[3]
and the thinly veiled homoerotic themes in Rydberg’s writing “were
brought to a newly formed mass audience of bourgeois readers (who
mostly preferred not to understand his homoerotic hints).”[4]
The “controlling passion of Rydberg’s life” has been described as
gosse-svärmeri – boy-craziness.[5]
The Scandinavian gay studies journal, Lambda Nordica, has
examined Rydberg’s erotic fixation on the aesthetic ideal of the
“Snow White Youth,”[6]
and the writer’s fascination with the youthful male physique is
strongly conveyed in many of his works, including his 1859 novel,
The Last Athenian and his essay on Antinous, the young lover of
the Emperor Hadrian.[7]
In pursuit undertaken.” Moffett, supra note 5, at 83. the
latter work, written as Rydberg emerged from a serious depression,
the author “exhibits a deep sympathy for same-sex relations,”
notwithstanding the Swedish legislation banning such conduct.[8]
This refusal to conceal his aesthetic focus in the face of possible
prosecution was one of the most compelling qualities of Rydberg’s
life. It is therefore both sad and ironic that his modern-day
devotees know so little of the man and his work that Rydberg’s name
is now sometimes invoked in support of homophobic polemics warning
against the supposed evils of the gay lifestyle.[9] There was nothing in Rydberg’s early life to
suggest that anything but an anonymous, working-class existence
awaited him. He was the son of an alcoholic prison guard who was
unable to support his family after Rydberg’s mother died in the
cholera epidemic of 1834. Young Abraham was shunted through a
succession of foster homes until he dropped out of school after his
first year at Lund University and found employment with the
Göteborgs handels och sjöfartsstidning (Gothenburg Mercantile
& Shipping Gazette) as a newspaper writer, the career he was to
pursue for most of his life.[10]
Finally able to pay his bills from his employment as a journalist,
Rydberg filled his spare time writing popular fiction, which he was
allowed to serialize for publication in the pages of his employer’s
newspaper. His tragic childhood left an indelible mark on Rydberg,
who suffered from symptoms of “severe mental illness” as an adult.[11]
Rydberg’s later work often expressed the writer’s deep emotional
longing to be reunited with the mother he had lost,[12]
and the “mother[13]obsession so evident in his work has a bearing on the homosexuality
covertly expressed in his many poems about naked children and
adolescents.”
At the same time, much of Rydberg’s most creative writing would also
display a yearning for the normality of a traditional family life –
something that had been snatched away from the writer as a child,
and was denied to him as an adult by the country’s legal climate. His friend Wikner made a passionate appeal for the
legalization of same-sex marriage in his book, Psykologiska
självbkännelser (Psychological Confessions), but such
reforms would not be considered until nearly a century after his and
Rydberg’s lifetime.
Rydberg published his first serialized novel in 1857, the ripping
adventure tale Fribytaren på Östersjön (Freebooter on the
Baltic). The following year brought the serialization in a
literary calendar of the moody and darkly erotic Singoalla,
the work that established Rydberg as a popular favorite with Swedish
readers. Singoalla highlighted what would become some of the
author’s characteristic themes: nature mysticism, Christian
humanism, and a highly charged homoerotic undercurrent. In his
introduction to a 1983 edition of the book, Sven Delblanc noted that
the novel “reflected homosexual desires and impulses in Rydberg
himself,” and that the protagonist’s slaying of young Sorgborn is a
“masked representation of homosexual intercourse.”[14]
Stig Bäckman has countered that other interpretations of the story
are possible,[15] and Birthe Sjöberg suggests that Rydberg’s use
of erotic themes in Singoalla represented an escape from
reality and the loss of an innocent childhood to which the author
longed to return.[16]
Rydberg’s style deliberately harkened back to the Romantic era,
with the result that much of his work seems cloying and overly
sentimental to modern readers. Even in his native land, Rydberg’s
prose is now perceived as “old-fashioned, wordy, sentimental and
even toothless.”[17] Nevertheless, the tension between Rydberg’s
thinly disguised homoeroticism and his sentimental paeans to the
simple joys of childhood and family life struck an emotive chord
with Swedish readers of the Victorian era, and his fiction enjoyed
great popularity. The growth of Rydberg’s celebrity as a writer,
combined with his position at the newspaper, gave him a platform
which he used to promote his views on the issues of the day. His
unsuccessful stint as a university student led him to become an
advocate of “folk” education, first promoted by the Danish
theologian N. F. S. Grundtvig, in which rigorous, formal academic
study and research would be replaced by practical training directed
to the common man.[18]
Enamored with what he knew of Hellenic culture, Rydberg advocated
public nudity and group exercise, which he believed had been
practiced in ancient Greece.[19]
In an essay entitled, “On Nudity and Ways of Dressing,” Rydberg
“suggested that a society civilized to the point of wearing clothing
was weak; it could be strengthened if its citizens adopted the
primitive habit of nudity.”[20]
Most importantly, Rydberg harshly criticized what he saw as
modernist trends in Swedish writing, and the authors who employed
such methods. Thus, despite his personal interest in liberalizing
Sweden’s strict code of public morality, Rydberg refused to support
August Strindberg when the modernist writer was tried for blasphemy.[21]In
1877, Uppsala University celebrated its 400th anniversary with a
year-long jubilee. As part of the festivities, honorary doctorates
were bestowed upon a variety of Swedish celebrities at public
ceremonies and – perhaps due in part to the influence of Wikner, who
was then a professor at Uppsala – Rydberg was among those who
received this recognition.[22]
Honorary degrees, of course, are entirely a reflection of the
recipient’s notoriety, and are unrelated to scholarly accomplishment
or capability[23].
Nevertheless, and despite his public denunciations of traditional
institutions of higher learning, Rydberg seemed inordinately pleased
with this distinction, and thereafter began designating himself
“Viktor Rydberg, Ph.D.,” as if his honorary doctorate were actually
an earned degree. That same year, three deaths occurred among the
eighteen members of the Swedish Academy, the non-academic body
established by King Gustav III to award prizes and take other
measures to promote Swedish literature. The Academy had been in the
forefront of the opposition to modernism that had caused Sweden’s
literature to lag far behind the rest of Scandinavia in breaking
with the Romanticism of prior generations.[24]
Rydberg’s anachronistic style and biting criticism of Strindberg and
other modernists made him an obvious candidate to fill one of the
vacancies, and he was accordingly elected to Seat 16 on the Academy,
replacing the poet C. V. A. Strandberg. In that capacity, Rydberg’s
continuing hostility helped ensure that Strindberg – by most
measures a greater literary talent than himself – would never be
elected to the Academy.
Characteristically, Rydberg used the occasion of his inaugural
address to denounce Lund University, where he had dropped out 30
years before, as being overly bureaucratic and stifling its
students’ creativity.[25] The same year Rydberg took his seat on the
Academy, the newly-organized Stockholm högskola (high school) began
hosting public lectures on scientific themes.[26] The school had already encountered more than a decade of delays in
opening, and the first two instructors, hired in 1881, lectured and
administered examinations out of their homes.[27] A private institution that neither conducted HISTORICAL
AND SOCIOLOGICAL
ESSAYS
191,
192, 206 (Sheldon Rothblatt & Björn Wittrock, eds., 1993) research
nor granted degrees, the högskola was intended to focus on
instruction in the natural sciences.[28] But by 1884 the school’s need for public
recognition had become so pressing that its administrators
determined to add Rydberg to its staff of two despite his lack of a
university diploma, assigning him to teach cultural history.[29]
It was while employed at the högskola that Rydberg embarked
upon the strangest episode of his eclectic career. During Rydberg’s
lifetime, Swedish Romanticism developed a strain of “ardent
nationalism,” derived in part from the influence of the German
Romantics.[30]
As will be reviewed more fully in the next section, 19th century
European nationalism was not necessarily related to promoting what
we now think of as nation-states. Rather, the concept of nation
was an organic one, less concerned with flags and borders than
with commonalities of language, culture, and ultimately race.[31] The Romantic nationalism that was gaining
influence in the region consequently tended to be pan-Scandinavian
in nature, or pan-Germanic, or even – and this was the variety that
commanded Rydberg’s allegiance – pan-“Aryan.” For the first time in
his career, Rydberg’s post at the högskola left him enough
free time to undertake a massive work, by which he hoped to harness
the popularity of the old Scandinavian myths to drive his Romantic
nationalist ideology. The result of this labor was the ponderous,
two-volume Undersökningar i germanisk mythology (Researches
in Germanic Mythology) – rather pretentiously titled, given that
Rydberg was, notwithstanding his one year of college, essentially an
autodidact, a “largely self educated journalist”[32]
whose formal academic training could best be characterized as
“spotty.”[33]The
Undersökningar (hereinafter UGM) opened with a
fanciful account of the supposed origin and spread of the
“ancient Aryans”[34]
– a race that could, Rydberg believed, be identified by its body
type: “light hair, blue eyes, light complexion, and tallness of
stature.”[35]
Rydberg viewed these “Aryans” as an elite sub-group of the “white
race,” which included Semites and other lesser stock.
For example, he asserts, “It is a known fact that southern portions
of Europe, such as the Greek and Italian peninsulas, were inhabited
by white people before they were conquered by Aryans.”[36]
Rydberg identified Asia as the cradle of civilization (i.e., the
original homeland of the Aryans): “In primeval time, the yellow
Mongolian, the black African, the American redskin, and the fair
European had there tented side by side.”[37]
In this halcyon age, Rydberg claimed, all Aryans shared a common
mythology which became splintered and fragmented with the diaspora
of their race across the globe. For the remainder of the book
Rydberg ostensibly “recreated” this original epic mythos, employing
a naïve comparative method of the sort that became popular with
later völkisch writers,[38]
selectively citing to snippets of myth and folklore from across a
vast temporal-cultural domain to fill in the details of his “epic,”
while ignoring the incomparably greater body of inconsistent or
contrary evidence.
In this, Rydberg was only adhering to the
standard of earlier Romantic nationalists in striving to create a
“Germanic” mythology not as it was, or had ever been, but as he
imagined it to be. If UGM is mentioned at all in modern scholarship, it is
typically dismissed as “imaginative,”[39]
a “pseudo-scholarly private mythology,”[40]
or simply wrong-headed and outdated.[41]The work fared little better at the time of its publication. Although the
Swedish popular press embraced UGM with the same enthusiasm
normally accorded to Rydberg’s novels, the scholarly community
generally greeted its publication with silence. Even scholars like
A. C. Bang and Sophus Bugge, who had been drawn into popular
disputes with Rydberg in the past, preferred to ignore his venture
into ethnomythography. The Stockholm högskola made no public
comment on the episode, but quietly stripped Rydberg of his position
in cultural history and transferred him to a newly-created post as
lecturer in the history of fine arts.[42]UGM
drew
inevitable comparisons to Olof Rudbeck’s hypernationalistic fantasy,
Atlantica, an imaginative rewriting of world history in which
Sweden played a disproportionately dominant role.[43]
In
terms that closely foreshadow Rydberg’s method, scholars have noted
that Rudbeck “changes numerous historical events, persons and place
names in favor of his thesis or invents freely.”[44]
He “used the well known myths and symbols of other peoples, in order
to write a chronicle for his own nation.”[45]
Although it was a far more massive undertaking, UGM also
echoed the work of the “Gothic Federation” of the early 1800s,
whose literary-artistic magazine Idunna advanced Romantic
nationalism via appeals to Old Norse myths.[46]
The closest model for Rydberg’s work, however, both temporally and
thematically, was Grundtvig’s creative reimagining of Norse
mythology as nationalist ideology.
The 1832 edition of Grundtvig’s Nordens mythologi[47] re-wrote the old myths to promote Danish
patriotic spirit and nationalist identification with basically
Christian ideals, disguised under a thin veneer of historical
paganism. As the Old Norse scholar Lars Lönnroth has pointed out,
Grundtvig’s use of his Icelandic sources was “extremely arbitrary
and unreliable”; he “eliminates such Eddic myths as do not fit into
his scheme of things (he maintains them to be ‘late,’ ‘corrupt,’
etc.) and fabricates new myths on the strength of vague allusions in
the sources.”[48] The same words could be used to describe
Rydberg’s method in UGM. As has previously been mentioned,
Rydberg was already a follower of Grundtvig in his rejection of
rationalism and classical scholarship in favor of Romanticism,
nationalism, and “folk” schooling. With UGM, Rydberg simply
moved Grundtvig’s project one step further along by fashioning a
largely fictional mythos designed to promote “Aryan” racial
nationalism, as opposed to Grundtvig’s comparatively paltry concern
with Danish patriotism.
Thinking that UGM’s cool reception might be due to its being
written in Swedish, Rydberg sought diligently to have the book
translated into German, French, or English, but could find no
scholar in Europe willing to undertake the task. Finally, this quest
led him to far-off Wisconsin, where the idiosyncratic
Norwegian-American Rasmus Anderson expressed an interest in
privately publishing an English translation of UGM. As it
turned out, however, Anderson had little interest in Rydberg’s
fictive mythology; indeed, he had previously published his own
revisionist interpretation of the Norse myths, which he regarded as
merely a primitive version of Christianity.[49] But Anderson was perhaps an even more ardent
Scandinavian nationalist than Rydberg, and he was attracted to the
Swede’s account of the “ancient Aryans’” rise to world dominance. Consequently, Anderson
wound up translating only the first half of Rydberg’s book – the
part containing the “Aryan” pseudo-history – in his self-published
Norroena series.
Anderson and Rydberg jointly dedicated the translated volume to
Oscar II, then king of both Sweden and Norway, as the “Ruler of the
Aryan People of the Scandinavian Peninsula.”[50] The monarch’s reaction to this “honor” is not
recorded. Presumably he considered himself the ruler of all
the citizens of his realm, Aryans and non-Aryans alike. (Indeed,
since Jews had been granted full civil rights in Sweden only two
decades earlier, UGM’s dedication would have carried an
unmistakable implication by exclusion.) Moreover, Oscar II’s support
of the works of Strindberg and other modernists suggests he would
not have been enthusiastic about his new title.[51]
In any case, Anderson’s partial translation marked both the
beginning and end of any real scholarly interest in UGM. By
the end of the 1880s, to the relief of his friends and supporters,
Rydberg put aside his public fascination with crafting a
racial-nationalistic mythos and returned to the creative outlets
that had won him recognition in the first place.
In particular, the poetry that he wrote in the years before his
death in 1895 met with critical as well as popular acclaim, and it
is these works, few though they may be, that have proven to have the
most lasting literary value of any of Rydberg’s extensive output.[52]
Rydberg’s historical significance is as “a representative of the
moribund romantic idealism” that stood opposed to the wave of
Scandinavian modernism ushered in by Strindberg, Ibsen, and those
who followed.[53]
He has been described as Sweden’s “last Romantic, the last idealist,
the last major Swedish poet to believe literally in the power of
Christianity to work in the personal life.”[54]
His work, with its
pervasive blend of homoeroticism and Christian-Platonic idealism,
marked the last gasp of the Romantic era that passed with him.[55]
Despite achieving literary prominence
for a time, Rydberg “influenced the next generation of writers
hardly at all.”[56]UGM fell into near-total obscurity after its author’s death. Nevertheless, minor though its impact may have been in its time,
the work was unmistakably both a part and a product of the
völkisch Zeitgeist that rolled from Herder to Hitler, ultimately
sweeping away much of European civilization in its wake. But like
Tolkien’s ring, UGM did not perish in the 20th century’s
holocaust of racial nationalism, but lay quietly in the darkness
waiting to be rediscovered.
[1]See
generally, e.g.,
CULTS AND NEW
RELIGIOUS
MOVEMENTS:
A READER (Lorne L. Dawson, ed.,
2003). THE
CULTIC
MILIEU:
OPPOSITIONAL
SUBCULTURES
IN AN AGE
OF GLOBALIZATION
(Jeffrey Kaplan
and Heléne Lööw, eds., 2002); Jeffrey Kaplan, RADICAL
RELIGION
IN AMERICA
(1997).
[2]See
“Sweden,” entry in ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF HOMOSEXUALITY
1270
(Wayne R. Dynes, et al., eds., 1990).
[3]
“Sweden,” entry in GLBTQ: AN
ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF GAY,
LESBIAN, BISEXUAL,
TRANSGENDER,
AND
QUEER
CULTURE:
(last
viewed August 31, 2006).
[5]
Viktor Rydberg,
1828-1895, in THE
NORTH!
TO
THE NORTH!:
FIVE
SWEDISH
POETS
OF THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY
77,
82 (Judith Moffett, ed. &
trans., 2001) quoting Sven Stolpe, DIKT OCH SAMHÄLLE: RYDBERG, SNOILSKY,80-TALET
(1978)."That Rydberg's erotic
fixation was more than just a matter of esthetics is confirmed by
his well-publicized liaison – prior to the passage of the
anti-sodomy act -- with the young Rudolf Ström. See Svante
Nordin, "Viktor Rydberg," entry in 151 Svenskt biografiskt
lexikon, 45, 47 (2000)."
[6]See
Hans-Henrik
Brummer, “Among the Shining Antique Marbles”:Viktor Rydberg’s Essay on Antinous, in DOCTO PEREGRINO: ROMAN STUDIES IN HONOUR
OF TORGIL
MAGNUSON
51-77
(Thomas Hall, et al. eds., 1992).
[7]
According to Moffett, “The enormous excitement and sensuality with which
he describes the beauty of young Greek men [in The Last Athenian]
leaves no
doubt about the sort of love-object Rydberg would have pursued,
given
circumstances that would have permitted the feelings to be
recognized and the
[8]
“Swedish Literature,” entry in GLBTQ: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GAY,
LESBIAN,
BISEXUAL,
TRANSGENDER,
AND
QUEER
CULTURE:(Last viewed August 4, 2006.)
[12]See
Lars
Lönnroth, Vårdträdet och Höstsejd: om olika sätt att använda
Völvans spådom,
in SKALDEMJÖDET
I BERGET:
ESSAYER OM FORNISLÄNDSK
SKALDEKONST OCH DESS ÅTERANVÄNDNING I NUTIDEN 169, 207 (1996)
(Rydberg’s poem, Vårträdet, is literarily redeemed by its
expression of the
mythical dream of returning to the mother’s bosom).
Honorary doctorate
(such
degrees are awarded “as a decoration”).
[24]See
Sven
H. Rossel, A HISTORY
OF SCANDINAVIAN
LITERATURE,
1870-1980
44 (1982).
[25]See
Nils
Runeby, Vagabonds, Specialists or the Voice of the People:Scandinavian Students and the Rise of the Modern Research University
in the 19th
Century,
in UNIVERSITY
AND SOCIETY:
ESSAYS
ON THE SOCIAL
ROLE
OF RESEARCH
AND HIGHER
EDUCATION
19,
30-31 (Martin Trow & Thorsten Nybom,eds.,
1991).
[26]See
Stockholm University web site:
http://www.su.se/otherlanguages/See
also Sven
Tunberg, STOCKHOLMS
HÖGSKOLAS HISTORIA FÖRE 1950 25-38 (1957).
[27]See
Aant
Elzinga, Universities, Research, and the Transformation of the
State in Sweden, in THE EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN
UNIVERSITY
SINCE 1800:
[31]Indeed, the word
nationalism “derives from the Latin natio,
implying a
common racial descent.” Carl Savich, The Development of Modern
European Nationalism: Social Darwinism and Scientific Racism,(quoting
Carlton Hayes, NATIONALISM: A RELIGION (1960)).
See, e.g., Bruce
Waller, Relations between States and Nations, in Themes
in Modern European History 1830-90 252, 252 (Bruce Waller, ed.,
1999) ("A nation is a group of people with similar characteristics
and aspirations. It is not the same thing as a state, and every Celt
will tell us that.").
[34]
"See Viktor Rydberg, 1
Undersökningar i germanisk mythologi 1-23
(1886)."
[35]
Viktor Rydberg and Rasmus B. Anderson, TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY 1
(1891). All English quotations from UGM are taken from
Anderson’s edition,which
remains the only professional translation of Rydberg’s work into
English.
[38]See,
e.g.,
Bernard Mees, Völkische Altnordistik: The Politics of Nordic
Studies in the German-Speaking Countries, 1926-45, in OLD NORSE MYTHS, LITERATURE
AND SOCIETY
316,
325-26 (Geraldine Barnes & Margaret Clunies Ross,
eds., 2000); THE
NAZIFICATION
OF AN ACADEMIC
DISCIPLINE:
FOLKLORE IN THE
THIRD
REICH
(James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld. Eds., 1994).
[39]
“Rydberg, (Abraham) Viktor,” entry in ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA, (14th
ed.), at 842.
[40]
Hans-Peter Naumann, Viktor Rydbergs “Undersökningar i germanisk
mythologi,”
in STUDIEN
ZUR DÄNISCHEN UND SCHWEDISCHEN LITERATUR DES 19.JAHRHUNDERTS,
185, 191 (4 Beiträge zur nordischen Philologie, 1976).
[41]See,
e.g.,
2 KOMMENTAR
ZU DEN LIEDERN
DER EDDA
(Klaus von See, et
al., eds., 1997) (dismissing Rydberg’s assertion that Hárbarð is
really Loki with the
observation that this misinterpretation was corrected nearly a
century ago);Paul
C. Bauschatz, THE
WELL
AND THE TREE:
WORLD
AND TIME
IN EARLY GERMANIC
CULTURE
122,
217 (1982) (noting that Rydberg’s speculations
concerning the roots of the World Tree reflect a fundamental
misunderstanding of
his sources).
[43]For
references to contemporary comparisons of UMG to Atlantica,
see sources cited in Naumann, supra note 40, at 199; Frauke
Hillebrecht, SKANDINAVIEN
–
DIE
HEIMAT
DER GOTEN?
(1997), text at nn.19-20.
[47]The
full title of Grundtvig’s 1832 text was NORDEN MYTHOLOGI ELLER
SINDBILLED-SPROG,
HISTORISK-POETISK
UDVIKLET OG OPLYST (“The
Mythology or Symbolic Language of the North, an Historical and
Poetic
Exposition and Explanation”). This was a substantially revised and
reoriented
version of his 1808 work, NORDENS
MYTOLOGI
ELLER UDSIGT
OVER EDDALOEREN FOR
DANNEDE MOEND
DER EI SELV ERE MYTOLOGER.
See Lars Lönnroth, The Academy
of Odin: supra
note 18, at 339-40.
[49]See
Rasmus B Anderson, NORSE
MYTHOLOGY:
OR,
THE
RELIGION
OF OUR
FOREFATHERS,
CONTAINING
ALL
THE MYTHS
OF THE EDDAS
/SYSTEMATIZED
AND INTERPRETED
(3rd
ed. 1879). See also Rasmus B. Anderson,The
Religion of the Ancient Scandinavians, in NON-BIBLICAL SYSTEMS OF RELIGION:
A SYMPOSIUM
(Fredk.Hastings
& A. F. Muir, eds., 1888) 153, 177 (The
old Scandinavian religion of the Eddas “has many ‘broken lights’ of
Christianity in it”).
[50]See
Rydberg and Anderson, supra note 35, unnumbered dedication page.
[51]See Barbara Miller Lane,
NATIONAL
ROMANTICISM
AND MODERN ARCHITECTURE
IN GERMANY
AND THE SCANDINAVIAN
COUNTRIES
11-12
(2000).
[52]See,
e.g.,
Scott, supra note 29, at 499; Frederick Winkel Horn,
HISTORY
OF THE LITERATURE
OF THE SCANDINAVIAN
NORTH
399 (Rasmus
B.Anderson, trans., 1895).
[53]
Giovanni Bach, et al., THE
HISTORY
OF THE SCANDINAVIAN LITERATURES
119
(1938).
