Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/131

Rh securely upon what is left of this fine poem, so unsafe is the text. The identifications Wayland-Thjasse, Slagfin-Gjuke, are alluring, but one is hardly prepared to assent to them off-hand, while with the guesses about Hencgest it is impossible to agree.

In conclusion, one may commend to every mythologist or student of the old Northern literature this bold and ingenious book. It is not easy reading, nor is it easy to criticise, its strength and weakness alike depend upon detail. The author’s experience in belles lettres has given him a quick eye for a plot, a delight in character, and a desire to bring harmony out of confusion. No professional scholar of the modern German type would have attempted or could have achieved this book, which, with all its imperfections, contains the most important work done in Northern mythology by a Scandinavian book during the last fifty years.

The next work is of a wholly different character, a book showing on every page marks of methodic training, of wide reading, some ingenuity, and slow, persevering labour, a book deserving careful consideration, and with which one is bound in future to reckon, but not to my mind a book that carries conviction with it. Its thesis is that Völuspá is a book-poem composed in Iceland cir. 1125, in “the first quarter of the 12th century”. A careful analysis, commentary, reconstructed text (but no index), make up a volume of 300 pages. (Völuspá, eine Untersuchung, von Elard Hugo Meyer, Berlin, 1889.) While quite willing to admit, as he was himself, that Vigfússon has not said the last word on Völuspá, and entertaining very little of Dr. Meyer’s respect for Mullenhoff’s work on this poem, it is a large demand that is made upon the reader’s faith, and at present I must confess to regarding the thesis advanced as a mere piece of prettily constructed speculation. The striking character of Völuspá as a work of art, and the exaggerated importance as a mythologic authority which its systematic eschatology has given it in the minds of modern readers, have obscured the fact that it has a peculiar and unique position among