Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/493

Rh Celts, that the Scandinavian mythic-heroic poetry waxed strong. It is this truth I would gladly see acknowledged; and this truth, to which Karl Müllenhoff was blind, the Icelander, Gudbrand Vigfússon, first saw clearly on English soil. What the master of critical method at the University of Berlin could not perceive, because the German descendants of Tacitus' Germanic tribes formed the centre of his considerations, was seen by the unmethodical but sharp-sighted Icelander, because from childhood up he had lived through the outer and inner history of his people as revealed in the sagas and scaldic lays, because he himself with open eyes had wandered in the wide paths of his fathers, and, under the guidance of P. A. Munch and Konrad Maurer, had come to understand the way in which the Scandinavian peoples have developed, to realise how much they have been influenced by the culture of the West."

I remember, when we were working together first, Vigfússon and myself, one evening as we came from a long walk east of Oxford, we stopped on Magdalen Bridge to watch the sunset colouring from the bay that then stood in the centre of the south side, and there, while we lingered talking, it was that he first told me what he said had been long his conviction, that the Eddic poems were the product of the Viking age, and that they were composed, with very few exceptions (the Greenland Lay of Atle, and perhaps Grípispá) in the British Isles. How many puzzles that theory cleared up, how much that was obscure has it made plain! It laid the foundations of reasonable and rightly based criticism of a body of most important and most beautiful literature, it furnished the key to further discoveries. Vigfússon has done for the Eddic poems what Welhausen has done for the Old Testament. Dr. Bugge's appreciation, cited above, only needs correction in two points, as it seems to me. First, I should put the name of Peterson in place of that of Munch, for it was largely Peterson's talk and books that (as I have often heard him say) made Vigfússon feel the need of an historic criticism intelligently and fearlessly applied to the literature of the north. In the next place, as a critic, and it is in this capacity we are here considering him, Vigfússon was certainly no pedant, but as certainly and essentially he was a master of the scientific method, one of the great critics of this century; and to talk of such a man as "unmethodic" is, I think, to mistake letter for spirit. Müllenhoff