Abraham Viktor Rydberg (
JönköpingJönköping is a city in Småland in southern Sweden with 84,423 inhabitants in 2005. It is the 9th most populous city of Sweden.The city is the seat of Jönköping Municipality which has a population of 122,194 , and also the seat of Jönköping County which has a population of 331,539 .Jönköping is the...
, December 18, 1828 –
DjursholmDjursholm is one of four suburban districts in, and the seat of Danderyd Municipality, Stockholm County, Sweden. Djursholm is included in the multimunicipal Stockholm urban area.-History:...
, September 22, 1895) was a
SwedishSweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe...
writer and a member of the
Swedish AcademyThe Swedish Academy , founded in 1786 by King Gustav III, is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. Modelled after the Académie française, it has 18 members. The motto of the Academy is "Talent and Taste"...
, 1877-1895. “Primarily a classical idealist”, “Viktor Rydberg, poet, novelist, essayist, idealist philosopher and one of the prominent figures in Swedish intellectual life in the latter half of the nineteenth century”, has been described as "Sweden's last
RomanticRomanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution...
" and by 1859 was “generally regarded in the first rank of Swedish novelists.” “The leading cultural figure of his day, he also wrote works on philosophy, philology, and aesthetics.” As “an idealist faithful to the Romantic tradition in poetry and thought, but with a mind receptive to the ideas of a new age. He achieved an unequalled position of authority in Swedish literature” and “with his broad range of achievements, greatly influenced Swedish cultural life” He came to be described by subsequent biographer
Judith MoffettJudith Moffett is an American science fiction writer. She is also a poet and an academic.She first wrote poetry and works about poets, like her 1984 book about James Merrill. She still writes for organizations like the Academy of American Poets...
as "a 'man of letters': a journalist, novelist, poet, religious historian, an expert on Norse mythology and the history of ideas, an all-around cultural leader." Of him, a trio of scholars at the University of Cambridge in 1951, write:
"One writer, par excellence, represents the transition from idealism of the 'Nyromantik' ['New Romantic'] to the Naturalism of the '80s. Viktor Rydberg (1828-1895) was a radical, largely self-educated journalist, who ended up as a professor at the newly founded University (Högskola) of Stockholm, and the Grand Old Man of the Swedish Academy, novelist, poet, philosopher, he owes his place in the history of Swedish literature before 1879 principally to his ideoligcal novel The Last Athenian ('Den siste atheneran', 1859) and his philosophical treatise The Bible's Doctrine Concerning Christ (Bibelns lära om kristus, 1862). In both of these work he attacks the narrow orthodoxy of the Church, implicitly or explicitly. Rydberg was a fighter for broader perspectives and loftier ideals, in fact for a better world."
Fredrik Böök sums up Rydberg as a metaphysical: "He saw the ideas of things, not the things themselves, the eternal, the overall patterns not the shifting multicolor phenomena of this world." "It is as an exegetic researcher that Rydberg’s influence on the history of ideas is the greatest." His work has "plainly been seen as the breakthrough of religious liberalism in Sweden." Rydberg works on the history of religion and comparative Indo-European studies has not been recognized to the same extent. “Rydberg fell between idealism and Naturalism, for as a novelist, poet, and critic, he began as a radical journalist and ended as a professor and author of philosophical poems.” As an idealist and a romantic, Rydberg had little influence on the next generation of writers, dominated by realism. “With the death of Rydberg, the last ideal barrier against the invading realism falls.”
Biography
Viktor Rydberg was of humble parentage. One biographer notes that: "He had a hard struggle to satisfy the thirst for learning which was a leading passion of his life, but he finally attained distinction in several fields of scholarship." The son of a soldier turned prison guard, Johann Rydberg, and a midwife, Hedvig Düker. Viktor Rydberg had two brothers and three sisters. In 1834 his mother died during a
choleraCholera, sometimes known as Asiatic or epidemic cholera, is an infectious gastroenteritis caused by enterotoxin-producing strains of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. Transmission to humans occurs through eating food or drinking water contaminated with Vibrio cholerae from other cholera patients...
epidemicDefining an epidemic can be subjective, depending in part on what is "expected". An epidemic may be restricted to one locale , more general or even global...
. Her death broke the spirit of his father, who yielded to hypochondria and
alcoholismAlcoholism is a term with multiple and sometimes conflicting definitions. In common and historic usage, alcoholism is any condition that results in the continued consumption of alcoholic beverages, despite health problems and negative social consequences...
, contributing towards his loss of employment and the family's apartment, forcing authorities to board young Viktor out to a series of foster homes, one of which burnt down, further traumatizing the youth.
Despite his economic status, Rydberg was recognized for his talents. From 1838 to 1847, Rydberg attended grammar school, and studied law at the University in
LundLund is a city in the province of Scania, southern Sweden. The town has 76,188 inhabitants in 2005, out of a municipal total of 105,000. It is the seat of Lund Municipality, Skåne County. The city is believed to have been founded around 990, when the Scanian lands belonged to Denmark...
from 1851 to 1852. Due to financial reasons, his university studies ended after one year, without a degree. Afterward, he took a job as a private tutor. In 1855, he was offered work at the Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, a newspaper in Göteborg, where he would remain employed for more than 20 years. It was during this time that his first novels saw print. He soon become a central figure of late Romanticism in Sweden, and Sweden's most famous living author.
Throughout his adult life, Rydberg was active in politics. In 1859, he wrote a pamphlet on national defense, which inspired the "Sharpshooter's movement", a voluntary militia of some political importance during the 1860s. In 1870, he took a controversial pro-German stance during the
Franco-Prussian WarThe Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between France and Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria...
. Representing the traditional economic system of Sweden, from 1870 to 1872, Rydberg was a member of the Swedish Parliament as a supporter of the Peasant's Party. Having been a supporter of the Jewish cause since his youth, it was MP Viktor Rydberg who gave the keynote speech in the parliamentary debate to enact a law granting all non-Lutherans full civil rights. He worked dilligently for working class people and in 1906 his works on the labor question in both prose and poetry were regarded as part of the "treasury of this class." He also advocated language reform, purging foreign words from the Swedish language, particularly those of German origin. Around this time, he advocated a more
Germanic spellingThe Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all the languages in this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
of his own name: Viktor, as opposed to Victor.
Throughout his life and career, Rydberg would coin several Swedish words, many, such as "gudasaga" for the foreign "mythologi," still in use today. In 1884, he refused to support
anarchistAnarchism is a political philosophy encompassing theories and attitudes which consider the state, as compulsory government, to be unnecessary, harmful, and/or undesirable, and favors the absence of the state ....
writer
August StrindbergJohan August Strindberg Johan August Strindberg Johan August Strindberg ( (22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright and writer. He is arguably the most influential of all Swedish authors, and one of the most influential Scandinavian authors, along with Knut Hamsun, with whom he...
, in his
blasphemyBlasphemy is the use of reference to one or more gods in a manner considered objectionable by a religious authority. It may include using sacred names as stress expletives without intention to pray or speak of sacred matters; it is also sometimes defined as language expressing disbelief or...
case. As a juror in an 1888 trial of socialist leader
Hjalmar Brantingwas a Swedish politician. He was the leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party , and Prime Minister during three separate periods . When Branting came to power in 1920, he was the first Social Democratic Prime Minister of Sweden...
, Rydberg voted to send him to jail for blasphemy. They would never speak to one another again. His apprehension of unregulated capitalism at the dawn of the industrial age is most fully expressed in his acclaimed poem
Den nya Grottesången (
The New Grotti Song) in which he delivered a fierce attack on the miserable working conditions in factories of the era, using the mill of
GrottasöngrGrottasöngr or the Song of Grótti is an Old Norse poem, sometimes counted among the poems of the Poetic Edda as it appears in manuscripts that are later than the Codex Regius...
as his literary backdrop.
For his lifetime of literary achievement, Rydberg received an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala in 1877 and was elected a member of the
Swedish AcademyThe Swedish Academy , founded in 1786 by King Gustav III, is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. Modelled after the Académie française, it has 18 members. The motto of the Academy is "Talent and Taste"...
the same year. He served from 1883 as teacher, from 1884 as professor, of the History of Culture at Stockholms högskola, now
Stockholm UniversityStockholm University is a state university in Stockholm, Sweden. It has over 27,500 students at four faculties, being one of the largest universities in Scandinavia. The institution is also frequently regarded as one of the top 100 universities in the world...
, and from 1889 as the first holder of the J. A. Berg Chair of the History and Theory of Art there. In 1889, he was also elected a member of the
Royal Swedish Academy of SciencesThe Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences or Kungliga Vetenskapsakademin is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. The Academy is an independent, non-governmental scientific organization which acts to promote the sciences, primarily the natural sciences and mathematics.The Academy was founded on 2 June...
.
Rydberg died at the age of 67 on September 8th, 1895 due to complications from diabetes and
arteriosclerosisArteriosclerosis refers to a stiffening of arteries.Arteriosclerosis is a general term describing any hardening of medium or large arteries...
. Rydberg's passing was reported as far away as the United States of America, where the New York Times published an obituary titled: "Death of Prof. A.V. Rydberg, Career and Remarkable works of one of Sweden's Leading Men." A national day of mourning would ensue all over Sweden. His grave is a national monument to this day. Many of his works have been translated, and remain in print. His works are widely read in schools throughout Sweden, and his poem "Tomten" ("Robin Goodfellow") is a Christmas favorite. A group of three charter high schools (Gymnasium) and one middle school in Stockholm, as well as a street in Götesborg, a student dormitory, and other buildings carry his name. He is still listed in many English language encyclopedias as an individual entry.
Since the late 1920s, scholars and critics have speculated about Rydberg's private life and sexual orientation. Referring to a failed engagement, Judith Moffett writes:
We can construct a story of backdoor illicit liaisons and front door respectability from these fragments and others— Rydberg would hardly be the first, if it were true— but he never spoke openly about his private life at any time, and our best guess would still be guesswork.
Svanberg (1928) and Stolpe (1978) suggested that Rydberg had a homosexual orientation, based on their interpretations of Rydberg's published works. Moffett (2001) endorsed Stolpe's theory, speculating that Rydberg's sexual orientation was the result of the early loss of his mother, concluding that Rydberg was homosexual but celibate. In her opinion, Rydberg found all sexual expression "despicable, impossible, or, at best, delicious but lethal."
Sven DelblancSven Delblanc, born May 26 1931 in Swan River, Manitoba, Canada, died December 15 1992 in Sunnersta, Gottsunda Parish, Uppsala, Sweden was a Swedish author and professor of literature. He's buried in Hammarby kyrkogård in Uppsala, Sweden....
(1983) argued that the novel
Singoalla "reflected homosexual desires and impulses in Rydberg himself," and that the protagonist’s slaying of his unacknowledged son Sorgborn ['child of sorrow'] was a "masked representation of homosexual intercourse." Bäckmann (2004) disputed this theory noting that there is "no textual evidence" to support this "empathetic reading" of Rydberg's biography.
Publications
In 1857, Rydberg's first novel,
Fribytaren på Östersjön (
The Freebooter of the Baltic; 1857), a historical romance set in the 17th century, incorporating themes of piracy, witchcraft and nautical excursions, was published.
This was soon followed by his first major success, and one of his most popular novels,
Singoalla (1858), a "romantic story out of the Middle Ages, permeated with a poetic nature-mysticism, about the tragic love between a knight and a gypsy girl." Rydberg rewrote the book throughout his life. The fourth and final edition of 1894, concludes with Erland dying as a hermit monk. The story has been made into a film twice, and today, a popular brand of cookie takes its name from the book's main character: Singoalla. A review of the first English translation of the work in the Saga-Book of the Viking Club, Vol. 4, Part 1, 1904-5, noting that the book "has already been translated into most of the languages of continental Europe," remarks that "Singoalla is a novel occupying a pre-eminent place among Rydberg's prose writings."
In 1859, Rydberg's most ambitious novel, and his last one for 30 years, was published under the title
Den siste Atenaren (
The Last Athenian). This, his best-known novel, offers a contrast between "Rydberg's admiration for classical antiquity and his critical attitude to dogmatic Christianity." This struggle is set in Athens, in the time of the last pagan emperor,
Julian the ApostateFlavius Claudius Julianus, known also as Julian, Julian the Apostate or Julian the Philosopher , was Roman Emperor , last of the Constantinian dynasty...
, during the transition from Platonic paganism to Christianity. The novel advocates a philosophy founded on the noblest elements of both ideologies. At "scarcely thirty years of age," William Widgery Thomas, Jr. said that Rydberg was "already acknowledged to be the foremost living prose writer of Scandinavia."
In 1862 he wrote and published “
Bibelns lära om Kristus” (‘
Christ According to the Bible”), a work of contemporary religious criticism, which was hugely successful. Introducing modern Biblical criticism to Scandinavia, he used the
New TestamentThe New Testament is the name given to the second major division of the Christian Bible, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament, both terms being associated with Supersessionism...
to deny the divinity of
ChristChrist is the English term for the Greek meaning "the anointed". It is a translation of the Hebrew . The term "Christ" was a title rather than a proper name. In the four gospels in the New Testament, the word "Christ" is nearly always preceded by the definite article...
. The long term effects of the book would be the weakening of the authority of the Church over the educated classes of Scandinavia. He taught freedom of individual conscience. It was this that inspired him in the fight against the state church. Predictably, this book attracted the ire of the orthodox religious establishment and is generally credited for Rydberg's exclusion from the
Swedish AcademyThe Swedish Academy , founded in 1786 by King Gustav III, is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. Modelled after the Académie française, it has 18 members. The motto of the Academy is "Talent and Taste"...
until as late as 1877. From 1865 to 1868, Rydberg suffered a severe bout of depression caused by the theological struggle and a broken engagement in 1865.
Rydberg's next work, "Medeltidens Magi" ("The Magic of the Middle Ages") 1865 is an exposition of the magical practices and beliefs of the Medieval period. According to Rydberg, the contemporary Church was still driven by the ideology of the Dark Ages, and its dualistic notions of good and evil, represented by God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell, contributed towards the horror of the witch-hunts in Europe and America in the recent past. From this point forward, Rydberg was economically successful as a writer.
"Lille Viggs äventyr på julafton" ("Little Vigg's Adventures on Christmas Eve", 1871) is a short
ChristmasChristmas , also referred to as Christmas Day, is an annual holiday celebrated on December 25 that commemorates the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. The day marks the beginning of the larger season of Christmastide, which lasts twelve days. The nativity of Jesus, which is the basis for the anno Domini...
tale for all ages, originally written for a newspaper, but later widely printed. It has since become a Christmas classic in Sweden.
After a long journey in Italy in 1874, Rydberg published
Romerska sägner om apostlarna Petrus och Paulus (
Roman Legends concerning the Apostles Peter and Paul 1874) and "Romerska Dagar" (
Roman Days 1877), a series of essays on Italian culture, history and archaeology; The journey is said to have strengthened Rydberg's creative power, as he now produced some of "the finest philosophical lyrics in Swedish literature". “His poems are not numerous, but their masterly form and wealth of thought give them rank among the best poetry in Swedish literature.” Charles Wharton Stork remarks: “In the originality and forcefulness of his imagery Rydberg marks an important advance in Swedish poetry;” “there is a manliness in Rydberg’s voice which makes the notes carry. His ideas are not the shadows of others, they are his by strong conviction."
Other important works include his translation of
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheJohann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer and polymath. Goethe's works span the fields of poetry, drama, literature, theology, philosophy, humanism and science. Goethe's magnum opus, lauded as one of the peaks of world literature, is the two-part drama Faust...
's
FaustFaust or Faustus is the protagonist of a classic German legend who makes a pact with the Devil in exchange for knowledge...
(1876) and the historical novel
Vapensmeden (
The Armoror, 1891), his first novel in three decades. Set during the
ReformationThe Protestant Reformation was a Christian reform movement in Europe which is generally deemed to have begun with Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 although a number of precursors such as Jan Hus predate that event...
, the novel depicts the struggle between Lutheran Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. In it, Rydberg "still fought fanaticism and dogmatism, and his ideal was still humanity and liberty."
Between 1886 and 1889, his literary work was focused on
NorseNorse, North Germanic, or Scandinavian mythology comprises the myths of North Germanic pre-Christian religion.Most of the written sources for Norse mythology were assembled in medieval Iceland in Old Norse, notably as the Edda....
and broader
Germanic mythologyGermanic mythology refers to:*any myths associated with historical Germanic paganism*Norse mythology*Continental Germanic mythology*Anglo-Saxon mythology*Germanic folklore -See also:*Common Germanic deities*Germanic paganism...
. He published several works in the field including two articles on the origins of the
Poetic EddaThe Poetic Edda is a collection of Old Norse poems primarily preserved in the Icelandic mediaeval manuscript Codex Regius. Along with Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda is the most important extant source on Norse mythology and Germanic heroic legends.Codex Regius was written in the...
poem
VöluspáVöluspá is the first and best known poem of the Poetic Edda. It tells the story of the creation of the world and its coming end related by a völva addressing Odin...
, in which he debated the authenticity of the poem with Norwegian scholar Sophus Bugge, who held that the poem was based on Classical and Biblical sources. Old Norse scholar Ursula Dronke characterizes this work as:
"... over one hundred pages (as against Bang's twenty-three!) of marvellously intelligent, masterly criticism of the errors, imprecise thinking and failure of scholarly imagination that underlay Bang's claim."
Even Sophus Bugge acknowledged that Rydberg won the argument, ushering in the modern age of Eddic scholarship by firmly vanquishing the nature-school of mythology. The result of his own investigations in prose was titled
Segerssvärdet 1882, (
The Sword of Victory), followed by two volumes of mythic studies titled
Undersökningar i germanisk mythologi, första delen, 1886 (
Investigations into Germanic Mythology, Volume 1); and
Undersökningar i germanisk mythologi, andre delen, (
Investigations into Germanic Mythology, Volume 2) 1889 as well as a children's version of Norse mythology in 1887 titled
Fädernas gudasaga (
Our Fathers' Godsaga). In a letter to Rydberg, after receiving the first volume of his mythological research, Bugge stated: "As I have read my heart has warmed more and more. ...Forgive these words from a man who before such a magnificent and in many respects remarkable work is well aware that he is nothing but a philologist."
Henrik Schück wrote at the turn of the 20th century that he considered Rydberg the "last —and poetically most gifted —of the mythological school founded by Jacob Grimm and represented by such men as Adalbert Kuhn" which is "strongly synthetic" in its understanding of myth. Of this work,
Jan de VriesJan Pieter Marie Laurens de Vries was a Dutch scholar of Germanic linguistics and Germanic mythology, from 1926 to 1945 ordinarius at Leiden University and author of reference works still in use today.During the German occupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War, de Vries was part of the...
said:
"At a time, when one was firmly convinced that the Old Norse myths were a late product, Rydberg’s voice resounds. At that time, he swam against the stream, but he clearly expressed that which has become an ever stronger certainty today: a large part of the myths of the Germanic tradition —and that is to say basically the Old Norse tradition—must be set back in a time when the undivided Proto-Indo-European people themselves created the vessel of their worldview in myths."
During the 1880s, Rydberg also published two studies of runic inscriptions. His acceptance speech into the Swedish Academy, titled "Om Hjeltesagan å Rökstenen" (translated as "Concerning the Heroic-Saga on the
Rök RunestoneThe Rök Runestone is one of the most famous runestones, featuring the longest known runic inscription in stone. It can now be seen by the church in Rök , Östergötland, Sweden...
") was published in English translation, with an introduction by Swedish Scholar Ola Östin, in its entirety in
The Runestone Journal 1, 2007, a publication of the
Asatru Folk AssemblyThe Asatru Folk Assembly or AFA is a US-based Ásatrú organization founded by Stephen McNallen in 1994.Gardell classifies the AFA as folkish. The organization denounces racism....
.
Rydberg’s final publication, an essay titled
Den hvita rasens framtid, "The Future of the White Race", was published posthumously as an introduction to the Swedish edition of Benjamin Kidd’s
Social Evolution. Noting that "Rydberg’s conception of race is not equivalent with the modern term; the meaning he gives the word is in fact more cultural than biological, ...he includes Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists living in Asia, America and to some extent Africa in this expression." Swedish scholar Anna Lindén says "what he actually criticizes is a phenomenon within Europe, not on other continents," continuing,
"The Swedish author is, unlike Kidd, not a Social Darwinist and far more pessimistic about the European future than the Irishman. A common feature is however that both of them view religion and ethics as most important for the survival of a “race”.
"Evolution is rightly said to be one of the most typical theme in 19th century Europe, but parallel to this optimism in the second half of the century there was a widespread, nearly apocalyptic, anxiety for the degeneration of the population caused by exceptional fast development. Rydberg shared this anxiety: he was very critical to industrialism and unhealthy milieu of the big European metropolises, ...in combination with low nativity this was a dangerous threat to Europe, especially compared to the steadily growing, physically as well as morally sound population in China and the Far East. ...This lack of morals will in the long run ruin the ecological system as well as the poor people on our continent."
In contrast to Kidd’s optimistic Darwinism (
all'ottimismo darwiniano di Kidd), Rydberg foresaw the possibility of European culture being overcome by the more industrious and more prolific Chinese nation. In this essay,
“Rydberg envisioned European culture being overthrown by the Chinese. He predicted that the downfall would come in the very near future and would come about because of moral degeneration, demographic conditions, and the ensuing defects in the population.”
Mythological works
There is no shortage of scholarly opinion and no consensus on Viktor Rydberg's works on Indo-European and Germanic mythology. Some scholars feel that his work is ingenious, while others feel the work is too speculative. One scholar expressed the opinion that "Rydberg's views" concerning resemblances of Thor and Indra were carried to extremes, therefore receiving "less recognition than they deserved." Others contest individual points of the work. Still others have commented on what they see as fundamental flaws in Rydberg's methodology, objecting to any systematization of the mythology including the one imposed by Snorri Sturlusson, believing it artificial, John Lindow and Margaret Clunies Ross have recently supported a chronological systemization of the most important mythic episodes as inherent in the oral tradition underlying Eddic poetry. Rydberg, however, believed that most of the Germanic myths were part of a chronological epic.
H. R. Ellis DavidsonDr. Hilda Roderick Ellis Davidson was a English antiquarian and academic, writing in particular on Germanic paganism and Celtic paganism. Davidson used literary, historical and archaeological evidence to discuss the stories and customs of Northern Europe...
has characterized this approach as "fundamentalist".
While Rydberg's ingenuity has been recognized by some, his work has most often been criticized for being too subjective. Yet, within his work, many find points on which they can agree. In the first comprehensive review of the work in English, Rydberg's "brilliancy" and "great success" were recognized, alongside an acknowledgement that he sometimes "stumbles badly" in his effort to "reduce chaos to order." In 1976, German-language scholar Peter-Hans Naumann published the first evaluation of the full range of Viktor Rydberg's mythological writings. In 2004, Swedish Doktorand (PhD student) Anna Lindén reviewed the full two-volume work on mythology, concluding in part that it was not more widely received because it was not fully available in one of the three international languages of scholarship: English, German or French.
At the time of its publication, the German school of Nature mythology dominated the field, and contemporary scholars took a dim view of comparative mythology, which would come to flourish in the 20th century. Commenting on Rydberg’s mythological work in 1902, Dutch Professor, P.D. Chantepie de la Saussaye, remarks:
”The comparative school has, even at the present time, some firm adherents. Among these may be reckoned the Swede, V. Rydberg, who shows great learning in the combination of various aspects of mythical narratives and according to whom even the cosmogonic myths are to be classed among the original possessions of the primitive Indo-European period. Such attempts, however, —of which this single example will suffice—lie outside of the current of modern development.”
As Fredrik Gadde has explained, it was in this context, that
“the book was reviewed by several German scholars, who all took up a more or less disparaging attitude towards Rydberg’s methods of investigation and his results. Although they speak with high praise of the author's learning, his thorough insight, his ability to occasionally throw light upon intricate problems by means of ingenious suggestions, they criticize severely his hazardous etymologies, his identification of different mythical figures without sufficient grounds, his mixing up of heroic saga and myth, and, above all, his bent for remodeling myths in order to make them fit into a system which (they say) never existed.”
"Rydberg's work was, then, stamped as a failure, and this verdict from certain points of view cannot be considered unjust, seems to have caused the book to fall into oblivion, a fate which surely it has not deserved." Among contemporary Swedish reviewers, Hildebrand and Bååth were appreciative, the latter unreservedly praising the work. In 1892, Irish scholar Stopford A. Brooke remarked: "When we have made every allowance for a certain fancifulness, and for the bias which a well-loved theory creates, this book is a real contribution to Northern mythology." While, in 1942, Fredrik Gadde concluded:
"Even though the views set forth by Rydberg never stood a chance of being accepted, there are points in his exposition that deserve being once more brought to light."
Since their publication, some of Rydberg's mythological theories have been cited in a number of other scholarly works including his theory regarding a
World MillThe World Mill is a mytheme suggested as recurring in Indo-European and other mythologies. It involves the analogy of the cosmos or firmament and a rotating millstone....
, the dead, various aspects of the world-tree
YggdrasilIn Norse mythology, Yggdrasil is the world tree. Yggdrasil is central in Norse cosmology, and around it exists Nine Worlds....
, the afterlife and underworld and his identification of Harbard with Loki in the
Poetic Edda poem
HárbarðsljóðHárbarðsljóð is one of the poems of the Poetic Edda, found in the Codex Regius and AM 748 I 4to manuscripts. It is a flyting poem with figures from Norse mythology-Synopsis:...
. He has been mentioned as one of several writers who proposed analogs of
Ask and EmblaAsk and Embla , according to Norse mythology, were the first two humans created by the gods. The pair are attested in both the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources, and the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson...
in comparative mythology, and who sought Indo-Iranian analogs for the
Poetic Edda poem,
VöluspáVöluspá is the first and best known poem of the Poetic Edda. It tells the story of the creation of the world and its coming end related by a völva addressing Odin...
. Marvin Taylor cites Rydberg’s definition of the phrase, “dómr um dauðan hvern,” as predating that of a more contemporary writer cited by the author in his review of Julia Zernack's Geschichten aus Thule, 1994, published in the Saga-Book of the Viking Society.
External links
- Viktor Rydberg, His Life and Works, a Memorial by Tore Lund.
- Viktor Rydbergs Sällskapet (The Viktor Rydberg Society), publisher of the Journal Veratis, devoted to Rydberg's Life and Literature.
- Several works online at Projekt Runeberg (in Swedish)
- Viktor Rydberg's "Teutonic Mythology: Gods and Goddesses of the Northland" 1906 edition, e-book
- Viktor Rydberg and the comparative study of the history of Indo-European religion, by Anna Lindén, Doktorand, Lund University.
- The Invincible Sword of the Elf-Smith, The Complete Norse Mythology Set to Music, based on Rydberg's Fädernas Gudasaga. by Mats Wendt
Mats Wendt Born in 1965. Scandinavian classical composer and artist. Most international known work is Eddan - the invincible sword of the elf-smith, a 16 hour long "cybersymphonic" work on Norse mythology according to Viktor Rydberg...