AAaaargh! Torsten, stop it please! Snorri and Saxo's stories, are shameless euhemerisations, as Chris Gwinn has so rightly pointed out. They are in exctly the same vein of Mediaeval and Classical scholarship as the stories of Aeneas founding Rome, or that other Trojan Brutus naming Britain. [No offence to the great memory of Snorri Stuluson, who was only following the example of what was thought in those days to be the best possible methodology. I have a little less sympathy for Saxo, who seems to have had less respect for his people's traditions] You say you are well acquainted with Viktor Rydberg's 'Germanic Mythology' but I would like to hear why you don't agree with his account of the euhemerisation process.
For those who are unaware of Rydberg, he refuted all the stories of the Germanic Peoples and Gods having originated from real historical personages who had more or less recently lived by the Sea of Azov, as long ago as 1887! He goes, step by fanciful step, through the entire process of the 'correction' of Germanic folk traditions in order to make them 'fit' with Classical 'history' as largely enshrined in the Aeneid.
There's an online copy at
http://www.boudicca.de/teut.htm
It's very long, but the relevent part to this discussion is found in sections 10 to 13, and is only a few pages worth.
Briefly, it's just a case of the story of Troy looming so large in barbarian Europe's inherited Classical tradition, that everyone wanted to, and simply HAD to, be descended from the Trojans. The deduction process the early Mediaeval historians used is highly reminiscent of the sort of thing that we see in Piotr's list of 'Kooky Sites'!
Rydberg uses these sources as a means to reconstruct the older traditions, which he does with some degree of plausibility, and constitutes in my opinion a worthwhile task. However, you can't treat the Trojan euhemerisation bits as containing traces of real history for they constitute a grafted on addition, that can be easily discerned if you follow it's own historiographical trajectory. Please clarify for me where you think Rydberg has gone wrong, Torsten, please!
Yours
Beinn Mac an Gheairr
PS. And, realistically, what are a people who live by the Don going to have a war with a Kartvelian society for? The journey would involve marching all the way thru the Kuban, and Adygeia, crossing over to the other side of the Caucasus Mountains, all of Abkhazia, Mingrelia ...
-----Original Message-----
From :
tgpedersen@...
To :
cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Date : 15 November 2001 13:04:58
Subject : [tied] Vanir
>
> I thought about for a while: is everybody tired of hearing about
>Snorri's ideas of the Aesir living on the Don and fighting Vanir to
>the east of them; but on the other hand, if someone should speculate
>on the origins of the Vanir, so ...
>
>in
>Vae victis.
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