SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

244
Saga-Book of the Viking Society
oratio III Percy, as The Gentleman's Magazine 2 ' told
them.
A later version by Johnstone of this much-rendered
poem was reviewed by the magazine'" which thought it
a "spirited recital" and that it would be interesting and
curious to "those who are versed in Islandic lore, and
fond of Northern Literature".
The change to a more sympathetic attitude to this
literature is manifest in the long and knowledgeable review
of Part I of the Edda Stemundar published at Copenhagen
in 1787, provided by The Gentleman's Magazine in
1788.27 We now read of the "singular and sublime
mythology" of the "Prosaick Edda", and the reader
learns that he will find in this publication a well-written
account of a mythology that has striking resemblances
to the Greek. There is a life of Ssemund with notes on
the dating of the poems, which contrast in "simplicity
of phraseology" with the "distorted conceits and violent
metaphors" of twelfth- and thirteenth-century poems.
The scenes and persons are never Icelandic. The poems
contain the pagan creed of Scandinavia, and their leading
features are certified by Jornandes, Bede, Adam of
Bremen, and Saxo Grammaticus. The reviewer proceeds
to give a summary of the thirteen poems, and recalls that
VegtamskviiJa was finely handled by Gray - always
the critics' standard - and that from his imitations
"the English reader may form an idea of this Edda".
The reviewer thinks the alleged connection of the lEsir
with Troy inconsistent with Snorri's history, and the
Trinitarian presentation of Odin "an absurd and ignorant
interpolation".
In 1786 the Magazine 2 8 reviewed a new edition of the
Poems of Mr Gray with notes by Gilbert Wakefield, and
2.• Gentlenian's Magazine LI (I78I), 430.
26 LIII Pt. 2 (1783), 603. (The Critical offered moderate approval, 54,
3I9.)
27 LVIII Pt. I (I788), 137.
2R LVI Pt. 2 (I/86), 591.