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Scandinavica for the 18th-century Common Reader 247
in by Lincolnshire people were really a festival of the
winter solstice and of Thor - which was the original
justification of excessive eating and drinking!
The eighteenth century still hardly knew where to place
the Scandinavians: it had not discovered the North to be
a wonderful holiday resort; it was unsure of its response
to Icelandic poetry. But it was growing rapidly in knowledge
of history and geography, and the sublimities (and
barbarities) of the heroic legends were gradually forcing
a breach in the smooth and rational complacency of the
period. The North was far from being the only surprising
factor, but it played an honourable part.
The Critical Reoieiu" must have the last word. In
1798 it reviewed A. S. Cottle's Icelandic Poetry, or the
Edda of Scemund (1797), and commented on the remarkable
difference between Runic mythology in Verstegan
and Saxo on the one hand and the Eddas on the other.
"Jn the antiquary and the historian, it appears like the
meagre and barbarous idolatry of savages: in the Eddas
it is a wild and magnificent system, calculated powerfully
to impress an unenlightened people, and which may take
place in poetry, of the tame fictions of Greece and Rome
... The historian will find in it the creed of his ancestors:
and the poet will acquire a variety of images peculiarly
adapted for poetry by their novelty, their strangeness and
their sUblimity."
37 Critical Review 22 (New Arrangement; I798).