<em>Beyond the Wall</em>. Renaissance Embodiments of the Old Norse god Freyr

Abstract

In his Gespräch über die Poesie («Athenäum», III, 1800), Fr. Schlegel reworked some of the ideas put forward years earlier by J. G. Herder – in his controversy with J. Winckelmann – on the need to recover the mythopoietic dimension in national artistic creation and to get rid of the influence of the Greek model, which has been active in German thought for a long time. Schlegel’s work became the manifesto of an upcoming pre-Romantic aesthetic, which for at least two centuries had been rediscovering the memorial heritage of old Germanic mythology, best embodied in the XIIth and XIIIth cent. Old Norse literacy. Among the controversial sources conveying that tradition, works like the early Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum by Adam of Bremen (ca. 1070) and some historical annals of late medieval Sweden generated unprecedented and long-lasting representations of divine simulacra, which were able to influence, both politically and ideologically, the Gothicist movement during the Renaissance. This essay focuses on the representation of Old Norse divine triads during the XVIth-and XVIIth centuries, and specifically on the reception of fertility myths connected with the god Freyr.

Keywords

• Adam of Bremen
• Norse mythology
• Freyr
• Gothicism
• Swedish Renaissance