Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses early scholarship on fairy tale motifs in Old Norse literature, which is for most parts only available in the German language. Those early theories have little been discussed in the last decades, but deserve to be re-examined and re-evaluated by new generations of folklorists.

Paper long abstract:

Long before Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature was published, the relations between the fairy tale and Old Norse literature was widely debated and discussed by early scholars of folklore and literature. The Brothers Grimm, for example, pointed out several important relations and similarities between some of their collected fairy tales and medieval Icelandic literature in their annotations to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. While some early folklorists regarded the fairy tale elements to be of an old age, which have been consciously incorporated into Old Norse literature (Olrik 1892, Rittershaus 1902, Bugge 1909, Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1929), others supported Theodor Benfey’s theory on a rather recent migration of the fairy tale from India to the far North, for which reason fairy tale elements could only be late additions to Old Norse texts (von der Leyen 1899). Some of the major accomplishments in this field were made by Friedrich Panzer, who assumed that the fairy tale was the soil out of which Old Norse literature and Germanic epic emerged in the first place, by adapting certain patterns and elements common to the fairy tale (Panzer 1901; 1910-12).

In this paper, I would like to present and discuss early ideas and scholarship on fairy tale motifs in Old Norse literature, which is for most parts only available in the German language. Those early theories and approaches have little been discussed in the last few decades, but deserve to be re-examined and re-evaluated by new generations of folklorists.