National Romantic Art and the 19th-Century Rediscovery
The Visual Arts
The National Romantic movement found in Norse mythology a rich visual vocabulary for expressing ideas about origins, nature, and peoplehood. In Sweden, painters such as Nils Blommér, August Malmström, and Mårten Eskil Winge became central figures. Blommér's "Näckens polska" (1850) and "The Dance of the Elves" introduced figures from folk belief into an academic tradition, while Winge's "Thor's Battle with the Giants" (1872) gave the struggles of the Aesir a monumental and dramatic form.
In Norway, Peter Nicolai Arbo and Theodor Kittelsen produced works that would shape how generations of Scandinavians imagine Norse mythology. Arbo's "The Valkyrie" (1869) is among the most reproduced works in the genre, depicting a mounted valkyrie against a stormy sky. Kittelsen, best known for his illustrations of Norwegian folk tales, gave trolls and nature spirits a visual life that persists in popular culture to this day. The Danish illustrator Lorenz Frølich created extensive pictorial cycles for the Eddas and shaped the graphic interpretation of the gods throughout the latter half of the century.
The movement was not confined to Scandinavia. German and British interest in the mythology of the Germanic past created a pan-European artistic current in which Eddic motifs were interpreted through distinct national perspectives. The shared thread was a longing for a presumed original state, an imagined antiquity free from the upheavals of industrialisation.
Wagner and the Role of Music
No single artist has exerted greater influence on how Norse and Germanic mythology is perceived in Western culture than Richard Wagner. His operatic cycle "Der Ring des Nibelungen", composed between 1848 and 1874, fused motif-clusters from the Old Norse Volsunga saga and the Middle High German Nibelungenlied into a new unified work of enormous dimensions. The cycle was performed complete in Bayreuth in 1876 and constituted a cultural seismic event whose aftershocks are still felt.
Wagner's adaptation was not philologically accurate in any modern sense. He reinterpreted, merged, and freely created new material, pursuing dramatic and philosophical goals that extended far beyond the source texts. Nevertheless, his portrayals of Wotan, Siegfried, Brünnhilde, and Fafner became archetypes for an entire era. The concept of the leitmotif, a recurring musical theme tied to a person or idea, found its definitive artistic form in the Ring and went on to influence all subsequent film music and dramatic composition.
Wagner's influence extends into the political sphere as well, a subject addressed in a later article. In purely musical and cultural terms, he opened a door for the broad European public to mythological material that had previously been confined to scholarly circles and a narrow readership.
Literary Reception: Morris, Grundtvig, and the Romantics' Philologists
In England, William Morris engaged with Old Norse literature with an intensity that coloured his entire artistic project. He learned Icelandic, traveled to Iceland in 1871 and 1873, and produced prose translations of the sagas alongside independent works inspired by Nordic poetry. His Arts and Crafts movement drew its formal vocabulary from medieval Nordic craftsmanship and advanced the idea that craft and fine art stood in a dignified relation to one another. Morris saw in the Icelandic sagas and Eddic poetry a literature freed from what he perceived as the hierarchies of classical antiquity.
In Denmark, N.F.S. Grundtvig played a decisive role in making Norse mythology accessible and meaningful to a broad readership. His "Nordens mytologi" (1808, revised 1832) was an early and influential attempt to systematise and interpret the Old Norse world of the gods. Grundtvig understood mythology as a living spiritual inheritance rather than mere antiquity, and his work had a profound impact on Danish popular education and the emerging folk high school movement.
Behind the artistic interpretations lay scholarly work of exceptional importance. Philologists such as Rasmus Rask and Jacob Grimm laid the foundations for comparative linguistics and mythology research. Vilhelm Grønbech's "Vor Folkeæt i Oldtiden" and subsequent work in the history of religions built on this foundation, attempting to reconstruct the spiritual and social world behind the source texts. Without this philological labour, the artistic reception would have lacked the raw material it required.