Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

Teutonic Myth and Legend: Introduction

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This is the introductory chapter of Donald A. Mackenzie's 1912 scholarly survey of Germanic/Norse mythology, situating the work within its primary sources and explaining how those sources came to survive. The chapter establishes the two Icelandic Eddas — the Prose Edda compiled by Snorri Sturlason (c. 1179–1241) and the Elder or Poetic Edda — as the central records of Teutonic paganism, supplemented by Saxo Grammaticus's history of Denmark, which Mackenzie notably identifies as the source Shakespeare drew on for Hamlet. A key argument running through the introduction is that Teutonic mythology was never doctrinally uniform across regions or eras, but rather a gradual, politically driven synthesis: mythologies were deliberately constructed to unify disparate tribes under centralized governance, with the merger of gods reflecting the merger of peoples. Mackenzie also leans heavily on the Swedish scholar Victor Rydberg, crediting his "Teutonic Mythology" as the foundational modern reconstruction of the northern mythological drama, while cautioning that purely theoretical scholars miss nuances that only someone raised inside a living folklore tradition can grasp. A distinctive strand throughout is Mackenzie's insistence that Pagan belief persisted long after formal Christian conversion — he compares half-pagan Icelanders to seventeenth-century Scottish Highlanders still sacrificing bulls near Loch Maree — suggesting the Eddic poems were preserved not merely as literature but as genuine living tradition.

Teutonic Myth and Legend: Introduction

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