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Originally Posted by Bill Ferny
Can it be that his judgement of Wagner is based on the Teutonic nationalism that Wagner inserts into the Elder Edda?
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That probably is the case - and the follow-up you suggesta as well. His reluctance to admit any similarities later would then arise from the legacy of Nazism so blatantly using those mythologies to their own horrible ends (let's not talk about Wagner here even if he was a role-model for Hitler; an artist and a politician at the same time with the quest of making great the nation).
But we should also see, that that kind of national-romantic world-view was not that uncommon back then (before WWII) among the intelligentsia. On the contrary it was more or less the mainstream cultural view in Scandinavia, the Great Britain and Germany. And it wasn't always just nationalistic in the way of referring to nation states only, but oftentimes took the form of
Nordischen erbe, the Northern heritage - or like Hitler popularised it; as aryanism (which of course means Persian / Indian roots, but little did he understand the history of ideas and people).
So it's easy to see the prof. taking part in that general mood and like everyone else taking part in that feeling, feeling a need to distance himself from it after the Nazi-regime so mishandled that line of thought.
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Originally Posted by Orofarne
This is the man who formed a book club where they read Icelandic literature in Icelandic.
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You're quite right here. He even studied Finnish to be able to read the Kalevala in the original language....
