The Suicide of the 'Historical' Óðinn in English Literary Adaptions at the Turn of the 18th and 19th Century
2019
Abstrakt
In June 1792 young poet Robert Southey, who was to become one of the prominent representant of English Romanticism, sent in a letter to a friend a poem called "The Death of Odin". Three years later, he published it in his first collection of poems together with another poem on Norse subject "The Race of Odin".
These poems contain one striking motif unknown from the Norse sources - Odin leaves this world by committing a suicide. In this paper, I'll try to put this description of Odin's death into the context of scholarly and antiquarian work written by Southey's predecessors and contemporaries which might have inspired him, and trace the tradition back to its probable source, the description of Odin's death in the Ynglinga saga.