Räume erzählen–erzählende Räume. Raumdarstellung als Poetik. Mit einer examplarischen Analyse des Nibelungenliedes by Franziska Hammer (review)

Baltics: only the one essay reviewed here, and even that essay is more about the Swedish literary and academic influence on Finnish and Sámi religious studies and less about the pre-Christian religions themselves. One could have wished for more space to Sámi and Finnish religious studies, especially since it was mentioned as a goal in the introduction and it is likely to have been an area that was less familiar to many students and scholars of pre-Christian religions of the North. This reader was also a little confused by how the terms Scandinavian and Nordic were being employed. It is admittedly an ongoing issue when discussing the topic in English. Is Scandinavia a cultural, linguistic, or geographic description? Are the Finns and Sámi to be included? How should one refer to the people living on the Scandinavian peninsula speaking a Germanic language as opposed to their Finno-Ugric neighbors? An example of an area that is curiously missing altogether is oral theory. There has been some work looking at issues of orality and performance in the Poetic Edda in the wake of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord’s work on the subject starting in the early twentieth century with a crescendo half a century later, but there is no mention of this area of study in the work. References to scholars like Paul Acker and Robert Kellogg, and even my own work are missing, as well as work in progress on orality in saga prose. It must be said that this volume is ambitious: pre-Christian religions of the North have made a considerable mark on research and culture, especially over the last two centuries. Therefore, some things were bound to be left out, and whereas the volume’s aim is to “track the reception history of ideas” (p. xxiii), it is possible this line of inquiry was considered outside the purview of the book. In the end, scholars, researchers, and students will find this book a very useful reference work for a survey of scholarship and reception in a wide variety of fields relevant to The Pre-Christian Religions of the North. Scott A. Mellor University of Wisconsin-Madison