Till the Gods Speak Again: Folklore, Esotericism, and Romantic Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Class Description

In the nineteenth century, a strange alliance took shape between folklorists, poets, and students of the occult. Across Ireland, Iceland, Sweden, and the Baltic, they walked into villages with notebooks and returned convinced they had recovered something older than Christianity: a hidden national soul, encoded in songs, charms, and stories. What they gathered became the raw material both for new nations and for a new kind of religion what we now call modern paganism.

Dell J. Rose serves as programme director for the Swedenborg Library Chicago. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the Centre for the History of Hermetic Philosophy at the Universiteit van Amsterdam in the Netherlands. His published research covers folklore, esotericism, political theology, Nordic paganism, the Celtic Revival, and nineteenth-century European religious and literary thought. 

What to Expect

Format: In Person 

Class Capacity: 10 

Class Style: Mix of lecture and discussion; participation encouraged 

Materials List

Required

• Instructor-Distributed Materials

First Assignment

Please read one of the following excerpts:

• Herder, "Treatise on the Origin of Language"

• Grimm, preface to Kinder- und Hausmärchen

• selection from Creuzer's Symbolik

Consider the question: What did it mean, in 1812, to say that a fairy tale preserved something "true" about a national culture?

A Brief Syllabus

1. The Enchanted Nation: Folklore, Esotericism, and the Invention of the Volk
2. The Celtic Twilight: Ireland, Magic, and the Making of a Nation
3. Sagas and Seers of the North: Iceland, Sweden, and the Germanic Revival
4. The Song of a Nation: Finland, the Baltic, and the Kalevala World
5. Till the Gods Speak Again: Legacies, Politics, and What the Folklorists Actually Built

Cost and Registration

5 Sessions, $255 ($229.50 for Newberry members, seniors, and students). Learn about becoming a member.

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The views and opinions expressed in this class and/or by the instructor are not necessarily representative of the Newberry. We aim to ensure that in our classes, participants can have respectful disagreement to foster critical thinking. This is a space to challenge and expand our own worldviews to work towards better understanding and appreciating humanity.

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