Grundtvig’s reading in Anglo-Saxon literature from 1815 onwards, long before his watershed meeting with Irenaeus, introduced him to a body of religious poetry characterised by its early medieval, patristic, oldkirkelige ideas and images. That these immediately appealed to him and perhaps confirmed views (for example on the interpretation of history) already forming in his mind, is evident from the interpretation he put upon Beowulf . His engagement with the four long scripture-based poems in the so-called Junius manuscript, attributed to the 7th-c. poet Cædmon, and with the Exeter Book of Anglo-Saxon religious poetry, continued his potential exposure to the oldkirkelige heritage, including the association of vernacular poems with the liturgical cycle of the Church’s year. But not to be overlooked is the fact that the Thesaurus (1703-05; the work of George Hickes and Humphrey Wanley) through which Grundtvig gained much of his basic knowledge of this poetry, reflects Hickes’s own commitment, as a non-juror priest and bishop in the English Church, to the catholic legacy of the pre-Reformation English Church. The record of Grundtvig’s development over these earlier years needs to take account of what he found in Hickes-Wanley and in the literature to which they pointed him.
In Rune-Bladet (1844), Grundtvig employs the image of a leaf or sliver of beechwood used to deliver a runic message of hope from off the sea. In his transcription of the Exeter Book (1830 onwards), he gave to Riddle 60 the title (and solution) “Rune-Kiævlet” [The rune-stick]. Riddle 60 is associated with two other Exeter Book poems, The Husband’s Message and The Wife’s Lament . Taken together, these poems appear to tell the story of a woman cruelly separated from her spouse or lover, and forced to live in exiled humiliation and yearning until she is at last summoned by a sea-borne message on a rune-stick to rejoin her spouse and once more assume the dignity and status rightfully hers. The analogy between this Anglo-Saxon motif and the issue of the status of Danish and Danishness in Slesvig which is a focus of the 1844 Skamlingsbanke gathering from which Grundtvig was returning by sea when inspired to compose the poem, is striking; and since the Anglo-Saxon motif may arguably allude ultimately to the relationship between Christ and his Bride the Church, the possibility arises of Grundtvig having appropriated it to place the Slesvig cause (at least in his own mind) in a context of divine providence. Seen thus, it is another revealing example of Grundtvig’s creative appropriation of metaphor and motif from this body of early medieval Northern Christian vernacular poetry.
