The poems, sagas and ballads of early Germanic and Scandinavian societies were a growing field of study in the English-speaking world around the turn of the nineteenth century. A trio of Scotsmen the writer Sir Walter Scott (1771 1832), antiquarian Robert Jamieson (1772 1844) and literary scholar Henry William Weber (1783 1818) decided to contribute to this field by bringing together their work on 'romances' from the Old German, Danish, Swedish and Icelandic languages, claiming that these poems and tales 'offer a new and interesting subject of speculation to the English reader'. In this...