1891. One of the great Swedish romanticists, Rydberg started Teutonic Mythology as an attempt to save the Old Norse Eddaic myths from allegations of Christian and Classical influence. Soon he became absorbed by the idea that they were not only very ancient but also fragments of a vast and coherent mythical epic. To the dismay of his friends, he spent nearly a decade trying to reconstruct and prove this epic. The results were largely dismissed by other scholars as poetical imaginations.