No one knows when he came to the farm, no one has ever seen him, but everyone knows it is the troll Tomten who walks about the lonely old farmhouse on a winter's night, talking to all the animals and reminding them of the promise of Spring.

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.

"There is no doubt that the book is one of the most original and valuable contributions to the study of Teutonic Mythology that have appeared since the great work of Grimm."- Atheneum Viktor Rydberg (1828-1895) was an author, journalist, distinguished scholar and controversial religious dissenter. A most important Swedish writer who for many years was a significant influence on Swedish national culture, he was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1877. From 1884 - 1895 he was professor of cultural history at Stockholms Hoegskola.