Early Modern English scholars like Laurence Nowell and Sir Robert Bruce Cotton seem to have studied or at the very least had an interest in Anglo-Saxon literature (as evidenced by their ownership of the only manuscript of Beowulf). Was this interest in old Germanic literature paralleled in other Early Modern European literary circles? For example, did Scandinavian scholars of the 16th and 17th centuries study the Sagas? Did their French and Imperial counterparts study old Frankish literature?
Scandinavian scholars of the 16th and 17th centuries did take an interest in sagas and runestones. The study of such things was indeed revived in that era. Here in Sweden, the first known (but minor) studies into runes were conducted by the bishops Olaus Magnus and Olaus Petri in the mid-16th century and the first systematic investigations and inventories of antiquities would be done by Johannes Bureus in the early 1600s. Interest in the sagas started growing in that time period but Swedes could not read them since they were speaking early modern Swedish (yngre nysvenska) by then. That situation was helped when the Swedes seized a danish ship with the icelander Jón Rugman, who was eventually brought to the academic capital of Uppsala and put to work translating sagas. Both Rugman and later his countryman Jón Eggertsson would also be sent to Iceland by the Swedish crown to secretly gather medieval Icelandic manuscripts and sagas. (Iceland being the territory of Sweden's enemy Denmark) And Denmark was doing the same through Árni Magnússon among others.
However, the main goal of all this was to document history rather than read the sagas as literature , even if linguistic/philological research went hand in hand with the historical, as it required rediscovering Old Norse. And history in turn would serve to establish Sweden as a truly ancient and noble culture, home of the goths and vandals and almost anyone else that seemed cool, a movement known as gothicism - "viking" romanticism as we know it now would come in the 19th century, in the 17th century all ancient Swedes had been "goths" and that was the aspect that was stressed.
The obvious fantastical or supernatural elements were simply explained away by various means. The Dane Ole Worm in the 17th century and Olaus Petri already in the 16th had argued for various allegorical interpretations- a 'giant' could really just mean a tyrannical ruler, a 'dwarf' an evil person. The gothicist Olof Verelius in his 1666 translation of Bósa saga ok Herrauðs cautioned readers from disbelieving the stories, out of their (supposed) naivité over just how much heathen magic had existed in the ancient past.
Anyway, there were certainly contemporary antiquarian equivalents of Nowell and Cotton in Scandinavia. There was far less to work with though. There was, after all, no preserved written documents of any kind on paper/parchment until about 1100, and most of the medieval texts were written in Latin and religious or legal in nature, most of the little that existed in Scandinavian languages were just translations of foreign texts.
(Wallette, Sagans svenskar. Synen på vikingatiden och de isländska sagorna under 300 år., 2004 is a nice thesis/book on the Swedish historiography of the sagas)