Gripla

						OLD  NORSE   COURT   POETRY                            195

dit, nous avons affaire dés l'origine á une sorte de norme linguis-

tique.

For Irish this phenomenon has been described by Corkery (1956:

73-74):

. . . the Irish language was the very apple of their eye to the bardic

schools. That language they took, and ruling out dialect and the

passing turn of speech, refined it and set it apart as a special

dialect, a language for literature, which became known from end

to end of Ireland. It was known also in Scotland. It remained

unchanged for centuries.

There are other examples still, for instance the language of the

German Minnes'ánger which has been compared to Norse poetic langu-

age by Kuhn (1969:111-112).

The discussion in (a)-(e) above leads to the somewhat unsurprising

conclusion that the court poems were indeed handed down orally

before being committed to parchment. Comparison with similar as well

as with different poetic genres elsewhere supports this.

4.0  The court poems have come down to us in manuscripts, mainly

embedded in the texts of the kings' sagas. Complete poems are seldom

found, only single verses. This is strikingly different from the Eddic

poems. The historians claim to use these verses as sources for their

works. This claim, as well as the historical value of the poems, will be

examined briefly below.

4.1   It is not known when the poems were taken to pieces but there

are at least two possible explanations:

(a)  The historians based their works on the poems and at the same

time they took the poems apart and inserted single verses into their

story as a proof of its veracity.

This explanation leaves something to be desired, because the prose

sections contain a wealth of information not to be found in the verses.

(b)  When the sagas were written there existed oral tales interspersed

with verses or poems accompanied by more or less detailed tales. The

historians collected these tales and committed them to parchment more

or less changed, thus working at the same time as collectors, editors