Gripla

						200                                                GRIPLA

propaganda for the chiefs, see 2.1-2.2 above, some exaggeration of

their feats may be expected. Vansina says (1973:76):

For instance, poems in praise of the kings . . . The purpose of

these poems is to extol the kings, therefore they distort events of

the past in the sense that they exaggerate the valorous deeds of

the kings and pass over their defeats in silence.

And on praise poems dealing with military actions Finnegan (1976:

126) has this to say:

The basis of the events mentioned is authentic, but the emphasis

is on those incidents in which the hero excelled.

But while the poems throw a considerable light on the society in

which they came into being, they were probably never intended to

record history. This has been dealt with by Vansina (1973:149):

A poem of praise is certainly not composed for the purpose of

recording history. Poetry of this kind is composed either during

the lifetime of the person concerned, or immediately after his

death . . . It is obligatory to use a large number of stereotype

phrases in this category of poems, so the poems serve as a source

of information about the social ideals prevalent at the time when

they were composed.

(e) The court poems were handed down orally, but it is an open

question how accurate this tradition was. Snorri Sturluson (Den store

saga om Olav den hellige 1941:4) has this to say on the problem:

Þau orð er i qvedscap standa ero en somo sem i fyrstu voro ef

rett er kveðit þott hveR maðr hafi siðan numit at auðrom. oc ma

þvi ecki breyta.

He states, again somewhat optimistically, that the poems cannot be

altered if they were metrically correct at the outset. There is no reason

to doubt that those who knew and recited the poems intended to hand

them down unchanged, and that they occasionally succeeded in this.

But there are examples of the same verse being found in two different

sources in divergent, even widely divergent versions, and this in spite

of the metre (cf. Jón Helgason 1953:107-108).

This is of course only what is to be expected in the case of an oral