Gripla - 01.01.1975, Síða 176

172
GRIPLA
In this way an oral tradition may never be quite the same as the
corresponding work in written ‘literary’ shape. I want to call
this very complicated process ‘literarisation’.
c) But in Iceland new traditions arose also about the events during
the discovery and settlement of the country and especially about
the forming of new orders and the conflicts connected with
them. These traditions must have been considered very impor-
tant ones by the Icelanders for a long time, both in the pre-
literary stage, and, obviously, also afterwards. This means that
these traditions were subject to ‘literarisation’ in a similar way
as the older ones.
These differences between Old Norwegian and Old Icelandic litera-
ture are not always clearly apparent, and certainly they are not simply
stages in a chronological development.
Let us now look at these three elements somewhat closer.
1. THE PRESERVATION OF OLD TRADITIONS
It is commonly known that traditions of several kinds as well as the
language itself are very often preserved much better in colonized
countries than in the homeland itself. So, for example, the language of
Bavarian speaking colonists in the so-called Seven Communities (Sette
communi) in Upper Italy has been preserved in a very archaic form
through many centuries, and though it is now named ‘Cimbrian’ it is
a very old form of Bavarian dialect.—In the Gottschee, a city and
district in Jugoslavia colonized by German speaking people, the
theme of the Middle High German poem ‘Kudrun’ still existed in our
century as a ballad with the title ‘Die Meererin’. As in these com-
munities old traditions, sometimes only relics, are preserved parti-
cularly well in so-called ‘Sprachinseln’, where settlers are surrounded
by a people speaking another language. We can find such settlements
especially in the eastern and south-eastern parts of Europe, mainly as
the result of planned colonizations.
But there are other examples, too. Scholars in folk tale research
know that folk tales, first of all Márchen, in the New England States
in North America, and sometimes even in Australia, are preserved