Gripla - 01.01.1975, Page 178

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GRIPLA
probably a psychological one; maybe an inclination to honour and
preserve all that had been of common possession in the home
country.
As already mentioned, it is above all folk tales, ballads, dances,
legends, and similar traditions that are generally well preserved. As a
rule traditions of such kinds are passed on only in a community, in
an auditory for instance or in a circle of dancers and singers. Very
often the artistic form of such traditions is not very complicated. In Ice-
land fomaldarsogur (in an oral, pre-literary stage) and maybe Eddic
lays belong to this group. But there is the scaldic poetry, one of the
highest developed artistic forms of poetry we know, which depends
on an individual poet with an extremely good sense of language,
rhyme, and metre. Scaldic poetry is not a kind of folk poetry and
cannot be compared with folk poetry or folk literature in general. I
think there is no doubt that scaldic poetry is a traditional art, too, but
a tradition bound in strong rules. Where such a poetry existed else-
where, it was generally connected with a sacral or secular school of
poets, as for instance in Old Ireland, and the poems created by such
authors are functionally destined. Also the scaldic poetry in Norway
had been a functional one, and scalds, as for instance the Norwegians
Þjóðólfr and Eyvindr in the tenth and the Icelanders Sighvatr Þórðar-
son and Arnórr Þórðarson in the eleventh century, were court poets.
But already in the tenth century scaldic poetry had become an art in-
dependent of the courts of kings and jarls, and it is first of all Ice-
landers like Egill, Kormákr, and Gísli, who used the possibilities of
scaldic poetry as a free artistic form without a functional limitation.
At a very early time these Icelanders using traditional forms created
a kind of l’art pour l’art poetry.
2. THE LITERARISATION OF OLD ORAL TRADITIONS
Probably we would not know anything about the old traditions of Ice-
land and Norway, if so many of them had not been written down in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But of course the term ‘writing
down old traditions’ does not mean the same as ‘literarisation’. When
Snorri quoted scaldic verses in the Heimskringla or in his Edda he