Gripla - 01.01.1990, Síða 268

264
GRIPLA
of His teachings by Peter. Though the stag horn in this ‘robbery’ could
have had several allegorical meanings, the poet utilized it primarily for
its physiological power of regeneration on the living stag, which it
evokes after death as the risen Christ; carved with runes, it likewise
serves to transmit the Christian message.
The syncretism of Sólarljóð, which I have confined to a couple of
stanzas (25 and 41), tends as with the creation of the sun-stag to break
up in the composition of the poem into increasingly complex, quasi-
syncretic, literary processes, which are governed by the hermeneutic
principle of interpretatio christiana and the poet’s imagination (the X-
factor). Synthetic as these processes are in interworking Christian
themes with Norse literary subjects and cultural objects, they fail of
being precisely syncretic because there usually is not involved any
high-level religious belief or active cult practice on either side of them.
So much may be allowed to Peter Foote’s narrow definition of Norse-
Christian syncretism.
Against the interpretatio christiana in section two and three of Sólar-
Ijóð the commentators on the poem have occasionally postulated an
interpretatio germanica in passages of section one wherever the poet
seems to waver between Christian and pagan ethics, or even prefer the
latter.50 But their equation of paganism with a specific code of ethics -
e.g., the Germanic lex talionis - is a scholarly fallacy of German and
Scandinavian religious thought which has been refuted more than
once, as by Hans Kuhn in a lecture of 1966.51 Moreover, the allegedly
pagan ethics in stanzas 10 and 19 are susceptible of fairly straight-
forward Christian interpretation. The moral in stanza 10 to the ex-
emplum of two men who loved disastrously one woman - ‘opt verðr
kvalræði af konum’ - is not peculiarly ‘Eddic’ but more commonly
Christian; and the well-meant advice in stanza 19, never to trust your
enemies, repaying fair speeches with fine assurances,52 borrows a
phrase from Hávamál, st. 45, but only in order to render the injunc-
50 See Falk on stanza 10 (= his stanza 11) in Sljð. I, pp. 6-7; and Falk again in ibid.,
pp. 11-13, Björn M. Ólsen in Sljð. II, pp. 33-34, and Fidjestpl in Sljð. III, pp. 38-41, on
stanza 19 (= Falk’s st. 20).
51 ‘Das Fortleben des germanischen Heidentums nach der Christianisierung,’ Kleine
Schriften, ed. Dietrich Hofmann et al., II, Berlin 1971, 378 ff.
52 ‘Góðu þu heit’ in the mss., superfluously emended by Björn M. Ólsen, at the in-
stigation of Falk, to ‘góðu þót heiti.’