Gripla - 20.12.2018, Síða 318

GRIPLA318
thetic and partly a question of the break with philological text editing that
Grundtvig’s plan would bring. Grundvtig won the short but bitter and
highly public conflict, and his ballad edition, which began publication in
1853, set the standard for the rest of the world. and this principle held
not just for ballads. for example, Evald tang Kristensen’s editions of the
legends and indeed other folkloristic materials of Jylland show us pretty
much all there was, as it was, as do some other legend editions from the
nordic countries. Digital technology will make such projects far easier, and
internationally it can certainly be said that folklorists are among the hu-
manists and social scientists best positioned to take advantage of advances
in thinking about big data. Everything there is or was, as it is or was, is an
increasingly attainable goal even when the amounts of material are almost
too vast to contemplate.
Had the philologists of the twentieth century followed this plan for
mythological materials, they would have published separately, and in full,
the two versions of Vǫluspá and the stanzas from the poem quoted in
Snorri Sturluson’s Edda. they did not, although Sophus Bugge had done
so in the nineteenth century. the result was, to give a personal example,
that when I first came to the poem through the edition of neckel and
Kuhn, I studied one text with little consideration of the differences. I am
glad that we have moved on over the years, that the value of paying atten-
tion to variation is obvious, and that the edition of Jónas Kristjánsson and
Vésteinn Ólason prints the versions separately.
as an aside, I can mention that when we were working on the History
and Structures strand of the Pre-Christian religions of the north project,
I lobbied for citing stanzas in Vǫluspá by indicating where the stanza was
in both Konungsbók and Hauksbók, if in both, and noting any variations,
if any, in Snorri’s version. I was overruled by my editorial colleagues on
the ground that only specialists would understand such citation, and that
we were aiming for a wider audience than specialists. Perhaps, but it still
troubles me that non-specialists miss the fact that what they think of as
Vǫluspá is an arbitrary construct. If they read my chapter on the written
sources they will be disabused of this erroneous notion, but if they encoun-
ter references to Vǫluspá elsewhere in the volumes they may not.
folklore traditions and folkloristics, the field that studies them, have
insights to offer about variation that go beyond the way we should edit and