Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1957, Page 134

INTRODUCTION
114
Olrik’s claim that we have to deal with “a shorter and a longer
version of the same work; the more elaborate presentation is the
older of the two, the other, with more of the character of a
chronicle, is the younger” (Aarb. 1894, p. 153). Only at the end
of Skjgld. is there perhaps reason to suppose some re-working.
Even if we cannot say with certainty how the original Skjgld.
ended, it is conceivable that the man who set Skjgld. before
Knytlinga saga undertook some revision of the end of the former
in order to procure a more natural transition to the latter. In the
form Skjgld. has as the introduction to Knytlinga, its last section
must necessarily have told of Gorm the Old and his ancestors,
whether this was also the original end of the saga or not.
AJ’s text I 3551—35931 corresponds precisely to the first part
of such a concluding section in Skjgld. But here a difficulty arises,
for there is no doubt that AJ’s chief source in this passage was
Olåfs saga Tryggvasonar (in AM 53 fol. and probably also the
version in Flat.). As is pointed out in the notes to this section,
there are however various signs of the use of a third source,
which we should most naturally conclude to have been Skjgld.
(see notes to 35512-15, 3566~7, 35723, 35829-30, 3594-7)- Now, it is
more or less certain that the section here in OTr. goes back ulti-
mately to Skjgld., though the text has certainly been worked
over and probably expanded. It is quite in keeping with his usual
methods for AJ to follow the fullest source, but it is just this
approach of his which makes the task of discovering how much
of his material had stood in the original Skjgld. a hopeless one.
Olrik wished to insert a hypothetical connecting link here, a
Chronicle of Denmark, supposed to have been based on Skjgld.,
Adam of Bremen and foreign annals. This work would then be
the source for both OTr. and AJ (Aarb. 1894, pp. 151—2). Of
this it must be said first that the existence of such a work cannot
be proved, and second that as an assumption it is quite super-
fluous. If one does not believe that the foreign material (Adam,
annals) was in Skjgld., there is still nothing to prevent it having
been first included in OTr., which AJ is known to have used.
It is thus impossible to unravel what was in Skjgld. in this sec-
tion and what AJ obtained from OTr. Neither therefore can we
make any distinction here between an older and a younger Skjgld.