Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Page 22
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We have clear evidence, in the wood carvings on the ancient “stave
churches”, that the heroic tales known to us from the Eddas were still
popular among the Norwegians of the 12th century, hut they existed only
as “oral literature” and were never written down. We also know that
skaldic poetry was composed in Norway near the end of the same century,
and Icelandic court skalds were received with favour by the kings well
into the 13th century. But this, too, was a reminiscence of hygone times;
the tradition of skaldic poetry was lyric rather than epic, and it could not
compete with the folk tales and heroic traditions. We do not know how
the Norwegian courtiers spent their leisure in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, hut we can imagine how the skalds and other experienced sagna-
menn recited poems and told stories of the old heroes. Later, we can
imagine how monks and priests read aloud from Saints’ Lives and other
religious literature. Original literature makes its appearance with the
Ågrip25, a chronicle in the European manner, which must have been in-
tended as a modernized version of the historical matter in the oral sagas of
the skalds. But the Ågrip remained the only specimen of Norwegian his-
torical writing; the Icelanders were the recognized authorities on Scan-
dinavian history in general, and the numerous MSS of Kings’ Sagas
written in Norway in the 13th century are all based on Icelandic works.
But this is the only field where we find the educated Norwegians of the
Middle Ages turning to native traditions for the material of literary
works, and the reason is that they could learn very little about the history
of Norway from English and French sources, a faet deplored by Theo-
doricus Monachus26. In all other spheres, they turned to foreign litera-
ture; in faet, to the Norwegians of the 13th century, literature was what
was recognized as such by the French and the English, and, as far as
North German literature was known at all, by the Germans. This atti-
tude to oral traditions in general is not in itself surprising; we know that
folk-tales have existed in Europe for centuries, but they were not written
down until late in the eighteenth century, when people became interested
in “folk” literature. This is not to say that Norwegians did not read Ice-
** If the Veraldar saga is a Norwegian work, as Professor Seip thinks, it may
possibly have been used for the same purpose as the Agrip later. Vide D. A. Seip:
Nye studier i norsk språkhistorie, Oslo 1954, pp. 105-114.
26 Monumenta Hist. Norv. pp. 3—4. He quotes what he has found in French chroni-
cles, and says that no more is known about the subject: illorum memoriam scripto-
rum inopia dele<vit.
*