Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Síða 40

20
Part One
based on Fasti Danici by Ole Worm. The most provocative part of
his passage on Old Norse literature, however, concemed Icelandic
letters:
Les colonies de Norvege qui peuplerent l’Islande, y porterent leur
esprit & leurs fables. Le[s] plus ingenieux de ces Insulaires s’appli-
querent å en forger de nouvelles. Ceux qui sont venus depuis, les ont
reciieillies, & en ont fait des volumes. Ils ont donné les noms d'Edda
& de Voluspa å ces repertoires de fictions, qui subsistent depuis prés
de six cens ans. Les Danois disent mesme qu’il y a eu une Edda
plus ancienne, dont celles de Semond & de Snorron qu’ils ont
aujourd’huy, ne sont que des abregez, & dont Saxon le Grammairien
a tiré tout ce qu’il a de plus fabuleux.32
(In settling in Iceland the Norwegian emigrants brought with them
their spirit as well as their legends, and the most ingenious of the is-
landers were busy making up new ones. Newcomers collected them
and gathered them into volumes. To these collections of fiction,
which have now been in existence for nearly six hundred years, they
gave the names Edda and Voluspa. In Denmark it is said that there has
been a still older Edda, of which those of Semond and Snorron, which
they have today, are only extracts, and of which Saxo the Grammarian
has taken everything that is most fabulous.)
In part this is a popular version of knowledge common among Scandina-
vian scholars; Resen, too, held that Saxo had access to an Eddie collec-
tion older than that of Sæmundr, “vetustissima illa Odini Eddå” (in Tor-
fæus’s words) - a point of view which later was contradicted by Tor-
fæus.33 The provocation consisted in Huet’s inclusion of Eddie literature
in his essay on the novel, where he treated it as fables and fiction, the
32 Ed. Kok 1942: 214. - Kok has reprinted the 8th edition of Huet’s work, published in
1699, which is apparently the last version revised by the author (Kok 1942: 105). The
first edition from 1670, variants from which Kok has printed in his notes, has in this case
a mueh shorter text. Huet’s sources are extensively quoted in Kok’s edition. “Edda and
Voluspa” (cf. “Semond and Snorron”) correspond to the different parts of Resen’s edition,
the “Dæmisogur” from Snorri’s Edda and the separate edition of Vgluspå.
33 Cf. the introduction by P.H. Resen in his Edda Islandorum (ed. Faulkes 1977: k2) and
Torfæus 1711: Prolegomena D2.