Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Síða 42

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Part One
ledge of Old Norse letters for more than half a century. Bartholin did not
deign to argue against Huet, he merely dismissed him as colour-blind
(“ut cæcus de coloribus”), someone who did not have the patience ne-
cessary to assimilate this poetry. Invoking the authority of the English
scholar Robert Sheringham, he asserted that neither Sæmundr nor Snorri
had invented the Eddie narratives, they had just taken down old tradi-
tions. As a proof of the existence of such traditions he pointed to Gylfa-
ginning, which says of Gylfi, that he “came back to his kingdom and
told of the events he had seen and heard about. And from his account
these stories passed from one person to another” (transi. Faulkes 1987:
57).37 On the other hånd Bartholin conceded that not all Eddie poems
were of the same age; whereas Håvamdl is attributed to OSinn himself,
in Grogaldr there is mention of a “kristin dau5 kona” (a dead Christian
woman), and this poem can thus be composed only after Christianity
had been preached to the Norsemen (Bartholin 1689: 193). References
to the age of particular Eddie poems are rare in this period, and this re-
mark reminds one of the critical awareness of Bartholin’s amanuensis.
Bartholin’s remonstration was foliowed up by the Icelander Thormod
Torfæus, Royal Antiquarian of Norway, who denied Huet’s authority in
the matter, underlining the difficulty involved in penetrating Old Norse
poetry. In faet very few non-Icelanders in this period, if any, were able to
read Old Norse texts, and Torfæus’s importance in Nordic historio-
graphy resides first and foremost in his being the first major historian to
evaluate and make independent use of the Old Norse sources, which he
- justifiably - preferred to Saxo, who, on the other hånd, had the advan-
tage of having written in Latin, a more widely understood language.
Torfæus held that Huet contradicted himself in assuming both that the
emigrants brought their poetry with them to Iceland and that it was only
600 years old (Torfæus 1702: 14-15), but as pointed out by the anony-
mous reviewer mentioned above, Huet had said no more than that the
collection was 600 years old (Mémoires de Trevoux 1703: 954). Criticiz-
ing the label “Fabula” sometimes given to the passages from Snorri’s
Edda as a translation of Magnus Olafsson’s “Dæmesogur”, because its
associations to fiction might be misleading, Torfæus stated that even if
the Edda might be mingled with fiction, it nevertheless had some
37 Cf. Bartholin 1689: 194; ed. Finnur Jonsson 1931a: 76.