Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Blaðsíða 74

54
Part One
The same general view - in line with Muller and Koeppen - was taken
by a number of scholars: Franz Dietrich, who published an Old Norse
reader with a literary introduction in 1843, Ludwig Ettmtiller, Professor
at Zurich, who included the Old Germanic literatures in his “history of
German literature” in 1847, Peter Andreas Munch in the first Norwegian
edition of the Eddie poems the same year, Emil Rosselet in a long article
on Icelandic literature in Ersch and Gruber’s Encyklopådie in 1855, and
Hermann Luning in his excellent German edition of the Edda from
1859.
Dietrich pointed to sagas telling of songs of battie and praise early in
the 8th century such as the poem of the battie of Bråvellir, and he pre-
sumed that the Eddie poems in their present form originated in this
period, “rich in songs”.13 They could not be mueh older, however; appar-
ently regarding the Old Norse language as a later development of
Gothic, he maintained that the Eddie language showed that the poems
were composed some centuries after the Gothic period. In his short sur-
vey he gave a fairly precise evaluation of the relative age of the poems,
mainly on the basis of the datings of Muller and Grimm.
Rosselet stressed more the difficulties in dating orally transmitted
poems and pointed to the problem created by the temporal discrepancy
between the origin and the writing down of a poem. Vgluspå, for in-
stance, is one of the very oldest poems with regard to its origin, but it
has been reworked, possibly as late as by the Edda collector in the 13th
century. In Alvissmål the mythical framework is very old, while the
mythological vocabulary is young. In Vafprudnismål, however, the con-
nection between the mythical plot and questions and answers is doser,
and the poem as a whole appears to be older. MUller’s datings of heroic
poetry (1816) apply strietly only to the legends, but in so far as the leg-
ends have been preserved in poems, these may be of the same age.14
Luning applied the “intemal” argument of fresh and juvenile heathen-
dom in dating poems like Vgluspd and Grimnismål to a period consider-
ably anterior to the 8th century.15
13 “Dieser gesangreichen Zeit gehoren daher am wahrscheinlichsten auch die auf noch alte-
rer Volksiiberlieferung beruhenden Lieder der Edda grossentheils an” (Dietrich 1843: xxi).
14 Rosselet 1855: 265-66, quotation p. 65 n. 44 below.
15 “Indessen als hauptgrund erscheint mir, dass im 8. jahrhundert die heidnische
religion kaum noch jugendfrisch genug gewesen sein kann, um solche
dichtungen hervorzubringen” (Luning 1859: 7).