Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Side 112

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Part One
These leetures by Svend Grundtvig are in my opinion a decisive step
in the direction of the creation of a conceptual framework for the apprai-
sal of literary form in Eddie poetry, which has in its tum had great con-
sequences for opinions on their age. Concerning the use of literary form
as a criterion of dating it is important to note that Grundtvig himself em-
phasised that an old form type is a necessary but not a sufficient condi-
tion for attributing an early date to a particular poem; a poem may be
younger than the form in which it is cast, but it cannot be older than its
proper form type.37
Even if Grundtvig did not want to have anything more to do with him,
Jessen’s arguments did not lose their weight, and he received support
from abroad, above all in two important review articles in Zeitschrift fur
deutsche Philologie by Konrad Maurer and Theodor Mobius in 1869.
In his review, written in 1867, of Keyser’s history of Old Norse litera-
ture, Maurer was principally concemed with defending the Icelandic
claim to Old Norse literature. The geographical isolation of Iceland and
precisely its political insignificance tumed out to be favourable to the de-
velopment of an original literature, he held, while the more dynamic po-
litical life in Norway was less favourable in this respect (Maurer 1869:
83). Maurer was mostly concemed in this article with the prose literature,
but he was obviously prone to regard the Eddie poems in general as later
than Keyser did (Maurer 1869: 58; cf. further Maurer 1863: 398).
An article by Maurer in the following year in which the dating of Eddie
poetry was discussed in greater detail is particularly valuable, owing
to its very pertinent points of methodological principle. The various
problems in question should be separated one from the other as neatly as
possible, Maurer maintained, and in examining each of them one should
always take as one’s point of departure the items that might be consid-
ered to be already settled, or those which by their nature were most
liable to be so.38 When dating on the basis of linguistic arguments, old
37 “[...] en fortsat anvendelse af en ældre stil finder altid sted ved siden af en senere udvik-
let, og gor det da navnlig i vor gamle digtning; et digt kan derfor være meget yngre end den
stil, hvori det (efter ældre forbilleder) er holdt; men det kan ikke være ældre end udviklin-
gen af selve den i det anvendte form” (Grundtvig 1867: 86 = Grundtvig 1863: 110).
38 “Bei der fiihrung der untersuchung wird es aber notwendig werden, die verschiedenen
einschlagigen fragen moglichst scharf von einander zu trennen, und bei der priifung einer
jeden von ihnen stets von denjenigen punkten auszugehen, welche als bereits sichergestellt
gelten durfen, oder doch ihrer natur nach einer objectiven feststellung am leichtesten zu-
ganglich sind” (Maurer 1870: 441).