Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 115

V Nordic debate in the period of Scandinavianism
95
Old Norse was a terminus a quo for Eddie poetry,43 which meant that the
poetry as such belonged to the Viking Age. He did not raise the prob-
lems conceming a possible pre-form of the poems. Pointing to what he
understood as place names from the Western Islands and reminiscences
of Gaelic words, he set forth the theory that the greater part of the Eddie
poems originated in the Viking world of the Western Islands,44 probably
from “about the time of Alfred and his son Edward” (GuSbrandur Vig-
fusson 1878: cxcii). The “Greenland Group”, in which he included not
only the two Atli-poems, but also Hymiskvida, with its “air of frost and
snow and high latitude”, presumably originating in the earliest part of
the eleventh century, he considered as later than “the bulk of the other
songs; so that we have thus a downward limit, below which the Eddie
Poems cannot fall” (1878: cxci). In Corpvs Poeticvm Boreale he de-
veloped these ideas further, making a collection of items concerning
“family-life, the law, the geographical indications physical and historical,
the vocabulary” (vol. 1: lviii), which in his opinion pointed in the direc-
tion of the western Viking world, and thus delimited the age of Eddie
poetry to 800-1100 A.D. (vol. 1: lvii).
In Corpvs Poeticvm Boreale he also refined his grouping of different
poems attributing them to particular, unnamed poets, in the vein of the
art historians’ attribution of anonymous works of art to particular mas-
ters, referring to the “earlier Didactic poems as the work of the Ethic
poet, the Helgi cycle and its fellow poems as the Helgi-poet’s [...], the
Loka-Senna group as the composition of the Aristophanes-poet [...], the
Lay of Thrym and the Mili Songs as the Ballad poet [...], the later Brun-
hild poems as the Tapestry-poet’s [...], the Ynglingatal and the Lays of
43 “Looking at the mass of separate poems of different styles, ages, and subject, as a whole,
we shall at once perceive that they are all inferior in age to the period when the Scan-
dinavian language broke off from the other Teutonic tongues, and took upon itself a char-
acter of its own, both in vocabulary, in the development of new grammatical pecularities
(e.g. the reflexive), and in the great morphological changes (e.g. very great contractions
and apheresis). A very early origin is therefore impossible, and the ninth century must be
our upward limit” (Gubbrandur Vigfusson 1878: clxxxv).
44 “[...] the Editor, some ten years ago, came to the conclusion that but one solution was
possible - that these poems (with one or two exceptions, to be noticed below) owe their
origin to Norse poets in the ‘Western Islands’ - that the Lays are, in faet, to these Islands
what the Saga was to Iceland - that they date from a time subsequent to the settlement of
Iceland from those Islands, though perhaps the work of the first generations after that
event” (GuSbrandur Vigfusson 1878: clxxxvi).