Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 118

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Part One
A prerequisite for this presumed unanimity was a shift of focus from
the origin of the poems to their extant form, and a tacit agreement that
the question of possible preforms was to be discarded as futile. Instead,
all attention was paid to the poems’ cultural milieu in the Viking world,
conditioning a rich growth in mythology and poetry. Following Gu5-
brandur Vigfusson’s suggestion of a western origin for the extant Eddie
poems, Bugge placed them in a more specific historical context than had
hitherto been possible. He pointed to a great number of correspondences
between Eddie mythology and Christian and Graeco-Roman myths,
concluding “that many of the most important Old Norse myths are pre-
served in a form not older than the Viking era, and that they were shaped
by Scandinavian mythological poets who associated with Christians in
the British Isles” (Bugge 1899: xiv-xv). As for the Edda itself, he con-
tended that “the oldest, and, indeed, the great majority of both the
mythological and heroic poems were composed by Norwegians in the
British Isles, the greater number probably in northern England, but
some, it may be, in Ireland, in Scotland, or in the Scottish Isles. Very few
Eddie lays seem to have arisen outside the British Isles. The late Atla-
mål, which varies greatly from the other heroic poems on the same sub-
ject, was certainly composed in Greenland. Some of the youngest
poems, e.g. Gripisspå, may have originated in Iceland” (Bugge 1899:
xviii). Occasionally Bugge could be extremely specific in attributing a
poem to a particular historical environment. Thus Helgakvida Hund-
ingsbana I was “composed ca. 1020-1035 by a poet from the west of
Norway, who understood Irish and English. He was familiar with Irish
poetry, and lived a while at the Scandinavian royal court in Dublin, and
probably a while also in England” (Bugge 1899: 263; cf. 1896: 243).
In the context of the history of scholarship the affinity between Bugge’s
theory and Friedrich Riihs’s view on the Anglo-Saxon origin of Icelandic
poetry is striking.47 To a certain extent, e.g. in their arguments conceming
the use of loan words in Eddie poetry, their lines of thought are parallel;
but to the best of my knowledge there is no indication that Bugge - or, for
47 Cf. the critical remarks by Friedrich Kauffmann: “[...] grossenteils sind seine [Bugge’s]
parallelen zu christlichen oder romisch-griechischen uberlieferungen ebenso naiv wie wir
sie langst bei den Edda-gelehrten des 17. 18. und beginnenden 19. jhdts. gewohnt sind und
es ist eigentlich zu verwundem, dass Bugge sich nicht bei gelegenheit auf seine vorganger
berufen hat; die emsthafteren versuche von Riihs sind wenigstens immer noch lesbar”
(Kauffmann 1891: 195).