Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 125

VI From the tum of the century to Jan de Vries
105
Finnur Jonsson strongly defended the old teaching that most Eddie
poems had a Norwegian origin, to the great irritation of his compatriot
Bjom Magnusson Olsen, who presented an elaborate counterargument
for Icelandic origin.2 One of Finnur’s arguments was taken from an as-
sessment of the historical conditions for literary life in Iceland in the
generations following colonisation. In contrast to their relatives back in
Norway, he maintained the Icelanders were, in this period, so engaged in
fighting and in political discussions that they simply had no time for po-
etry (1894: 28-30), a point of view reminding one, as Gustav Neckel
later remarked, of earlier romantic theories referring the origin of Eddie
poetry to a pre-historic period of peace and cultural flowering. Finnur
only moved this period from Denmark in the fifth to the seventh centu-
ries to Norway in the tenth century.3
Finnur Jonsson had the courage to propose an exact absolute dating
for the different Eddie poems, here shown in Table 1 (1894: 65-66,
1920: 67-68). In the eyes of his contemporaries he grossly overestim-
ated the possibility of assigning a specific date to the various poems; but
in the main I think his datings are representative for the period.
2 Bjom Magnusson Olsen 1894; cf. Finnur Jonsson 1895, Bjom Magnusson Olsen 1895.
3 “DaB der abstrakte Gedanke, die Dichtkunst bliihe nur in friedlichen und friedensge-
segneten Kulturen, ganz irrig ist, gehort zu den elementarsten Lehren der Geschichte.
Dieser Gedanke ist wiederum nichts als die neue Anwendung einer alteren Lehre, der
romantischen Lehre von der Entstehung der Edda in einem vorgeschichtlichen Kultur-
lande, wahrend die rohere Nachwelt so hoher Schopfungen unfahig gewesen sei. Das
Kulturland wurde einfach aus dem Danemark des 5.-7. Jahrhunderts in das Norwegen
des 10. verlegt” (Neckel 1916: 86). - It may be of interest to note that this was written
while the author was serving in the German forces in the first world war, “Von Dr.
Gustav Neckel, Prof. an der Universitat zu Heidelberg, z. Zt. im Heeresdienst”. Neckel
also stressed that according to the ethics of the sagas and the Eddie poems, “ist ein ‘un-
unterbrochenes Kampfleben’ nicht an sich ein ‘siindiges Leben’” (loc. cit.). - Neckel
published a shorter article on the Eddie problems in Germanisch-Romanische Monats-
schrift 1913.