Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Blaðsíða 150

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Part One
Gesta Danorum. Among these poems is Bjarkamal, parts of which are
known from Icelandic tradition; and Olrik thought that other Danish
poems might also have been translated into Icelandic in the same way.
As an interesting historical parallel he pointed to Danish ballads that had
been transformed into Icelandic “danzar” in the later Middle Ages. Even
if the Danish exemplars of the Icelandic ballads are not known, the bal-
lads sometimes contained linguistic traces of their Danish originals. Ac-
cording to Neckel, the transformation of Danish ballads into Icelandic
“danzar” may serve as a historical model for the proper understanding of
an earlier transformation of German Eddie poems into Old Norse. Some
of the Eddie poems, whose content is taken from South Germanic le-
gends, contain uncommon words or meanings which may be interpreted
as vestiges of South Germanic originals, in the same way as some de-
tails in the form of the legend may be common to the German and the
Scandinavian tradition.
Thus in the fragments of West-Germanic lays (Hildebrand and Finns-
burgh) and in the oldest Eddie lays we apparently have examples of an
old common Germanic genre, representing a period anterior to later lit-
erary developments which, on the one hånd, led to the West Germanic
epic and, on the other, to the Scandinavian “one-sided” lay.37
In a brief, popular survey of Old Norse literature from 1923, Neckel
reiterated his view on the development of Eddie poetry, partly in an even
more pointed form. Concerning the “five old lays” (Atlakvida, Brot af
Sigurdarkvidu, Hamdismål, Hlgdskvida, and VQlundarkvida) he now
stated that they were South Germanic - Gothic, Frankish, Saxon -
poems from the fourth and/or fifth centuries, in Old Norse garments.38
More forcefully than before he stressed the Germanic heritage in Old
Norse poetry and underlined the importance of the study of Old Norse
literature in his own time - i.e. the early period of the Weimar Republic
37 “Grenzen der literarischen Formen gab es, soweit wir zu erkennen vermogen, in der al-
testen Zeit zwischen den germanischen Volkem nicht. Sie entstanden erst, als sich in Eng-
land das Epos, im Norden das einseitige Ereignislied bildete. Die eddischen Gedichte zei-
gen uns in der Mannigfaltigkeit ihrer Gattungen eine historische Abfolge; sie fiihren uns
von den speziell islandischen Arten hinauf zu den gemeinnordischen und weiter zur ge-
meingermanischen” (Neckel 1916: 95).
38 “Die fiinf alten Heldenlieder sind also siidgermanische (gotische, frankische, sach-
sische) Gedichte des vierten, fiinften Jahrhunderts in altnordischem Gewande” (Neckel
1923: 82).