Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Blaðsíða 154

134
Part One
basis of a few superficial phenomena does not do justice to the modes of
existence of oral poetry, which will always tend to change both in form
and in content, without necessarily changing its nature.”48
The most original Old Germanic form of heroic poetry, represented
outside Scandinavia by Hildebrandslied and the Finnsburgh fragment,
and within the Edda principally by the five old heroic poems, is the so-
called double-sided lay of incident (“das doppelseitige Ereignislied”).49
Its Old Norse generic name may have been kvida. This is a genuinely
epic form, telling a story (“incidents”) in the form of plain narrative
intermingled with speech (“double-sided”).
According to its definition, this form is open to variation mainly in
two directions. On the one hånd, the pace of events may slow down so
that description and contemplation will dominate over narration, eventu-
ally leading to a new form of purely lyrical nature. This is the so-called
situation poem (Heusler 1923: 175-Situationslied; 1941: 183 - Stand-
ortlied), which concentrates on one single situation, exploring its psy-
chological implications. On the other hånd, the balance of narration and
speech may be altered in favour of speech, eventually leading to a new
form of purely dramatic nature, the so-called one-sided form (“das ein-
seitige Ereignislied”), where the verse narrator is absent and plain nar-
rative, if any, is given in prose. Since not only lays of incidents but also
situation lays may be cast in the one-sided form, these two pairs of con-
cepts generate four different groups, but the distinction between the two
forms is less important in lyric poetry than in its dramatical counterpart.
Variation along the two dimensions of content and form not only gave
rise to new genres, it also created variation within the original group of
48 “[...] da die gedachtnismaBige Uberlieferung mancherlei Freiheiten erzwingt oder auch
erlaubt, konnte ein langlebiges Gedicht mit der Zeit Form wie Inhalt stark wandeln, ohne
geradezu ein neues Lebewesen zu werden [...] Bei der starren Datierung der Eddagedichte,
oft auf Grund von zwei, drei Oberflachenerscheinungen, hat man die Lebensbedingungen
der mtindlichen Tradition besonders auffallig miBachtet” (Fleusler 1941: 23).
49 A. Campbell translated doppelseitiges Ereignislied by “two-dimensional lay of inci-
dent”. In an appendix “on the term lay” Campbell gave a definition of the ‘lay’, as opposed
to ‘epic’, which corresponds to “German lied in the technical sense usual since the late
nineteenth century,” and which fits well in with Heusler’s point of view: “Lay employs a
brief technique of narrative, with compressed description and rapid conversation, while
epic expands in all three fields” (Campbell 1962: 24—26). As an example of the genre
Campbell took a stanza from Atlakvida.