Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Síða 173
VI From the tum of the century to Jan de Vries
153
Hans Kuhn: “Fremdstofflieder”
With his thesis on Das Fiillwort in 1929, Hans Kuhn made an important
contribution to the problem of dating Eddie poems, which will be dis-
cussed in detail in chapter VII below. After the publication of this thesis,
Kuhn continued his investigation of the language of Old Germanic
poetry in a series of articles which appeared in Beitråge zur Geschichte
der deutschen Sprache und Liter atur every third year from 1933 to
1939. In these articles, ingenious and far-reaching hypotheses, mainly
on Old Germanic syntax and stress pattem, were tested on different
branches of Old Germanic poetry, and more or less as a by-product of
these linguistic studies new light was thrown on the historical develop-
ment of the poetry that constituted his testing ground.
Most important from our point of view is an unorthodox grouping of
Old Norse poetry, which has mueh influenced the overall view of the
heroic poems of the Edda.
The more technical side of these analyses will also be discussed and
criticised in chapter XII below; in this context only a general presenta-
tion of the main content of his work will be given, as one of the most im-
pressive contributions to Eddie scholarship in our century.
In the first article, “Zur wortstellung und -betonung im altgerma-
nischen”, Kuhn formulated a series of rules relating to Old Germanic
stress pattem and word order, which, although obsolete in Old German-
ic prose, could be elicited through a sophisticated analysis of poetry in
the Old Germanic languages, particularly skaldic poetry.
According to Kuhn the Germanic languages had inherited from
their common Indo-European origin a linguistic rule prescribing a
more or less fronted position for all so-called sentence particles, i.e.
unstressed words modifying the sentence as a whole, which in the Ger-
manic languages acquired a proclitic position, either to the first or the
second stressed word (Kuhn 1933: 5-7 = 1969: 21-22). This rule,
which Kuhn characterized as the most important of all Indo-European
word order rules (1933: 88 = 1969: 87), subsequently lost its force in
most Germanic dialects, so that the sentence particles might be placed
before the second stressed part of the sentence instead of the second
stressed word of the first part of the sentence. This is the case for
example in Otfrid, while the old order is preserved in Beowulf
(1933: 93-94 = 1969: 90-91). Thus different Old Germanic poetic tra-