Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 179

VI From the tum of the century to Jan de Vries
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fluences from clerical language, and partly on this basis he concluded
that the poem was probably composed in Iceland in the first half of the
11 th century.80
Meissner’s short contribution was particularly promising owing to its
combination of arguments drawn from the history of Old Norse word-
formation, on the one hånd, with, on the other, the absence or presence
of the relevant word types in older skaldic (and Eddie) poetry and later
clerical literature respectively. Obviously, since no conclusion can be
drawn from the absence of a word type in a particular poem, only from
its presence, the argument can be used only for dating post quem, and
even then the exact date is open to dispute. But as far as I know nobody
has raised any serious objection to Meissner’s main line of thought. It is
only to be regretted that it has not been worked out in more detail so that
the weight of the argument might be easier to assess. A study of the
chronology of word formation based on evidence from skaldic poetry
might yield interesting material for comparison. The brevity of this
interesting contribution may be the reason why it has not had mueh in-
fluence on the later debate.81
This is not the case with Helmut de Boor’s influential article on the
religious vocabulary of VQluspå and some related poems (de Boor
1930), which has been hailed as an unsurpassed model in its field (Kuhn
1971b: l).82 Making only a brief allusion to Meissner’s contribution, de
Boor chose as his subject religious or theological “word fields” in Eddie
and skaldic poetry, concentrating in three subehapters on proper and
common words denoting gods, epithets of praise used to characterize
gods and, finally, the vocabulary associated with evil forces and the end
of the world. These word fields are in de Boor’s view well suited to pro-
vide a stylistic characterisation of the poems in question, since in the
first instance they may be used as a means of classification and, sec-
80 “Die Vsp. zeigt spuren einer einwirkung geistlicher sprache. - Ohne auf die fragen der
kritik naher einzugehen, spricht der vortr. zum schluss auf grund allgemeiner erwagungen
seine uberzeugung aus, dass die Vsp. in der ersten halfte des 11. jahrhunderts auf
Island gedichtet ist” (Meissner 1911: 451).
81 This does not mean that the history of word formation is not occasionally used as an ar-
gument, not least by von See (on metnabr, hyggjandi etc. cf. von See 1972b: 5, 7 = 1981:
31,33).
82 Cf. Schier 1986: 381.