Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 184
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Part One
ly related to the Vgluspå-group, representing the same religious devel-
opment and consequently permitting a dating of the Eddie group (cf.
p. 160 n. 84 above). De Boor may be right in stressing the place apart
occupied by these poems within the skaldic corpus,90 but by grouping
together the Eddie and skaldic poems in question,91 he does not take ac-
count of the terminological discrepancies between them that he himself
enumerates.
I cannot see that de Boor’s conclusion is possible on the basis of the
material presented by him. On the contrary, if anything can be stated
with reference to the examples given, it is rather that the two groups of
poems show slight traces of a different religious development, in the
Eddie group a tendency towards conceiving the relation between the
gods and between gods and humans in terms of family relations, and in
the skaldic group looking at the gods as a collectivity. Some similarity
between these conceptions may be conjured up, but the statistics based
on the vocabulary do not warrant any grouping together of the Eddie and
skaldic poems in question. Thus no chronological consequences are to
be drawn from the distribution within these word fields.
Further, I wonder if this distribution is not more or less what is to be
expected. The Eddie poems treat mythological matters and consequent-
ly the different gods and their relations are in focus, whereas the skaldic
poems mostly treat matters temporal, occasionally touching on men’s
relations to the divine powers in general, but not necessarily involving
individual gods.
The conclusions drawn from the statistics in the following subchap-
ters on epithets of praise and the forces of evil are hardly more convinc-
ing. Verbal similarities that may be found in poems treating similar
maters give no sound basis for a chronological order. The reason why de
Boor has succeeded in persuading so many of his readers is probably
90 For a critical remark on this point, cf. Kuhn 1971b: 4.
91 “Der Uberblick iiber die skaldische Dichtung zeigt uns, dass vieles von der hier behan-
delten Terminologie gar nicht oder nur ausserst sparlich ausserhalb unseres Dichtungs-
komplexes zu finden ist. Seine Sonderstellung, die an dem Typus ‘Menschenkinder’ er-
wiesen wurde, wird dadurch noch unterstrichen und erst voll zum Bewusstsein gebracht.
Anderes dagegen schichtet sich auch innerhalb der Skaldik so eigentiimlich, dass sich ein
bestimmter skaldischer Kreis herausschalen wird, der mit dem Vsp.-Kreis terminologisch
zusammenhangt, und der dann seinerseits wieder zur Deutung und Festlegung der ed-
dischen Dichtungen herangezogen werden kann” (de Boor 1930: 82-83 = 1964: 226).