Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Qupperneq 187

VI From the tum of the century to Jan de Vries
167
other Nordic languages, it might be possible in a general way to charac-
terize the vocabulary of an Eddie poem as old-fashioned or relatively
modem.96
Jan de Vries’s history of Old Norse literature
An important landmark in the historiography of Old Norse literature is
the Altnordische Literaturgeschichte of Jan de Vries, who is known as
the author of a number of ambitious summas of learning in different
fields of Old Norse philology. His history of Old Norse literature first
appeared in 1941—42 - about the same time as the second edition of
Heusler’s Altgermanische Dichtung - as vol. 15-16 of Hermann Paul’s
Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, and a second, revised edition
was issued in 1964-67.
From our point of view, Jan de Vries is of particular interest, because
in a far more radical way than any of his predecessors he chose the his-
torical development of literature as his main focus - defying Heusler’s
ahistoric position. In a somewhat confusing way he labelled his his-
torical approach a “synchronic treatment”, but the term is logical
enough, since in faet he set about to treat the history of literature in a
series of slices of time, each in principle - if not always in practice -
consisting of fifty years, within which the Eddie poems were discussed
together with the skaldic poetry from the same period. The traditional
method, where each main genre was discussed throughout its whole his-
tory, or divided into only two or three periods, he called “diachronic
treatment”. Synchrony thus means that different genres from the same
period are discussed in the same chapter, but this approach is neverthe-
less highly diachronic in so far as the different periods are ordered and
treated successively. In faet, the first edition of de Vries’s history of
96 Lately Ulrike Sprenger has made extensive use of vocabulary studies in her treatment
of the Eddie heroic elegy, where she tries to isolate word fields concerning psychological
and moral issues, which seem to presuppose the introduction of Christianity. She does not
really pose the question of dating, however, as she to a great extern takes the traditional
Heuslerian datings as solidly established, and the method of dating is thus not in the focus
of her interests. Nevertheless, her extensive study provides a very interesting material to
the discussion on dating based on study of the vocabulary (cf. Sprenger 1992, with further
articles referred to there).