Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Side 202
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Part One
inclined to look back into the past and close itself to the future, de Vries
said.121 Nevertheless, he saw the period as a second culmination of Ed-
die poetry which created a new brand of heroic poetry, full of personal
pathos.122
What was left to be done, in “the Period of Completion”, was the col-
lection and preservation of the old heritage. Among the first attempts
were the Hdvamdl collection and the hypothetical lost Saga of Sigur5r.
But also the poem Gripisspa is to be attributed to the same tendency to
collect and impose order, in this case in the form of a prophecy giving a
catalogue of events to follow in SigurSr’s life.
Finally, Svipdagsmal is placed, without any attempt at dating it, in a
transition period from Eddie poetry to ballad (in the second edition it is
ascribed to the 14th century, and treated in the chapter on the Late
Middle Ages, but in the first edition there is no mention of Eddie - or
Edda-like - poems in this last period).
A group of non-Eddic poems in Eddie metres on heroes from olden
times is found in the fornaldarsogur, poems like Innsteinskvida (Inn-
steinslied) and Hrokskvida (Hrokslied) in Halfs saga, and Oddskvida
{Odds Sterbelied), Æfikvida and Mannjafnadr (Mannervergleich) in
Qrvar-Odds saga. But unlike Vikarsbalkr etc. these poems are supposed
to have been composed especially for the sagas, without any history of
their own, and therefore they fail outside the scope of Eddie poetry.
Only Buslubæn in Bosa saga may have preserved some old traces in its
latter part, the Syrpuvers.
In conclusion, de Vries’s chronology of Eddie poetry may be sum-
marized in Table 3. It should be kept in mind that in a number of cases
he supposes that a poem may belong to several periods, as many of them
are rather heterogeneous, but it is possible to take this into account only
in cases where he is particularly explicit about it. Doubts and question
marks will also have to be left out of the table.123
121 “Riickblicksgedichte sind charakteristisch fur diese Periode, die auch selbst nur
riickwarts nach der Vergangenheit zu schauen scheint und sich der Zukunft verschlieBt”
(de Vries 1942: 163).
122 “Das 12. Jahrhundert hatte die Eddadichtung zu einem zweiten Gipfel emporgehoben:
dem von personlichem Pathos erfiillten Heldenlied” (de Vries 1942: 209).
123 Cf. a comparison between datings in de Vries 1964, 1967 and Einar Olafur Sveinsson
1962 in Schier 1986: 384-85.