Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 208

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Conclusion of Part One
place, in which it was transformed from one kind of literature into an-
other, radically different from, or even directly opposite to, what it had
been before, namely a fixed text. Only in their secondary State, as fixed
texts, are the Eddie poems accessible to investigation, and consequently
OTCtojta SecHHCJieHHbte nonbiTKH ycraHOBHTb, Korjta 6bijm
COHHHeHbl Te HJIH HHbie 3flflHHCCKHe npOH3BegeHHH, nonbiTKH,
nopaHcatomne Kax pa3MaxoM, H3o6peTaTejibHOCTbio h kojih-
MecTBOM 3aTpaneHHoro Tpyqa, Tax n a6co;noTHOH 6ecnjtofl-
HOCTbtO.1
(The countless attempts at establishing the date of composition of one
or the other Eddie poem are just as striking for the wide range of their
approach, their resourcefulness and the amount of work spent in
them, as for their absolute unfruitfulness.)
All extant Eddie texts are written, fixed texts, and as such their age is
identical to that of their manuscripts or to the archetype of the different
manuscripts. Beyond the fixed texts the poems probably had a non-fixed
prehistory, but this is so to speak another State of aggregation, one of
whose fundamental qualities is undatability.
A similar point of view is formulated by Preben Meulengracht Søren-
sen, with reference to the oral-formulaic theory of poetic composition
developed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord (cf. Meulengracht Søren-
sen 1993: 175 = 1977: 183):2
With the exception of skaldic poetry it makes no sense to speak of the
original form of the oral text. Each realization is independent and
equally valid. By the text one can understand either the individual re-
alization (since that is what confronts us on the written page, we tend
to take it as the text) or the sum of all its occurrences. The latter con-
ception lies doser to that of the oral culture itself. For us this means
treating the text as something fluid which has changed from one oc-
currence to the next. For the oral culture the text was the content or
1 Steblin-Kamenskij 1979: 83.
2 A well-argued discussion of variation in Eddie stanzas as related to the oral theory is
found in Harris 1983.