Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 209
and Introduction to Part Two
189
the essence of the content - “the story.” [...] Only in the first of the
above-mentioned senses, as an individual occurrence, can the text be
dated. That is, one can date the time of writing of a preserved written
text [...] but one cannot assert that the concrete text was composed at
a particular time long before being written down. [...] In the second of
the senses mentioned above the text cannot be dated to a point in time
[in which it was composed], but it can nevertheless be dated to the
period in which it was performed. One cannot, for example, demon-
strate with any certainty that an eddic poem such as the Voluspå
(“The Sybil’s Song”) in the extant forms was written [sic] about the
year 1000. But one can show, on the other hånd, that poems with the
same ideas and similar content - that is, conceming the beginning and
end of the world - belonged to the oral tradition from the tenth to the
thirteenth centuries”.3
In a contribution to a symposium on Nordic heathendom Meulengracht
Sørensen retumed to the question of dating Eddic poetry, and he re-
marks that the problem presents itself in different terms to the historian
of religion, who is concemed with the content of the poem, than to the
historian of literature, whose object is the entire text. To be sure, the
two points of view are interrelated, but in principle and in practice it is
possible and perhaps necessary to distinguish between them. The
mythological poem is not identical with the myth in which the historian
of religion is interested, it presupposes and alludes to the myth more
often than it retells it, and the myth can also be known from other
sources.4
In this way, Meulengracht Sørensen rescues mythological Eddic
3 Meulengracht Sørensen 1993: 76-77 = 1977: 89-90.
4 “Denne skelnen mellem udtrykket og det, som skal udtrykkes, er et fundamentalt analy-
tisk redskab. Det første, man må gøre sig klart, er, hvilket aspekt af digtet, man arbejder
med, og dermed hvad det er man ønsker at aldersbestemme: digtet i den foreliggende
skriftlige form eller dets indhold eller dele af det i en ikke nærmere bestemt form [...]. -
For litteraturhistorikeren er det digtet som helhed - teksten - der er objektet. For religi-
onshistorikeren og historikeren er det dets indhold, dets oplysninger om førkristne forhold.
Disse to synsvinkler kan ikke helt adskilles. Man er nødt til at danne sig et litterært begreb
om digtet som tekst, inden man kan bruge det som kilde. [...] Det er tilstrækkeligt at tage
stilling til, om det i henseende til de dele, der benyttes, bygger på en troværdig tradition”
(Meulengracht Sørensen 1991: 218).