Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 215
and Introduction to Part Two
195
would be to reduce the history of Old Norse poetry before the advent of
writing to the history of skaldic poetry, a genre which is not only emi-
nently datable, but which also, thanks to its rigid form, gains a sort of
intermediate State of being halfway between orality and literacy. I be-
lieve that everyone would agree, however, that such a picture would be
unrealistic. Eddie and skaldic poetry probably coexisted as genres for
centuries before any Old Norse poem was written down, something the
history of literature will somehow have to take into account.
In my opinion the solution to this dilemma lies in the acceptance of a
more abstract comprehension of the past than we usually conceive of
when concerned with literary history. Undeniably, all poetry which is
orally transmitted from the past can be known only in its written form
after the process of oral transmission has ceased. However, all historical
study is an effort at reconstructing a vanished past on the basis of the
traces left to posterity. The past is never immediately accessible anyhow.
This commonplace is somewhat less evident in the study of literature -
or the history of art in general - than in other branches of history, I think,
because the normal objects of study in our field are existing texts and
artefacts, and students of literature may therefore be subject to the illu-
sion that the literary past presents itself in the form of tangible objects.
Consequently he or she may be less aware that the past is never direetly
accessible, but exists only as an abstraction, a synthesis between the
scholar’s own conceptions and devices - as well as those of previous
scholars - and the traces left by our ancestors.
In our context, this means that our attention is directed toward the
process of investigation no less than toward the texts that form the im-
mediate object of literary study. The present work is thus entirely devot-
ed to the history and method of investigation and not the study of separ-
ate poems. My purpose is not to determine the age of the Eddie texts, but
to account for the process of dating Eddie texts. This I consider to be my
contribution to complying with the paradox of treating the history of a
subject lacking all certain chronology. I do not believe it is likely that we
shall ever know the exact date when any Eddie poem was composed, but
I do think that the question of their dating is accessible to rational delib-
eration, which may yield results that can serve as reasonably solid pre-
requisites both for their interpretation and for the study of their literary
history.