Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 216

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Conclusion of Part One
Defining the text
The most important question which still remains is the delimitation of
the very object to be dated, which has to be something more abstract
than the extant texts.
Kurt Schier has presented a useful survey of possible answers to this
question:
a) The age of the poem in its extant form.
b) The age of the poem in its extant form, possible reworkings taken
into account.
c) The age of the subject matter.
d) The age of particular parts of the poem, groups of stanzas, stanzas or
parts of stanzas.
e) The age of particular details (objects or institutions, words, linguistic
forms).
f) The age of genres (e.g. senna, heroic elegy).10
As for the Eddie poems as extant texts (point a), there is no fundamental
problem, and in any case the dating of the manuscripts provides us with
a useful dating ante quem.
But since our object is not only the extant texts, but the texts in their
more vaporous State of aggregation, namely the oral texts which are tak-
en to be represented by the extant texts (i.e. a variant of point b), the
situation is more complicated. In so far as datings of point c-f are suc-
cessful, they may be relevant to the discussion of the dating of the texts
in our extended comprehension of the term.
Venturing beyond the firm ground of written texts, it is impossible to
make an exact delimitation between the ‘text’ and the Titerary structure’
it incamates. “A poem is not only a chain of words,” Heusler says in a
discussion of the possibility of dating Eddie poetry to a period anterior
to the Old Norse language, “but a composition of scenes, characters
10 “Grundsatzlich ist zu unterscheiden zw. - a. Alter des Liedes in der jetzt vorliegenden
Gestalt; - b. Alter des Liedes in der vorliegenden Gestalt unter Beriicksichtigung eventu-
eller Umarbeitungen; - c. Alter des Liedstoffes; - d. Alter einzelner Liedteile, Strophen-
folgen, Strophen und Strophenteile; - e. Alter einzelner Details (Realien, Worter, Sprach-
formen); - f. Alter einzelner Gattungen (z. B. Senna, Heldenklage)” (Schier 1986:
378-79).