Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Side 307

XI Mythological kennings
287
That having being said, the faet remains that the general idea of a poetic
revival, probably roughly coinciding with the origin of a written historical
literature,24 has not been invalidated, although we have insisted that most
of the poems in question cannot be dated in the manner required by de
Vries’s statistics. In faet, the most interesting feature of the material from
this period gathered by de Vries is its strong concentration in a limited
number of major poems retelling events from the past, poems such as
Islendingadråpa, Rekstefja, Olåfsdråpa Tryggvasonar, Kråkumål, Hdtta-
lykill and even the Christian poems Plåcitusdråpa and Harmsol. This faet
I find more significant than the overall rise postulated by de Vries in
the relative frequency of mythological skaldic kennings in the period, and
it should be noted that, in a general way, it conforms well to the idea that
the same period might be propitious for the composing of new Eddie
mythological poems. This is a generally accepted view, however, and de
Vries’s statistics, in my opinion, do not support the idea that this kind of
poetry must have been banned in the period between 1000 and 1150.
In order to offer not only negative criticism of de Vries’s effort at
creating a statistical basis for his view, I want to conclude with a similar
investigation, confined to material that in my opinion is better suited to
an examination of this kind.25 In the skaldic praise poems we possess a
corpus of a certain homogeneity stretching over the whole period of Old
Norse literature which is both more likely to be genuine than most other
parts of skaldic poetry and can be dated with relative certainty. Within
this corpus I have tried to localize kennings containing allusions to
myths in general - not only to the gods - and, following Stefan Einars-
son’s suggestion, I have calculated their frequency in proportion to the
total number of kennings in the same poems in each period. This is the
best material I can think of for a final test of de Vries’s hypothesis, bear-
ing in mind Kuhn’s remarks, implying that the fluctuations in the atti-
tude towards religion were probably most marked at court. If de Vries’s
hypothesis is well founded, we should at least expect to find in this
material the fluctuations he has postulated. If so, his thesis that there was
a period when Eddie mythological poetry was banned, will not be
24 “Digtning af denne art synes at være fremkommet omtrent samtidig med at man be-
gyndte at beskæftige sig litterært med fortiden” (Jon Helgason 1953: 139).
25 The essential results of the following examination have been published in a preliminary
version in Fidjestøl 1993: 100-102.