Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 325

XII Foreign matter poems
305
In sum, observing that the language of different groups of Old Norse
poetry differs in some aspects, believed to be ultimately connected with
the stress pattern of the Germanic languages, Kuhn explained these dif-
ferences in four ways: “domestic” fornyrdislag and drottkvætt show
traces of an older development in the spoken language, while the situ-
ation in Ijddahåttr is taken as the result of certain stylistic tendencies.
The “foreign” group has been under the influence of foreign linguistic
developments (in West-Germanic languages), which have left their im-
print on these poems in connection with some process of translation, and
finally the same phenomena have found their way, under the influence
of the translated poetry, into original poems treating the same material
(poems originally Old Norse with “foreign” subject matter) or having
some other (stylistic?) affinity to it (“Eddie praise poems”).
The chronology of this model thus appears to be rather tortuous. As
we have seen, a great part of the “domestic” poetry is preserved only in
fornaldarsogur, but their language, as far as the phenomena in question
are concerned, is nevertheless said to belong to an older layer than that
of the skaldic poetry in drottkvætt. In the skaldic poetry, on the other
hånd, a group belonging to the very oldest datable poetry, the “Eddie
praise poems”, represent in some respects a younger state of the lan-
guage than the mueh later hrynhent poetry, due to (indirect) influence
from hypothetical German poems, the language of which is supposed to
have been more advanced.
The complexity of Kuhn’s argument is equally conspicuous in his dis-
cussion of the negation of verbs. Kuhn assumed that the particle ne as
well as the “free use” of -gi disappeared from the Old Norse language at
an early date, but that they continued to be used in the old-fashioned
Ijddahåttr poetry. In the process of transmitting foreign poetry, the West-
Germanic negations ne, ni were usually rendered by normal Old Norse
negation, but now and then a ne slipped through, so mueh the easier as
the translators already knew the word from poetry in Ijddahåttr. Once
the connection to this poetry was established, some stray occurrences of
-gi in free use, which, of course, had no connection to West-Germanic,
also pushed their way into the “foreign” poems.
This explanation does not in itself seem very probable, Kuhn admit-
ted, as two different explanations are applied to the two negations, one
being taken over from West-Germanic, with some support of Ijddahåttr,
the other being taken direetly from Ijddahåttr. However, Kuhn pointed