Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Blaðsíða 338

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Part Two
Wolfgang Mohr
At this point Kuhn’s colleague Wolfgang Mohr took up the baton in two
influential articles on the “younger foreign poems”, published in Zeit-
schriftfur deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur in 1938 and 1939.
Accepting Kuhn’s conclusion based on linguistic and metrical evidence,
Mohr continued the analysis in the same direction in a thorough study of
vocabulary, formulas, plot pattems and motifs, concentrating chiefly on
the retrospective poems, which Andreas Heusler had assigned to an Ice-
landic “aftermath”. In opposition to Heusler, Mohr concluded that they
were Icelandic in origin, but nevertheless doubly “foreign” in the sense
that they not only derived their subject matter from German poetry,
which had left its imprint on language and metre, but also in the sense
that they were originally composed in Denmark (or, less probably,
Northern Germany), presumably in the 12th century, before they -
mostly to their disadvantage - reached their final form in Iceland.
Mohr’s main thesis is that the retrospective poems were composed un-
der the influence of a medieval genre, the aftermath of which also was to
be seen in Danish ballads. This genre Mohr called the novelistic “Spiel-
mannslied”, an end-rhymed pre-form of the ballad, corresponding to the
French Chansons de toile, which de Vries had pointed to in connection
with the genesis of the Scandinavian ballad (1919). The problem with
the “Spielmannslied”, however, is that is a purely hypothetical genre,
whose existence is to be inferred solely from its influence on later gen-
res. The existence of this phantom genre seems to be the most question-
able point in Mohr’s construction, which has failed to gain general
acceptance, as far as I can see.
Nevertheless his investigation is on the whole carried out in a very or-
derly and methodical way, and his arguments for defining these poems
as a group, associated with Danish ballads, are well worth considering.
The poems considered by Mohr - Gudrunarkvida I, Sigurdarlcvida in
skamma, Helreid Brynhildar, Gudrunarkvida II, Gudrunarkvida III,
Oddrunargråtr, Atlamål, GudrunarhvQt — coincide with Kuhn’s “for-
eign” poems, apart from the “five old poems” and the poems on Sig-
urSr’s youth, which incidentally tend not to exhibit the linguistic and
metrical characteristics defined by Kuhn. (Some attention is also paid to
hypothetical poems supposed by Heusler to have filled the lacuna in
Codex Regius.) In the first article, different types of defining criteria are