Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 354
334
Editor’s postscript
would be without any internal chronological order, as I do not see any
reason why the intensity of skaldic influence should vary in one direc-
tion as time passed.
On the other hånd, perhaps it is possible to single out a probable
period for such influence. One might point to the faet that some court
poets around 1100 showed interest in the Eddie metre fornyrdislag,
which may indicate some contact which had not been there before.
12. The planned chapter on “Loans and allusion”
A chapter on “Loans and allusion” was planned (cf. pp. 201-03), but
never completed. Professor Fidjestøl’s review of Hermann Pålsson’s
Heimur Hdvamåla (1990) in Maal ogMinne (1992: 1-10) clearly repre-
sents preparatory work for this chapter. Apart from that, there is only a
rough draft, of which the following is a slightly edited précis:
- In general
The chapter should include a section on possible influence from clas-
sical literature, which would date the poems to after 1100, when
people had begun to learn Latin, especially the relationship to Disti-
cha Catonis, which has been discussed in particular by Klaus von
See.
- On the question of verbal loans
In the case of verbal parallels, believed to be verbal loans from one
Old Norse poem to another, the general problem is that the direction
of loan can in only a very few cases be established with any certainty.
In a number of cases, however, loans or influences from Latin liter-
ature, in particular proverbial literature, have been postulated, and in
these cases the problem of direction clearly doesn’t exist. If a passage
in an Eddie poem can be identified with a Latin proverb, the Eddie
passage is not a possible source for the Latin one, and in most cases
only the opposite is conceivable, i.e. that the Eddie verse is a trans-
lation or adaptation of the Latin.
- On dating by “imitation”
Some scholars have attempted to establish the relative chronology of