The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2008, Qupperneq 25

Vol. 62 #1
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
23
more than six hundred years, the Danish
language in Iceland never rose to the level
of becoming one of two languages in a
bilingual community.
In his recent book, Creators - From
Chaucer to Durer to Picasso and Disney,
English historian Paul Johnson writes that
“Chaucer was probably the first man, and
certainly the first writer, to see the English
nation as a unity.” Chaucer’s works also
reflect that he saw the English language as a
unity of many diverse dialects.
Furthermore, Johnson claims that Chaucer
brought together a great variety of dialects
into a unified artistic and dignified whole,
fit for the expression of literary art of a
high calibre. This explains his great appeal
to his contemporaries, who no longer read
French easily, if at all, and who wanted to
read about themselves in English. “What
Chaucer gave them was this, and some-
thing more: his was the English they spoke.
It was one of the great creative gifts, which
no one else was to posess to the same
degree until Shakespeare came along, that
he could write in a variety of vernaculars.”
In their works, these two masters of
English literature drew on the varied land-
scape of the entire territory of English
speaking people, which they saw as their
proper domain. Partly therein lay their suc-
cess.
Many centuries before Chaucer and
Shakespeare laid their respective corner-
stones of Modem English, anonymous
authors composed the poems of The Elder
Edda or The Poetic Edda, the best-known
of all Icelandic books. Its manuscript has
been dated to the middle of the 13th centu-
ry but it contains poems of a much earlier
provenance, which means that they must
have been part of an oral tradition and
handed down continuously from one gen-
eration to the next. Some of these poems
have been dated as far back as about 800
A.D. and would therefore be older than the
discovery and settlement of Iceland.
Among them is one of the masterpieces
of Northern mythological or heroic litera-
ture, a poem about the craftsman Volundur
whose story parallels to some extent the
Greek myth about Daedalos the designer
of the Labyrinth. The Volund poem is rich
in imagery but its words and phrases some-
times point beyond the limits of the Old
Nordic language, a designation which may
be appropriate here, and in the direction of
other Old Germanic languages as, for
example, Old High German and Old
English. The poet borrows words and
phrases from these languages, giving them
at the same time a purely Nordic or
Icelandic countenance. Yet, without
recourse to texts in Old Fligh German and
Old English for explanation, their correct
meaning would elude us or, at best, remain
a mystery.
How did this come about? The answer
to that question is not an obvious one. At
the time the poem was composed not only
had the Old Germanic Language broken
up into many different dialects but, with
the passage of time, these dialects had
become mutually unintelligible languages.
The author of the Volund poem appears to
have been well enough at home in both Old
High German and Old English to be able
to adjust his borrowings almost impercep-
tibly to his Nordic language environment.
Perhaps though they were, in the poet’s
day, remnants from an earlier stage in the
development of his language. Their intrin-
sic value may have secured for them excep-
tionally long life spans. Second, it should
not be overlooked that, during the Viking
Age, men from the north, including
Icelanders, travelled widely and must have
come into contact with those who spoke
languages closely related to their own.
Many of them settled in the British Isles
where Nordic dialects and Old English, in
varying degrees, intermixed. Language
contacts of this nature must have made it
relatively easy for well-crafted words or
phrases from Old High German or Old
English to wend their way into a Nordic
territory for permanent placement in a
poetic masterpiece. This may indeed have
been the case with some of the expressions
in the Volund poem.
Whether or not its author lived in the
8th century or later, some of the already
mentioned language borrowings, if I am
allowed to use that term, give me among
other things the distinct feeling that, sub-