THE ORIGIN OF THE EDDIC POEMS
There is even less agreement about the birthplace, authorship and date of the Eddic poems themselves than about the nature of the existing collection. Clearly the poems were the work of many different men, living in different periods; clearly, too, most of them existed in oral tradition for generations before they were first committed to writing. In general the mythological poems are strongly heathen in character, and as Christianity became generally accepted throughout Norway and Iceland early in the eleventh century, it is altogether likely that most of the poems dealing with the Norse gods antedate the year 1000. On the other hand, Hoffory, Finnur Jonsson and others have shown pretty conclusively from linguistic evidence that [[xviii]]these poems cannot have assumed anything like their present form before the ninth century. As for the poems belonging to the hero cycles, one or two of them appear to be as late as 1100, but most of them clearly belong to the hundred years following 950. It is a fairly safe guess that the years between 900 and 1050 saw the majority of the Eddic poems put into shape, but it must be remembered that many changes took place during the long subsequent period of oral transmission, and also that many of the legends, both mythological and heroic, on which the poems were based, certainly existed in Norway, and quite possibly in verse form, long before the year 900. In considering such poems it is essential to forget the present mode of composition, whereby a poet at once fixes his thought and his style by means of writing, and to remember that for at least two centuries, and possibly much longer, the correct transmission of many of the Eddic poems depended solely on accurate hearing and retentive memory.
As to the origin of the legends on which the poems are based, the whole question, at least so far as the stories of the gods are concerned, is much too complex for discussion here. How much of the actual narrative material of the mythological lays is properly to be called Scandinavian is a matter for students of comparative mythology to guess at. The tales underlying the heroic lays are clearly of foreign origin: the Helgi story comes from Denmark, and that of Völund from Germany, as also the great mass of traditions centering around Sigurth (Siegfried), Brynhild, the sons of Gjuki, Atli (Attila), and Jormunrek (Ermanarich). The introductory notes to the various poems deal with the more important of these questions of origin. [[xix]]
Of the men who composed these poems,—“wrote” is obviously the wrong word,—we know absolutely nothing, save that some of them must have been literary artists with a high degree of conscious skill. The Eddic poems are “folk-poetry,”—whatever that may be,—only in the sense that some of them strongly reflect racial feelings and beliefs; they are anything but crude or primitive in workmanship, and they show that not only the poets themselves, but also many of their hearers, must have made a careful study of the art of poetry.
Where the poems were composed is almost equally uncertain. The claims of Norway have been extensively advanced, but the great literary activity of Iceland after the settlement of the island by Norwegian emigrants late in the ninth century makes the theory of an Icelandic source for most of the poems plausible. The two Atli lays, with what authority we do not know, bear in the Codex Regius the superscription “the Greenland poem,” and internal evidence indicates that this statement is correct. Certainly in one poem, the Rigsthula, and probably in several others, there are marks of Celtic influence. During a considerable part of the ninth and tenth centuries, Scandinavians were active in Ireland and in most of the western islands inhabited by branches of the Celtic race. Some scholars claim nearly all the Eddic poems for these “Western Isles,” in sharp distinction from Iceland; their arguments are commented on in the introductory note to the Rigsthula. However, as Iceland early came to be the true center of this Scandinavian island world, it may be said that most of the evidence concerning the birthplace of the Eddic poems in anything like their present form points in that direction, [[xx]]and certainly it was in Iceland that they were chiefly preserved.