THE TEUTONIC EPIC
I
[The Tragic Conception]
| Early German poetry | [65] |
| One of the first things certain about it is that it knew the meaning of tragic situations | [66] |
| The Death of Ermanaric in Jordanes | [66] |
| The story of Alboin in Paulus Diaconus | [66] |
| Tragic plots in the extant poems | [69] |
| The Death of Ermanaric in the "Poetic Edda" (Hamðismál) | [70] |
| Some of the Northern poems show the tragic conception modified by romantic motives, yet without loss of the tragic purport—Helgi and Sigrun | [72] |
| Similar harmony of motives in the Waking of Angantyr | [73] |
| Whatever may be wanting, the heroic poetry had no want of tragic plots—the "fables" are sound | [74] |
| Value of the abstract plot (Aristotle) | [74] |
II
[Scale of the Poems]
| List of extant poems and fragments in one or other of the older Teutonic languages (German, English, and Northern) in unrhymed alliterative verse | [76] |
| Small amount of the extant poetry | [78] |
| Supplemented in various ways | [79] |
| 1. The Western Group (German and English) | [79] |
| Amount of story contained in the several poems, and scale of treatment | [79] |
| Hildebrand, a short story | [80] |
| Finnesburh, (1) the Lambeth fragment (Hickes); and (2) the abstract of the story in Beowulf | [81] |
| Finnesburh, a story of (1) wrong and (2) vengeance, like the story of the death of Attila, or of the betrayal of Roland | [82] |
| Uncertainty as to the compass of the Finnesburh poem (Lambeth) in its original complete form | [84] |
| Waldere, two fragments: the story of Walter of Aquitaine preserved in the Latin Waltharius | [84] |
| Plot of Waltharius | [84] |
| Place of the Waldere fragments in the story, and probable compass of the whole poem | [86] |
| Scale of Maldon and of Beowulf | [88] [89] |
| General resemblance in the themes of these poems—unity of action | [89] |
| Development of style, and not neglect of unity nor multiplication of contents, accounts for the difference of length between earlier and later poems | [91] |
| Progress of Epic in England—unlike the history of Icelandic poetry | [92] |
| 2. The Northern Group | [93] |
| The contents of the so-called "Elder Edda" (i.e. Codex Regius 2365, 4to Havn.) to what extent Epic | [93] [93] |
| Notes on the contents of the poems, to show their scale; the Lay of Weland | [94] |
| Different plan in the Lays of Thor, Þrymskviða and Hymiskviða | [95] |
| The Helgi Poems—complications of the text | [95] |
| Three separate stories—Helgi Hundingsbane and Sigrun | [95] |
| Helgi Hiorvardsson and Swava | [98] |
| Helgi and Kara (lost) | [99] |
| The story of the Volsungs—the long Lay of Brynhild contains the whole story in abstract giving the chief place to the character of Brynhild | [100] [100] [101] |
| The Hell-ride of Brynhild | [102] |
| The fragmentary Lay of Brynhild (Brot af Sigurðarkviðu) | [103] |
| Poems on the death of Attila—the Lay of Attila (Atlakviða), and the Greenland Poem of Attila (Atlamál) | [105] |
| Proportions of the story | [105] |
| A third version of the story in the Lament of Oddrun (Oddrúnargrátr) | [107] |
| The Death of Ermanaric (Hamðismál) | [109] |
| The Northern idylls of the heroines (Oddrun, Gudrun)—the Old Lay of Gudrun, or Gudrun's story to Theodoric | [109] |
| The Lay of Gudrun (Guðrúnarkviða)—Gudrun's sorrow for Sigurd | [111] |
| The refrain | [111] |
| Gudrun's Chain of Woe (Tregrof Guðrúnar) | [111] |
| The Ordeal of Gudrun, an episodic lay | [111] |
| Poems in dialogue, without narrative— (1) Dialogues in the common epic measure—Balder's Doom, Dialogues of Sigurd, Angantyr—explanations in prose, between the dialogues (2) Dialogues in the gnomic or elegiac measure: (a) vituperative debates—Lokasenna, Harbarzlióð (in irregular verse), Atli and Rimgerd (b) Dialogues implying action—The Wooing of Frey (Skírnismál) | [112] [112] [114] |
| Svipdag and Menglad (Grógaldr, Fiölsvinnsmál) | [114] |
| The Volsung dialogues | [115] |
| The Western and Northern poems compared, with respect to their scale | [116] |
| The old English poems (Beowulf, Waldere), in scale, midway between the Northern poems and Homer | [117] |
| Many of the Teutonic epic remains may look like the "short lays" of the agglutinative epic theory; but this is illusion | [117] |
| Two kinds of story in Teutonic Epic—(1) episodic, i.e. representing a single action (Hildebrand, etc.); (2) summary, i.e. giving the whole of a long story in abstract, with details of one part of it (Weland, etc.) | [118] |
| The second class is unfit for agglutination | [119] |
| Also the first, when it is looked into | [121] |
| The Teutonic Lays are too individual to be conveniently fused into larger masses of narrative | [122] |
III
[Epic and Ballad Poetry]
| Many of the old epic lays are on the scale of popular ballads | [123] |
| Their style is different | [124] |
| As may be proved where later ballads have taken up the epic subjects | [125] |
| The Danish ballads of Ungen Sveidal (Svipdag and Menglad) and of Sivard (Sigurd and Brynhild) | [126] [127] |
| The early epic poetry, unlike the ballads, was ambitious and capable of progress | [129] |