RECENT WORK AND VIEWS ON THE POETIC EDDA

Abstract

one who has rather steadily occupied himself with that remarkable body of poems now generally called the Poetic Edda it may at times seem that, notwithstanding the intensive efforts of many dedicated scholars, we have made little progress in understanding these poems, in dating them, in attributing them to a certain country and to certain authors. It must also be admitted that, though some progress has been made, these problems still for the most part elude us, as did the luscious fruit hanging over Tantalos, just when we seem to have them within our grasp. Take the question of dating these poems. late as 1899 Sophus Bugge, one of the greatest philologists Scandinavia has produced, was able to declare: As to the date of these poems, there is now practical unanimity of opinion. ... All Old Norse scholars nowadays agree that no one of the Eddie poems in its present form is older than the end of the ninth century.1 The reason for this confidence was the belief that language and metrical forms had at last furnished a definite ante quern non, and so had put an end, once and for all, to the hazy speculations to an age-old origin for the Eddie poems (Migration Period, possibly even the IndoEuropean). Bugge himself had discovered2 that the 'full line' of the Eddie Ijooahattr measure regularly ends, either with an accented, longsyllable word (-') or else with its metrical equivalent, accented short syllable, followed by an unaccented short syllable (?^,), after Sievers had deduced the fundamental, two-bar, two-stress nature of old Germanic verse form. Now the most important difference between Runic and the