The Poetic Edda: Grímnismál

An abridged excerpt from the Introduction to
Sturlunga Saga,
edited by Gudbrandr Vigfusson, 1874.

§ 33. The Eddic Poems

Up to this time the word Edda has been consistently used for Snorri's Edda, and before 1643 there is no trace of any one knowing the Poetic Edda at all. An essay of Björn still in MS., written 1641, and a composition of Jón Gudmundsson, penned in 1642, both treating exhaustively mythological subjects, yield not the faintest allusion to the poems we know as 'Edda.'

But now the Cod. Regius of the Lays turned up, and Brynjolf at once accepted it as proof positive of his own theory: 'Ilia genuina rhythmica Saemundi,' he says; boldly writes Edda SÆmundi on the back of the newly-discovered book, and henceforward the 'two Eddas' become a standing phrase among the learned; Snorri's Edda being distinguished as Prose-Edda, the Book of Lays as Sæmund's Edda.

Whence the bishop got this Book of Lays we do not know for certain. About this he says nothing, but we believe that it was in the East of Iceland, which was almost a terra incognita, where things might lurk in silence for scores of years, for there were no great copyists in the East, it was so far from the real centres of intellectual life, Holar, Skalholt, and Broadfrith. One reason for this hypothesis rests on the fact that with Cod. Regius came a fragment (A of editions, AM. 748) which contained Vegtamskviða. Now there is a poem of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, Hrafnagaldr Óðins, which was composed to serve as introduction and be affixed to Vegtamskviða. In it there is a word borrowed from the Völuspa of Cod. Regius, so that it is clear the author knew both these two MSS. But this poem is, we take it, by an East countryman, the word 'endr-rjoða' being a provincialism only used in that quarter, as far as we know. Again, the handwriting of the two vellums is quite unlike any handwriting known to the Editor. This would, at all events, be hardly the case if they were of Western origin, from a part of the country where there had been a regular school of scribes with a marked character of handwriting, &c.

In the absence therefore of all direct allusion, we must seek back for traces of them through Icelandic literature. In the fifteenth century we have, besides Hrafnagaldr Óðinns quoted above, the two Thrymlur (printed in Möbius' edition of Edda), Ballads founded on the Lay Thrymskviða. Next we come to the fourteenth-century paraphrase of the Lays of Helgi and the Volsungs in Volsunga Saga, clearly drawn from a sister copy of our Cod. Regius.

Looking at the mass of separate poems of different styles, ages, and subject, as a whole, we shall at once perceive that they are all inferior in age to the period when the Scandinavian language broke off from the other Teutonic tongues, and took upon itself a character of its own, both in vocabulary, in the development of new grammatical peculiarities (e. g. the reflexive), and in the great morphological changes (e.g. very great contractions and apheresis). A very early origin is therefore impossible, and the ninth century must be our upward limit.

It is obvious that the only way to settle such a question as this is to take the poems one by one, and argue from one to another where they are connected, classifying them in the process.

Taking Grimmsmal, several of the river names are, we think, to be identified with Gaelic streams. Even 'Kerlaugar tvær' strikes us as remarkably like a Scottish or English Kerlock or the like. The Kjar seems to point to some such root as appears in Cher, Cher-well, Char, &c., all Celtic names.