[In the following essay, Kellogg explores the origins of the Elder Edda as oral poetry and its preservation in written manuscripts, including the prose adaptation of Snorri Sturluson.]

The oldest vernacular literary texts that survive from medieval Europe are the products of two cultures. First, they are marked by the characteristics of oral-formulaic composition, pointing back to origins in preliterate societies. But they are also the products of literacy, coming to us as they do in written manuscripts. In some cases, such as the text of Beowulf or of Hildebrandslied, scholarly convention has proposed a period of two or three hundred years as the probable time between an “original” composition of the work and its having been written down in the manuscript form in which we have it. In other cases, such as the Chanson de Roland or the Nibelungenlied, the lapsed time is usually seen as shorter. In any event, these early vernacular works have come down to us with stereotyped elements of diction, narrative style, and structure that are typical of poetry composed orally in performance.

In addition to the formal signs of oral composition, many of these works, especially the Germanic heroic poems, also share a common body of legend that refers to people and events as far back as the fifth and sixth centuries. Only by means of oral tradition could material of this antiquity have been preserved in vernacular tradition. In fact, it may be the age of such myths and legends that led scholars in the past to believe that the poetic texts are considerably older than the manuscripts in which they are preserved, older even than writing itself in the case of Scandinavia. The same scholars who have written that certain of the Icelandic eddic poems probably date as far back as the ninth century have also in general been unwilling to acknowledge obvious signs of oral extemporaneous composition in them. This conventional view is more often an implied assumption than an explicit argument, but it is one in need of examination. It holds that some eddic poems, while they must have been originally composed long before writing was used in Scandinavia—even before the settlement of Iceland—went into oral tradition as fixed texts of the sort we are accustomed to in modern literature cultures.

As formulaic and traditional as these early vernacular texts are—as directly, in other words, as they point to oral-formulaic techniques of composition—they are also in some sense the products of writing, not of some hypothetical pagan, preliterate writing, but of the literacy that produced the thirteenth-century manuscripts in which they have survived. Like the Iliad and the Odyssey, early vernacular European texts are at times even a bit bookish, betraying not just the technology of literacy but some of its organizing and cognitive habits as well. These texts have, after all, been preserved in written codices that exploit the book's ability to organize and preserve a single, unified, stable text of considerable length. We find in some texts—again Beowulf comes to mind—an acknowledgment of the historical past, of a time when men believed and behaved differently from men today. When the Danes in Beowulf make offerings to idols, the narrator says, “Such was their custom, the hope of heathens” (178b-179a). His awareness of the discontinuity between the beliefs and the events of the past and those of the present is not a trait of orality but of literacy.¹

Rather than to argue for the exclusively oral or the exclusively literate nature of early European vernacular texts, it is more reasonable to concede that they represent a collaboration between two contemporaneous cultures, one essentially oral and the other essentially literate. For several hundred years after the introduction of writing to northern Europe, a spectrum of possibilities existed in most societies between orality at one extreme and literacy at the other. Identifying in their oldest literary texts the boundaries, even the contradictions and tensions, between their allegiances to oral and to literate culture is one way of understanding more fully the nature of their art and thought.

I will try to illustrate this idea with an extended example from thirteenth-century Iceland. In the body of poetry that we call the poetic or Elder Edda (the Icelandic term is eddukvæði), traditions are preserved that developed in northern Europe many centuries before the earliest manuscript texts were written.² Like Beowulf, Widsiþ, Deor, Hildebrandslied, and Heliand, the poems of the poetic Edda derive important features of their meter, diction, and story from what appears to have been a common preliterate Germanic tradition of heroic and mythological song (Heusler). Even some of the imagery that has survived in Icelandic eddic poetry was inscribed on stones in Sweden as early as the seventh century (Hauck). The evidence, in other words, that eddic poetry is grounded in ancient myth and heroic tradition is a scholarly commonplace and accounts in some measure for the high value we place on it.

The principal manuscript containing eddic poetry, Codex Regius 2365, 4⁰, is now happily in Iceland, after a long residence in Denmark that began in the Royal Library, from which its name was derived. Codex Regius 2365 was written in Iceland about 1270 and is a well-conceived book. It is written in a single hand throughout and bears a complex and essentially unrecoverable relationship to a number of other surviving manuscripts and literary texts. Codex Arnamagnæan (abbreviated AM) 748, 4⁰ in Copenhagen, for example, contains slightly variant texts of seven of the poems in Codex Regius. As many as twenty of the Codex Regius poems are quoted whole or in snippets, or are very closely paraphrased, in a number of other texts, including Snorri Sturluson's prose Edda and the prose legendary narrative Völsunga saga. From the existence of these closely variant versions and from such internal evidence as spelling conventions that vary from poem to poem, we must assume that Codex Regius has been compiled from a variety of older written sources (Lindblad). Our manuscript would seem to be, considering the body of other works to which it is related, but the tip of a thirteenth-century antiquarian iceberg, the main body of which has disappeared, making a detailed linkage impossible among the works that have survived.

Although Codex Regius is an anthology of poems on what were even in the thirteenth century considered to be old, traditional subjects, it has been organized with understanding and taste. It begins with an unnamed poem that, fifty years before the manuscript was written, Snorri Sturluson in his Edda had called Völuspá. The poem tells of the creation of the world and the gods, and it prophesies their destruction. Following Völuspá are ten more poems associated with gods and other supernatural beings. Then come legendary/mythological poems about the Völsungs, which make up the balance of the book.

To help the reader understand the poems in their context, someone (the “Compiler” of Codex Regius 2365, we could call him) has written some prose notes and comments. A few of these prose passages are also in AM 748, indicating that they did not entirely originate in Codex Regius and that the Compiler is therefore not the scribe of the manuscript, but rather a more abstract anterior figure.³ Nevertheless, the Compiler of Codex Regius is a presence in the work in a way that neither its scribe nor the author is; the Compiler's voice, like the poems themselves, is shared in places with Codex AM 748, and the voice must be thought to have developed at some time prior to the writing of either manuscript. This presence in the work functions as both the guiding organizer and the speaker (both the histor and the rhetor). We are chiefly indebted to the Compiler for the succinct prose summaries of background information that he provides for the short eddic poems, information that is occasionally indispensable to our understanding. In most of what follows I will be interested in focusing attention not on eddic poetry itself but on this voice or presence through which it is presented.

The Compiler's work is of two kinds. In the first type, he adopts a voice identical to that of the narrator of the poems, telling enough of the story in prose to lead seamlessly into the verse, either a whole poem or a part of a poem. He does not even mention the poem as such, but just moves the narrative back and forth from his prose to the poetry that he has presumably inherited from oral tradition. Here is a typical example from his headnote to the important mythological poem that is called För Skírnis in Codex Regius and Skírnismál in AM 748. The note's only purpose is to assist in telling the story clearly.

Freyr, the son of Njörðr, sat in Hliðskjálf and saw over the whole world. He looked into Jötunheim, where he saw a beautiful maiden as she went from her father's house to the women's quarters. From this he suffered great inward pain. Skírnir was the name of Freyr's servant. Njörð asked him to speak to Freyr. Then Skaði [Freyr's mother] said:

The poem then follows. It is a series of speeches by six different characters in forty-two stanzas, which are held together in a comprehendable narrative by two more short prose links from the Compiler. The main outlines of the story of Skírnismál had been told by Snorri in Edda (Gylfaginning 37), so that even without the Compiler's contributions we would, with Snorri's help, have no difficulty piecing it together from the poem alone. In other cases, however, such as the story about Helgi Hjörvarðsson, which has not survived outside of Codex Regius, the poem would be completely baffling without the Compiler's narratives.

The Compiler's second voice speaks to us from outside the fiction, in the role of a thirteenth-century scholar, referring to the poems as poems. At the beginning of a poem that is without a title in Codex Regius but is called Oddrúnargrátr in later paper manuscripts, he briefly identifies Oddrún and her circumstances and then adds, “About this story it is here told in verse.” Similarly, he writes before the poem Atlakviða that Guðrún Gjúkadóttir had avenged her brothers, “svá sem frægt er orðit” (“as has become well known”), and then adds a few words later, “About that, this poem is made.” The two voices, one from inside the fiction and the other outside it, may of course derive ultimately from two separate sources, but that is something we are never likely to know. The second, scholarly voice has several shadings, from the kind of Compiler's note I have just quoted to the expression of a greater ideological remove from the old material.

Neither Snorri in Edda nor the Compiler in Codex Regius can be completely identified intellectually with the world of mythic and heroic narrative. Snorri's work is especially complex, self-conscious, and sophisticated in its uses of traditional poetry and has been much studied by scholars (Margaret Clunies Ross). He was no doubt an exceptional individual, and yet he may in some respects also be representative of the antiquarian movement of which his work is a part. He organizes and rationalizes mythic narratives in his concise retelling of them with the ostensible purpose of explaining how traditional poetic language and imagery should be interpreted literally, and to a certain extent also ethically. Snorri's method is that of the historian and storyteller, and his sympathy with the old mythic and poetic traditions is implicit in his deep knowledge of them, even when he tells a story for the purpose of explaining an image or metaphor. He is not an allegorist, and he does not use the old traditions against themselves, attempting instead a synthesis of the old pagan literary culture and the contemporary world of Christian scholarship. Even if Snorri was a conservative intellectual, he lived in and derived his mentality from the thirteenth century in Iceland, not from pagan antiquity in Norway or Denmark.

Similarly, the poems that the Compiler collects and edits in Codex Regius can be thought to derive from pagan antiquity, and yet they are also an important constituent of the thought and language of his own contemporary culture. While he has less scope to demonstrate Snorri's intellectual complexity, the Compiler does occasionally reveal, like Snorri, a consciousness of the discontinuity between the worlds of ancient story and the present more rational, scholarly, literary time. He does this primarily by referring to “heathen times” or “antiquity” (the word is forneskja in Icelandic) and to “old stories” (fornar sögur).⁴ The reader begins to notice this, for example, in the Compiler's short narrative called The Death of Sinfjötli, where he writes concerning the Völsungs, “Sigmundr and all his sons greatly surpassed all other men in strength and size and spirit and abilities. Sigurðr, however, was foremost and everyone in old literature [fornfræði] calls him superior to all other men and the noblest of warrior kings.”

There is no irony here, no lack of conviction or sympathy, simply a scholar's appeal to the authority of old knowledge. The Compiler is slightly more Snorri-like in a note appearing between two of the poems that editions now call Reginsmál and Fáfnismál: “Sigurðr concealed his name because it was their belief in heathen times that the word of a doomed man had great power if he cursed his enemy by name.” In scholarly fashion he identifies a custom that may no longer be familiar to his audience, a move he feels necessary in explaining the appearance at this point in the poem of a stanza which hides Sigurðr's identity in a riddle. In specifying a “then” and “now” he moves a little further back from his material rhetorically than he did in merely referring to fornfræði.

The Compiler shares with some of the writers of Icelandic family sagas a stylistic device designed to enhance the impression of a story's substance, by reporting that “some people say this, while others say that.” The following is a passage from a narrative entitled On the Death of Sigurðr that appears between two poems in Codex Regius about the killing of Sigurðr by his brothers-in-law, the sons of Gjúki:

Here in this poem [by which the Compiler refers either to the Sigurðarkviða, which has gone before or the First Guðrúnarkviða, which follows] is told about the death of Sigurðr, and it indicates that they killed him outdoors, but some say that they killed him sleeping in bed. The Germans say that they killed him out in the woods, and in the old Poem of Guðrún [a later poem in Codex Regius] it says that Sigurðr and the sons of Gjúki had ridden to the Thing, where he was killed. But everyone also says that they betrayed his trust and attacked him lying down and unprepared.

Guðrún sat over the dead Sigurðr. She did not cry like other women, but she was ready to die of grief. Both women and men went to comfort her, but it was not easy. People say that Guðrún had eaten of Fáfnir's heart and that she understood the language of birds. This is said further about Guðrún [the poem follows].

The work of the Compiler is here as rich and literary as it gets, citing poems by title, correctly reporting on various versions of the legend—including the South Germanic tradition preserved in the Nibelungenlied, that Sigurðr (Sifrit) is killed out in the woods on a hunting expedition—and then, in a simplicity of style as fine as the best of Snorri's Edda or the fornaldarsögur, doing justice to Guðrún's inexpressible pain before she was able to cry.

The Compiler does not succeed in arranging the poems in Codex Regius neatly according to whether they are about gods or heroes. The ninth poem after Völuspá is not about a god exactly but about Völundr the smith, whose poem, Völundarkviða, may have earned its place among the supernatural beings because he was still thought of as a powerful elf (Grimstad). Völundr had also lived for seven years with a Valkyrie. Several other legendary heroes, including Sigurðr, had adventures with Valkyries, associating them with Óðinn and powers beyond the merely human. These Valkyrie stories serve as a transition between the fictions of the gods and elves and giants and poems about the more nearly historical personages in the courts of the Burgundians and Huns.

Two of these transitional heroes who were beloved of Valkyries were named Helgi. They come ultimately from Danish legend rather than Burgundian, and although in Codex Regius they are said to be Völsungs (Helgi Hundingsbani is Sigurðr's half-brother), they are elsewhere not considered Völsungs at all. Their three poems come before the history of the Völsungs proper. At the end of the second poem of Helgi Hundingsbani, the Compiler reveals a division of allegiances that we have noticed before. He wants both to tell the story and, in this instance, to dissociate himself from it: “It was a belief in heathen times that men could be reborn, but that is now called old women's foolishness. Helgi and Sigrún are said to have been reborn. He was named Helgi, Prince of the Haddings, and she was Kára, the daughter of Hálfdan, as is told in the poem Káruljóð, and she was a Valkyrie.” (Neither the poem Káruljóð nor any other tradition of Kára has survived.) It may not be immediately clear what motivates this particular critique of traditional fantasy, since the Compiler had already mentioned without comment, in a prose link between the fourth and fifth stanzas of the poem, that Helgi's Valkyrie lover Sígrún had already been reborn once. She was the earlier Helgi Hjörvarðsson's Valkyrie lover Sváva reborn.

Regardless, for the moment, of why this remark is made, we see here the conflict between an allegiance to old traditions and the claims of a new scholarly rationalism as clearly as anywhere in Codex Regius. In the long run, however, it is not the antithesis in allegiances that matters, but rather the remarkable cultural synthesis that is achieved by means of this tolerant acknowledgment of contradiction. In fact, constructing the synthesis was most likely the motive—here, in Snorri's Edda, and in Beowulf—for mentioning the beliefs of the pagans. Doing so brings the conflict between old and new, myth and history, fantasy and empiricism, out into the open and allows the purely heroic, dramatic, and ethically exemplary elements to be contemplated and valued apart from any pagan “taint.” More subtly, the Compiler's characterization of the transmigration of souls as being an old wives' tale focuses our attention on the possibility of an allegorical, genetic, or metaphorical sense in which we can in fact understand that the continued presence of the ancient heroes and lovers in subsequent generations explains their nature.

The assignment of titles to poems and prose narratives is probably a feature of thirteenth-century literacy. When stories are in oral tradition, a distinction is felt more strongly between the events being told and the telling of them than is the case in a literate culture, where we almost need to be taught the distinction beween “story” and “discourse.” In Icelandic, the Compiler's usual distinction is between saga (events) and kvæði (poem) or kveðja (to compose). A name might be applied more naturally to the events than to any particular telling of them, and even by the thirteenth century the names of eddic poems tend to be of the sort “A Poem about X” or “The Sayings of Y.” With the possible exceptions of the two poems Hávamál and Oddrúnargrátr, which could be said to name themselves,⁵ the eddic poems (as distinct from the comments of their thirteenth-century collectors) do not refer to particular poems by name. Snorri Sturluson, the greatest of the cultural synthesizers, knew three of the poems in Codex Regius by name, Vóluspá, Alvíssmál (although he calls it Alsvinnsmál), and Grímnismál, as did some other writers in the thirteenth century. In addition to Völuspá, the Compiler in Codex Regius omits a title before the texts of Völundarkviða and eleven of the heroic poems. In compensation, he gives titles to his prose pieces, some of which, like Frá Völundi ok Níðaði (Concerning Völundr and Níðaðr) might have been intended to serve as names of poems. Aside from the titles written at the beginnings of poems, he mentions four titles within his prose: the Old Poem of the Völsungs, the Greenland Lay of Atli, the Old Poem of Guðrún, and the Old Poem of Hamðir. This last comes as an appropriate symbol of his antiquarian tidiness. At the end of the final poem, the conclusion of the whole vast myth, Guðrún's sons Hamðir and Sörli (the products of her third marriage) lie dead. The last words of Codex Regius are the Compiler's note: “That is called The Old Poem of Hamðir.”

As many as fifteen of the Codex Regius poems are paraphrased or quoted in Völsunga saga, one of the best known of the legendary sagas, which was written in Iceland at about the same time as Codex Regius. We cannot say what relationship exists between the particular texts in Codex Regius and Völsunga saga. The similarities are close, but neither work is copied from the other. As a genre, the legendary sagas (fornaldarsögur) are closely related to eddic poetry. They are in many respects the prose equivalent. Like eddic narrative, they tell stories from the heroic and legendary past of the Germanic world. Unlike the great family sagas (Íslendinga sögur), they do not deal with Icelanders. To what extent the mentioning of Icelanders in a prose narrative, or the not-mentioning of them, was felt in the Middle Ages to be an absolute generic attribute we cannot be sure. A similar prohibition against mentioning Englishmen in Anglo-Saxon epic narrative would suggest that it may have been taken seriously and, conversely, that the cultivation of narrative in prose and verse about native heroes (e.g., the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Icelandic family sagas) was even then understood to be a distinctly different literary activity from telling mythic and legendary stories of the prenational Germanic past.

The Compiler of Codex Regius 2365 was not alone in his consciousness of a significant historical break between the world of the old stories and the present. This kind of consciousness and the serious effort made at synthesizing the two worlds is also one of the features of Snorri's thought that makes him most interesting. Where Icelandic literary art is most traditional, with its clearest debt to orality, it is also deeply scholarly, which is to say deeply literate. As the aristocratic and ruling groups in a society turn from orality to literacy, the oral traditions might be expected to begin the long slide from sacred myth and epic to ballad and märchen. This doubtless happened in Scandinavia as elsewhere. But the antiquarian movement of thirteenth-century Iceland that is represented in Snorri's Edda, in Codex Regius 2365, and in the written texts of the legendary sagas was able to save a remarkable body of myth and legend from perishing altogether. It is with some brief description of the oral-formulaic heritage of this scholarly movement that I will conclude.

In an oral tradition, poetic narratives of the eddic sort exist as “texts” only at the moment of performance. Like any other utterance, they exist in the silence between performances not as texts but only as an abstract cultural competence—the ability of some members of society to produce poems in performances. This distinction between a text of a poem and the competence to perform a poem is parallel to, and derives from, Saussure's distinction between utterance (parole) and language (langue). The text is parole, an actual event; the competence is langue, an abstract system, in terms of which the event is intelligible.

There are many references in the family sagas, kings' sagas, and the collection known as Sturlunga saga to literary performances, both extempore and as entertainments at courts and assemblies. Jeff Opland has collected and commented on a number of similar references made by English writers of the Anglo-Saxon period. What we cannot assume about the Icelandic examples—there has always been less tendency to do so about the English ones—is that the texts that were performed on these occasions enjoyed either a prior or a subsequent existence, beyond the fleeting moment of their performance. The fact that later writers in England and Iceland do seem to suppose that preliterate oral performers had memorized their texts ought to count for very little. The question for us is unavoidable: where did Snorri and the other Icelandic collectors—or for that matter the scribes of the Beowulf manuscript—get their traditional poetic texts?

This question cannot be answered with certainty, but it can be approached in terms of the classic Parry/Lord model of oral tradition, in which the memory of fixed texts plays little or no role.⁶ A number of scholars have documented the presence in eddic poetry of the formulaic diction that in the Parry/Lord hypothesis is the primary evidence of oral composition (Harris, Lönnroth, Pàroli, Meletinsky, Gurevi, Sigurðsson). Such formulas make it possible for a performer to sing or recite verse with the same fluency that a speaker might deliver a speech in prose. Many of the formulas in eddic poetry simply move the narrative forward and would scarcely be considered formulaic in any significant sense were it not for the fact that they satisfy the rules of poetic meter and alliteration. For example, einu sinni, “once,” makes a good half-verse and is used that way five times in a b-verse (e.g., “Á leit Guðrún einu sinni”) and four times in an a-verse (e.g., “einu sinni af öllum hug”), always, of course, as in these examples, with vowel alliteration. Only slightly less frequent are öðru sinni and þriðja sinni. Another example of a simple narrative formula is the alliterating pair einn, “one,” “only,” “alone,” and allir, “all,” in the sense “one is Xer than all,” for example, “Varð einn borinn öllum meiri” (Vsk 14), “One was born greater than all,” and “eitt er þeirra öllum betra” (HHj 8), “one of them is better than all.”⁷ This formula occurs seventeen times in eddic poetry.

The study of formulas becomes more interesting when we move from colorless structural idioms of this sort toward culturally specific ideas. For example, another very common formula type in eddic poetry, as in Old English narrative poetry, is the whole-line formula naming the speaker and his or her father (e.g., “Vaknaði Brynhildr Buðla dóttur”; “Brynhildr awakened, the daughter of Buðli”). Brynhildr is identified as Buðli's daughter seven times in this way and one time when the epithet dóttur Buðla appears in an a-verse. Sigurðr goes by the epithet burr Sigmundar or Sigmundar burr five times. Related to these very common patronymic epithets is a fixed formula of introduction combining the words ek heiti, “I am named,” with the phrase hét minn faðir, “my father was named”:

Hrímgerðr ek heiti, Hati hét minn faðir                    (HHj 17)
Andvari ek heiti, Óinn hét minn faðir                    (Rgn 2)
Sigurðr ek heiti, Sigmundr hét minn faðir                    (Ffn 4)
Vindkaldr ek heiti, Vákaldr hét minn faðir                    (Fls 6)
Svipdagr ek heiti, Sólbjartr hét minn faðir                    (Fls 47)

More mythic is a set of epithets applied to gods and kings in their roles as “lords.” Formulas with dróttinn can be made to fill a b-verse: hafra dróttinn, “lord of he-goats” (twice), þursa dróttinn, “lord of giants” (four times). Sigurðr is called seggja dróttinn and Gunnarr gumna dróttinn, both meaning “lord of men” but varying to provide the appropriate alliteration. Gunnar is also Gotna dróttinn, “lord of the Goths.” The attraction between two words cannot always be explained as a matter of alliterative convenience as the association here of Gunnarr with Gotar and gumnar. In some cases the frequency of a pairing suggests an inherited image. For example the association of drekka, “to drink,” and the adjective dýrr, “precious,” “noble,” in dýrr mjöðr, “precious mead,” and dýr veig, “precious drink,” suggests that dýrr might not work in free variation with just any word beginning with a d but is more precisely bound to the image of drink:

drykk ins dýra mjaðar                    (Háv 105

)

ok ek drykk of gat ins dýra mjaðar                    (Háv 140)
Vel skulum drekka dýrar veigar                    (HHu II 46)
Hann skal drekka dýrar veigar                    (Hnd 34)
drekka ok dæma dýrar veigar                    (Hlð 16)

Similar traditional images do not even involve alliteration in associating one word with another in a formula. Like Óðinn, the raven (hrafn) is associated with the high (hár) gallows (meiðr or galgi):

hrafn kvað at hrafni,—sat á hám meiði                    (HHu I 5)
hrafn af meiði hátt kallaði                    (Sgk I 9)
Hrafn flýgr austan af hám meiði                    (Hlm 8)
Horskir hrafnar skulu þér á hám galga                    (Fls 45)

Another of the culturally specific formulaic images familiar to students of Old English heroic poetry is the giving and receiving of “rings.” Of the more than thirty occurrences of the word baugr, “ring,” nearly every one is involved in some kind of formula. A conspicuous half-line formula is baugar rauðir, “red, that is, golden rings.”

rauðir baugar ok in ríkja mær                    (HHu I 56)
—bíðk-a ek þess bót,—bauga rauða                    (Vln I 9)
þér býðr bróðir bauga rauðar                    (HHu II 35)
Bitt þú, Sigurðr, bauga rauða                    (Ffn 40)
bauga rauða burar Sigmundar                    (Sgk II 39)
Buðu þeir árla bauga rauða                    (Odg 21)
Buðum vit þegnum bauga rauða                    (Odg 26)

In addition, there are ljósir, “bright,” and fagrir, “fair,” baugar in less frequent formulas. These few examples may suffice to illustrate the densely formulaic quality of eddic verse. More detail is likely to be tedious to the non-specialist.

The Parry/Lord model was developed to describe orally composed epic poetry, and the eddic lays are too short and episodic to be called epic. But from the work of Parry and Lord the possibility has arisen of considering the relationship between epic and eddic poetry in a new way. Rather than conceiving of oral epic as a text, a thing accomplished in a single performance, it is more reasonable to consider it as an especially rich cultural competence. Epic, like other oral traditions, is langue, not parole. It is a narrative form that depends for its creation upon an oral tradition that is supported by an aristocratic and heroic culture. And yet the epic poem as we habitually conceive it cannot be experienced as a single unified and coherent whole until its generative culture has given way to a later stage of development, namely, one in which writing is used in the recording of texts.

Medieval Scandinavia did not produce a written form of epic that we know of. Writing, when it came, was used for things more attuned to the stable, learned, ecclesiastical and courtly cultures that sponsored it. Decisive in this matter was the Icelanders' emphasis on developing a narrative prose fiction that grew out of their own national history. The old preliterate epic did not die altogether, however. Contemporaneously with the family sagas, a more modest place was given to the anciènt Germanic myths and legends in eddic poems and legendary sagas. In the mind of the Compiler of Codex Regius, the eddic poems were very much like epic episodes in the mind of an oral performer. They existed for him and could be fully comprehended and appreciated only in a much larger world of story. This fact alone, without considering in a more particular way the character of the poems themselves, suggests that they are survivals of something much larger—calcareous deposits, crystallizations that have been precipitated from a large solution of myth and legend. It is clear, in other words, that the eddic poems are late, not early—relics, not progenitors. Like the closely related legendary sagas, the poems of Codex Regius assumed a literary form that was congenial to the tastes of a people whose imaginations no longer dwelt in epic but who were nonetheless capable of acknowledging, tolerating, even creating new fictional forms out of the contradictions between myth and history, both of which they understood the importance of preserving.

Notes

1. Klaeber's text reads, “Swylce wæs þeaw hyra, / hæþenra hyht.” The whole project of distinguishing between the habits of mind associated with orality and those associated with literacy, including this one of continuity or discontinuity with the past, received an important impetus with the publication in 1963 of Jack Goody and Ian Watt's article “The Consequences of Literacy.” Since then, the work of Havelock and of Ong has been widely influential, with more specialized medieval situations being the province of Bäuml.

2. I will use the terms edda, poetic edda, and eddic poetry interchangeably to refer to the poems in the Codex Regius 2365, 4⁰ (which, by the way, does not call itself edda) and to similar poems found in other manuscript collections and in the legendary sagas (fornaldasögur). These terms have arisen through association with an imaginary poetic “edda” that tradition attributed to Sæmundur the Wise. The only actual book entitled Edda in the Middle Ages was a quite different work, the very important prose treatise on myth and poetics by Snorri Sturluson, to whom I will refer a number of times in this essay. For the texts of eddic poems, I will cite the normalized-spelling edition of Eddukvæði by Guðni Jónsson, although I am much indebted also to the standard edition, entitled Edda, edited by Gustav Neckel. The translations are mine.

3. There is much of value about “authors,” “scribes,” “compilers,” “editors,” and so forth in thirteenth-century Icelandic historical writing in Tómasson, 180-194 and throughout.

4. This in itself is actually a familiar epic topos in the poems, where it is not a signal of quite the same type of belatedness as may be attributed to it in thirteenth-century prose. The epic form is illustrated in Old English in gear-dagum and Icelandic í árdaga. The very idiomatic Icelandic phrase is found, incidentally, thirteen times in eddic poetry and, except for once in Völuspá, always (as in the opening of Beowulf) at the end of the line.

5. Hávamál could be said to name itself in the final stanza (164): “Nú eru Háva mál kveðin / Háva höllu í” (Now are the sayings of Hávi [the High One, Oðinn] recited / in Hávi's hall). The case of Oddrúnargrátr is similar but more interesting. The poem ends with Atli's sister Oddrún saying, “nú er of genginn / grátr Oddrúnar,” by which she means “Now the weeping of Oddrún is over.” Mistaking event for the telling of it, later scribes and editors thought she was saying her poem was over (as the Hávamál announced the simultaneous conclusion of event and telling) and have called the poem Oddrún's Weeping. Recognizing the error, Guðni Jónsson entitles the poem Oddrúnarkviða (The Poem of Oddrún) in his edition.

6. Since Magoun's “Oral-Formulaic Character,” a vast literature applied the ideas of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord to all of the vernacular literatures of medieval Europe, the most convenient guide to which is John Miles Foley's Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research. The most detailed and scholarly discussion I have seen recently on the oral background of edda is Harris, “Eddic Poetry as Oral Poetry.” Lars Lönnroth, too, has a series of articles on the topic, especially “Iorð fannz æva né upphiminn: A Formula Analysis.”

7. The abbreviations of titles of eddic poems are the ones I used in my Concordance: Ffn (Fáfnismál), Fls (Fjölsvinnsmál), Háv (Hávamál), HHj (Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar), HHU I, II (Helgakviða Hundingsbana I, II), Hlð (Hlöðskviða), Hlm (Hjálmarskviða), Hnd (Hyndluljóð), Odg (Oddrúnargrátr), Rgn (Reginsmál), Sgk (Sigurðarkviða), Vln (Völundarkviða), Vsk (Vóluspá in skamma).

Works Cited

Foley, John Miles. Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research: An Introduction and Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1985.

Goody, Jack, and Ian Watt. “The Consequences of Literacy.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5.3 (1963): 304-45. Rpt. in Literacy in Traditional Societies. Ed. Jack Goody. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1963. 27-68.

Harris, Joseph. “Eddic Poetry as Oral Poetry: The Evidence of Parallel Passages in the Helgi Poems for Questions of Composition and Performance.” Edda: A Collection of Essays. Ed. R. J. Glendinning and Haraldur Bessason. [Winnipeg]: U of Manitoba P, 1983. 210-42.

Havelock, Eric A. The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982.

Havelock, Eric A. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986.

Havelock, Eric A. A Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1963, rpt. 1982.

Lönnroth, Lars. “Iorð fannz æva né upphiminn: A formula analysis.” Speculum Norroenum: Norse Studies in Memory of Gabriel Turville-Petre. Ed. Ursula Dronke et al. Odense: Odense UP, 1981. 310-27.

Lord, Albert. “Perspectives on Recent Work on the Oral Traditional Formula.” Oral Tradition 1 (1986): 467-503.

Lord, Albert. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1960; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1978.

Magoun, Francis P., Jr. “The Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry.” Speculum 28 (1953): 446-67.

Ong, Walter J. “Before Textuality: Orality and Interpretation.” Oral Tradition 3 (1988): 259-69.

Ong, Walter J. Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.

Ong, Walter J. “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite.” Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971. 113-41.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.

Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Culture and Religious History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967.

Ong, Walter J. “Text as Interpretation: Mark and After.” In Foley, Oral Tradition 147-69.

Ong, Walter J. “The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction.” PMLA 90 (1975): 9-22.

Ong, Walter J. “Writing Is a Technology That Restructures Thought.” The Written Word: Literacy in Tradition. Ed. Gerd Baumann. Wolfson College Lectures 1985. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. 23-50.

Parry, Milman. L'épithète traditionnelle dans Homère: Essai sur un problème de style homérique. 1928. Trans. Adam Parry in The Making of Homeric Verse. 1-190.

Parry, Milman. Les formules et la métrique d'Homere. 1928. Trans. Adam Parry in The Making of Homeric Verse 191-239.

Parry, Milman. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Ed. and trans. Adam Parry. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971.

Parry, Milman. “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making: I. Homer and Homeric Style; II. The Homeric Language as the Language of an Oral Poetry.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41 (1930): 73-147; 43 (1932): 1-50. Rpt. in The Making of Homeric Verse 266-324, 325-64.