A Study Guide for Anonymous's "Poetic Edda"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Anonymous's "Poetic Edda," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Epics for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Epics for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535822497

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10

Poetic Edda

Anonymous

800–1100

Introduction

Provenance is the history of manuscript ownership, which attempts to explain how old literary works survived from one century to the next. This history traces the known record of documents, where they were located and who owned them and what versions existed, perhaps in different places, perhaps even at the same time. Before the use of the printing press, literature was transmitted orally, and then at some later time it was written down by hand. When it was written down, it was preserved for future owners of the manuscript. But that writer and all subsequent ones can affect the work: They can choose the organization; they can choose to omit parts; they can insert material that is new or relevant to their own times; they may offer commentary, right inside the text. In these and many other ways, as the oral work transitions into written text, it goes through a number of alternations. Issues of provenance and multiple transcriptions are fundamental to any study of an ancient work, and they have been fundamental to the study of the edda (lays or short poems) that originated among Norse peoples in Scandinavia and were perhaps first composed sometime between the ninth and twelfth centuries. The essence of the problem is this: The collection of Norse poems, often referred to as the Elder Edda, appears not to have survived to modern times. However, before it was lost, some person or persons used the collection of poems, perhaps in the twelfth century, as source material. What has survived to modern times are medieval manuscripts that used the original written texts, that quoted from them, and it is these versions of the earlier, now lost, poems that people read and study in modern times. These later texts are referred to variously, but one title is the Poetic Edda.

The Poetic Edda preserves what is known about the earlier poems. Modern translations of this work come via the Konungsbok, or Codex Regius (King's Book), copied in Iceland about 1270 CE. This manuscript suggests that the original poems were the work of many poets. Its language suggests that the poems were composed between 800 and 1100 CE, and these poems were perhaps first written down between 1150 and 1250 CE. The later versions of the poems are a rich source of information about Norse culture and beliefs and about the Vikings. However, they also show later influences. For example, the Sigurd story draws on actual historical events regarding the tribes that invaded the Roman Empire between 350 and 600 CE. Christian Irish influence can also be traced.

The Poetic Edda first came to scholarly attention in the seventeenth century as antiquarian interest in the non-classical past was growing in Europe. It was published in its entirety just as intense romantic and nationalistic interest in the perceived tribal ancestors of the European nation states emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century. This interest, combined with the new field of philology (the comparative study of languages in historical texts), ensured popular and scholarly interest in texts such as the Poetic Edda. In the later nineteenth century, some of the lays (short narrative poems or lyrics) were published in bowdlerized (corrupted) versions designed for children. In the hands of Richard Wagner (1813–1883), the Poetic Edda provided material for one of the century's masterpieces: a group of four operas. Northern legends and the scholarship based on them were misused by the Nazis to develop and promote their ideas of race, the poems being seriously misrepresented by this use. In these three instances,