Edda

EDDA, the title given to two very remarkable collections of old Icelandic literature. Of these one bears that title from the middle ages; the other is called Edda by a comparatively mod ern misnomer. The word is first met with in Rigspula, a frag mentary poem dating from the first half of the loth century, where it is introduced as the name or title of a great-grand mother. From the i4th to the i 7th century, this word—but no one has formed a reasonable conjecture why—was used as a synonym for the technical laws of the Norwegian Court-metre, Eddu regla, and "never to have heard or seen Edda" signified "never to have learned the art of poetry." The only known work by the name in the middle ages was the miscellaneous group of writings composed by Snorri Sturluson (q.v. ; 1 178-1 241), the greatest name in old Scandinavian literature. It is believed that the Edda, as he left it, was completed about 1222. Whether he gave this name to the work is doubtful; the title first occurs in the Uppsala Codex, transcribed about 5o years after his death. The collection of Snorri is now known as the Prose or Younger Edda, the title of Elder Edda being given to a collection of myth ological and heroic poems, discovered by the Icelandic bishop of Skalaholt, Brynjolfr Sveinsson, in 1643 and erroneously named by him the Edda of Saemundr.

The Prose Edda.

Properly known as 'Edda Snorra Sturl usonar, this was undoubtedly written by Snorri Sturluson. It is divided into five parts, the Preface or Formdli, Gylfaginning, Bragaroed'ur, Skdldskaparmal and Hdttatal. The Preface bears a very modern character and simply gives a résumé of the biblical story of the creation and the flood, with a brief account of the rise and spread of paganism. Gylfaginning, or the Delusion of Gylfi, on the other hand, is the most precious compendium which we possess of the mythological system of the ancient inhabitants of Scandinavia. The Bragaroetlur, or sayings of Bragi, are further legends of the deities, attributed to Bragi, the god of poetry. The Skdldskaparmdl, or Art of Poetry, commonly called Skdlda, con tains the instructions given by Bragi to Aegir, and consists of the rules and theories of ancient verse, exemplified in copious extracts from Eyvindr Skaldaspillir and other eminent Icelandic poets. The fifth section of the Edda, the Hdttatal, or Number of Metres, is a running technical commentary on the text of Snorri's three poems written in honour of Hakon, king of Norway. Affixed to some mss. of the Younger Edda are a list of poets and a number of philological treatises and grammatical studies. These belong, however, to a later period than the life of Snorri Sturluson.

The three oldest mss. of the Prose Edda all belong to the beginning of the 14th century. The Wurm ms. was sent to Ole Wurm in 1628; the Codex Regius was discovered by the inde fatigable bishop Brynjolfr Sveinsson in 1643. The most important, however, of these mss. is the Uppsala Codex, an octavo volume written probably about the year 1300. There have been several good editions of the Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, of which, perhaps, the best is the edition published by the Arnamagnaean Society in Copenhagen in 1848-52, edited by a group of scholars under the direction of Jon Sigurbsson, and the more recent Danish (1 goo) and Icelandic (1907) editions of Finnur Jonsson. There are English translations by T. Percy, Northern Antiquities, from the French of P. H. Mallet (177o) ; by G. Webbe Dasent (Stock holm, 1842) ; by R. B. Anderson (Chicago, 188o) ; by A. G. Brodeur (1916). The last-named version contains the whole of the Prose Edda, with the exception of the very technical and practically untranslatable Hdttatal.

The Elder Edda,

Poetic Edda or Saemundar Edda bins f rota was entirely unknown until about 1643, when it came into the hands of Brynjolfr Sveinsson, who, puzzled to classify it, gave it the title of Edda Saemundi multiscii. Saemundr Sigf iusson, who was thus credited with the collection of these poems, came of an old and distinguished Icelandic family, and lived from about 1056 to 1133. The poems themselves are many of them only fragments of longer heroic chants now otherwise entirely lost. They treat of mythical and heroic legends of an early Scandi navian civilization, and are composed of the simplest and most archaic forms of Norse verse. They present many difficult prob lems upon which scholars have expended an inexhaustible but not always conclusive erudition.

It may be said with some confidence, however, that the 34 poems usually included in the Edda were composed between the 9th and 12th centuries, and that they were the composition of poets, whose very names are unknown, but who were certainly Norwegians by birth or descent and shared the same religious and poetic convention. These poets were not uncultured; they were affected by the beliefs of the Christianized peoples of western Europe; they used as material for their art Danish and German legends; they were influenced by the Anglo-Saxon and Irish literatures. Irish influence is marked in Rigspula; to what extent it affected the Edda as a whole is debatable. The honour of having been the home-land of the Edda has been claimed in turn for Norway, Iceland, the British Isles and Denmark. The two Atli poems can be assigned with certainty to Greenland; Grimnismdl appears from internal evidence to have been com posed in Norway, and Gripisspd in Iceland; Rigspula may have been composed in Ireland or in northern England. The meaning of the title "Edda" is still in doubt ; it has been variously ex plained by scholars as "Tales of a Grandmother," "Poetics," "The Book of Oddi"—Saemundr resided at Oddi—"Poems of Death and Destruction," from the Irish word aitte, signifying "deaths." The poems appear to have been collected from oral tradition and committed to writing in the 12th century, prob ably in Iceland and possibly by Saemundr.

The most remarkable of the poems in this priceless collection is the Voluspd, or prophecy of the Volva or Sibyl. In this chant we listen to an inspired prophetess, "seated on her high seat, and addressing Odin, while the gods listen to her words." She sings of the world before the gods were made, of the coming and the meeting of the Aesir, of the origin of the giants, dwarfs and men, of the happy beginning of all things, and the sad end ing that shall be in the chaos of Ragnarok. The melodies of the verse, exquisite in their extreme and severe simplicity, are wholly rhythmical and alliterative, and return upon themselves like a solemn incantation.

Hdvamdl, the Lesson of the High One, or Odin, follows ; this contains proverbs and wise saws, and a series of stories, some of them comical, told by Odin against himself.

In Hyndlulj6o', the Lay of Hyndla, the goddess Freyja rides to question the volva Hyndla with regard to the ancestry of her young paramour, Ottar. With this poem, the first or wholly mythological portion of the collection closes. What follows is heroic and pseudo-historic. The VolundarkviJa, or Song of Vol undr, is engaged with the adventures of Volundr, the smith-king, during his stay with Nidudr, king of Sweden. Volundr, identical with the Anglo-Saxon Weland and the German Wieland (O.H.G. Wiolant), is sometimes confused with Odin, the master-smith. This poem contains the beautiful figure of Svanhvit, the swan maiden, who stays seven winters with Volundr, and then, yearn ing for her fatherland, flies away home through the dark forest. Helgakvifi'a Hjorvar, Yssonar, the Song of Helgi, the Son of Hjorvarb, celebrates the wooing of Helgi of Svava, who, like Atalanta, ends by loving the man with whom she has fought in battle. Two Songs of Helgi the Hunding's Bane, Helgakviea Hundingsbana, open the long and very important series of lays relating to the two heoric families of the Volsungs and the Nibelungs. A very curious poem is the Song of the Sun, S6larljoJ, which forms a kind of appendix to the Poetic Edda. In this the spirit of a dead father addresses his living son, and exhorts him, with maxims that resemble those of Hdvamdl, to righteousness of life. Though found only in the 17th century copies of the Edda, SolarliM appears from internal evidence to have been written in the 11th century, and to have been the composition of a Christian mystic who had not completely shed heathen modes of thought and expression.

The principal ms. of this Edda is the Codex Regius in the royal library of Copenhagen, written continuously, without regard to prose or verse, on 45 vellum leaves. This is that found by Bishop Brynjolfr. Another valuable fragment exists in the Arnamagnaean collection in the University of Copenhagen, consisting of four sheets, 22 leaves in all. These are the only mss. older than the 17th century which contain a collection of the ancient mytho-heroic lays, but fragments occur in various other works, and especially in the Edda of Snorri. The text of the Poetic Edda has been edited by Mobius, Sophus Bugge, Hildebrand, Sijmons and Gering, Finnur Jonsson, Neckel, Detter and Heinzel (19o3) , and Sievers (1923) . Twelve poems from the Poetic Edda were translated into English verse by Amos Cottle in 1797 ; the poet Gray produced a version of the Vegtamsk vistra; but the first translation of the whole was that published by Benjamin Thorpe in 1866; the most recent English versions are those of Olive Bray (1908) and H. A. Bellows (1923) .

The Eddic poems were rearranged, on a system of their own, which differs entirely from that of the early mss., by Gudbrand Vigffisson and F. York Powell, in their Corpus poeticism boreale (1883) . This is a collection, not of Edda only, but of all existing frag ments of the vast lyrical literature of ancient Iceland.

(X.; R. P. Co.)