II
Scale of the Poems
The following are the extant poems on native heroic themes, written in one or other of the dialects of the Teutonic group, and in unrhymed alliterative measures.
(1) Continental.—The Lay of Hildebrand (c. a.d. 800), a Low German poem, copied by High German clerks, is the only remnant of the heroic poetry of the continental Germans in which, together with the national metre, there is a national theme.
(2) English.—The poems of this order in old English are Beowulf, Finnesburh, Waldere, and Byrhtnoth, or the Lay of Maldon. Besides these there are poems on historical themes preserved in the Chronicle, of which Brunanburh is the most important, and two dramatic lyrics, Widsith and Deor, in which there are many allusions to the mythical and heroic cycles.
(3) Scandinavian and Icelandic.—The largest number of heroic poems in alliterative verse is found in the old Northern language, and in manuscripts written in Iceland. The poems themselves may have come from other places in which the old language of Norway was spoken, some of them perhaps from Norway itself, many of them probably from those islands round Britain to which a multitude of Norwegian settlers were attracted,—Shetland, the Orkneys, the Western Islands of Scotland.[18]
The principal collection is that of the manuscript in the King's Library at Copenhagen (2365, 4o) generally referred to as Codex Regius (R); it is this book, discovered in the seventeenth century, that has received the inaccurate but convenient names of Elder Edda, or Poetic Edda, or Edda of Sæmund the Wise, by a series of miscalculations fully described in the preface to the Corpus Poeticum Boreale. Properly, the name Edda belongs only to the prose treatise by Snorri Sturluson.
The chief contents of Codex Regius are a series of independent poems on the Volsung story, beginning with the tragedies of Helgi and Swava and Helgi and Sigrun (originally unconnected with the Volsung legend), and going on in the order of events.
The series is broken by a gap in which the poems dealing with some of the most important parts of the story have been lost. The matter of their contents is known from the prose paraphrase called Volsunga Saga. Before the Volsung series comes a number of poems chiefly mythological: the Sibyl's Prophecy, (Volospá); the Wooing of Frey, or the Errand of Skirnir; the Flyting of Thor and Woden (Harbarzlióð); Thor's Fishing for the Midgarth Serpent (Hymiskviða); the Railing of Loki (Lokasenna); the Winning of Thor's Hammer (Þrymskviða); the Lay of Weland. There are also some didactic poems, chief among them being the gnomic miscellany under the title Hávamál; while besides this there are others, like Vafþrúðnismál, treating of mythical subjects in a more or less didactic and mechanical way. There are a number of prose passages introducing or linking the poems. The confusion in some parts of the book is great.
Codex Regius is not the only source; other mythic and heroic poems are found in other manuscripts. The famous poem of the Doom of Balder (Gray's "Descent of Odin"); the poem of the Rescue of Menglad, the enchanted princess; the verses preserved in the Heiðreks Saga, belonging to the story of Angantyr; besides the poem of the Magic Mill (Grottasöngr) and the Song of the Dart (Gray's "Fatal Sisters"). There are many fragmentary verses, among them some from the Biarkamál, a poem with some curious points of likeness to the English Lay of Finnesburh. A Swedish inscription has preserved four verses of an old poem on Theodoric.
Thus there is some variety in the original documents now extant out of the host of poems that have been lost. One conclusion at least is irresistible—that, in guessing at the amount of epic poetry of this order which has been lost, one is justified in making a liberal estimate. Fragments are all that we possess. The extant poems have escaped the deadliest risks; the fire at Copenhagen in 1728, the bombardment in 1807, the fire in the Cotton Library in 1731, in which Beowulf was scorched but not burned. The manuscripts of Finnesburh and Maldon have been mislaid; but for the transcripts taken in time by Hickes and Hearne they would have been as little known as the songs that the Sirens sang. The poor remnants of Waldere were found by Stephens in two scraps of bookbinders' parchment.
When it is seen what hazards have been escaped by those bits of wreckage, and at the same time how distinct in character the several poems are, it is plain that one may use some freedom in thinking of the amount of this old poetry that has perished.
The loss is partly made good in different ways: in the Latin of the historians, Jordanes, Paulus Diaconus, and most of all in the paraphrases, prose and verse, by Saxo Grammaticus; in Ekkehard's Latin poem of Waltharius (c. a.d. 930); in the Volsunga Saga, which has kept the matter of the lost poems of Codex Regius and something of their spirit; in the Thidreks Saga, a prose story made up by a Norwegian in the thirteenth century from current North German ballads of the Niblungs; in the German poems of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which, in a later form of the language and in rhyming verse, have preserved at any rate some matters of tradition, some plots of stories, if little of the peculiar manner and imagination of the older poetry.
The casual references to Teutonic heroic subjects in a vast number of authors have been brought together in a monumental work, die deutsche Heldensage, by Wilhelm Grimm (1829).