The Age of the “Vǫluspa”
1961; Routledge; Volume: 36; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/19306962.1961.11787048
ISSN1930-6962
Autores Tópico(s)Linguistics and language evolution
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size NotesGermanic Review XXXIV, 247 ff.Ark. för nord. fil. XLII, 216.S. Bugge, The Home of the Eddic Poems, trans. W. H. Schofield. (London, 1899), XXXIX.1Baldr’s brother did not spare the hungry foe of men; mountains shook and mountains broke; Heaven burned.R = Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda; H = Hauksbok. W, r, U, and T, mentioned later, are MSS of the Prose Edda.Om Tiden för Völvens Spaadom. Sœrtryk af Morgenbladet, 26 juni, 1926.Södermanlands Runinskrifter (Stockholm, 1933), 117 f.“Völuspa och Sverge” in Årsbok IV of the Societas Scientiarum Fennica (Helsingfors, 1926), B 4–15.Most of the attempts to explain R’s iviÕi must be considered mere etymological guesses, though one may agree with Neckel (Ark. för nord. fil. XLVI, 198) that Palmér’s reading (Studier tillägnade Axel Koch [Lund, 1929], 115 f.) of i viÕi “in the wide expanse” is “sprachlich plausibel und inhaltlich erwägenswert.” Detter-Heinzel (Sœmundar Edda, II, 8) thought that the scribe of H, in which i viÕiur is written, added -ur in the belief that the sign ∞ often used for this syllable had been omitted in R. But they did not consider the possibility that H’s form may be the only correct one. For it can be read iviÕjur and makes good sense if taken as “tree spirits” (iviÕja ” dweller in a tree, dryad"; cf. “HyndluljóÕ” 48: iviÕio, accus. “forest-dweller, witch”). The volva boasts here that she has been living from the beginning of time; she remembers nine worlds in chronological succession, each symbolized by the world tree which has been reborn many times, together with the spirit abiding in it. That is why the tree is called mœran in the following line.H. Falk und A. Torp, Norwegisch-Dänisch es etymologisches Wörterbuch, übersetzt von H. Davidsen, (Heidelberg, 1910–11), II, 1374.11.Deutsche Altertumskunde (Berlin, 1908), V, 126.S. Gutenbrunner, “versteckte Eddagedichte” in Edda, Skalden, Saga. Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Felix Genzmer (Heidelberg, 1952), p. 75.Gutenbrunner, ibid., p. 80.G. Neckel, Überlieferungen vom Gotte Balder (Dortmund, 1920), p. 240.A. Brandl, Forschungen und Charakteristiken (Berlin und Leipzig, 1936), p. 9 f.Brandl, ibid., p. 75 ff.H. M. Chadwick, The Heroic Age (Cambridge, 1926), p. 49 ff.A. Kurfess, Sibyllinische Weissagungen (München, 1951), p. 20.Kurfess, ibid., p. 11 f.The Vǫluspá, read April 6, 1838 before the Leicestershire Literary Society (Leicester, 1838), p. 22.Section 41; cf. also E. H. Meyer, Die eddische Kosmogonie (Freiburg i. B., 1891), pp. 31 and 41.In RH 9 and 10 the underlying thoughts are that the dwarves are first created by the “powers” from Ymir’s blood and bones and that they (the dwarves) thereupon make the bodies of men from earth. But a glance at the manuscripts will show that they are greatly at variance, the acts of creation having been misunderstood in the course of time. For 9, 5 f. it seems best to take R’s reading, which is supported by T: (The powers decided) at skyldi dverga drótt of skepja “that the host of dwarves should be created, since hverr in RWU (instead of at) would mean that some one of the superior powers, who are elsewhere described as working in common, was about to be chosen for this task. H’s “what dwarves (hverir dvergar) should create the people (dróttir) cannot be right, for it was the dwarves, not men, who were made from Ymir’s body. R’s drotin (= drótinn) for drótt(ir) of the other manuscripts seems to have been influenced by the thought of Motsognir in Strophe 10 as the chief of the dwarves. But as it can scarcely be reasonable that the chief dwarves Motsognir and Durinn created the other dwarves, which seems to be the tenor of the H-reading, R is probably right in having ór jǫrõo as against the ijǫrõu of the other manuscripts. The dwarves, with Motsognir and Durinn at their head, made the bodies of men from earth, not in the earth: The other dwarves who participated in this act of creation are listed in 11, 12, and possibly 13. The two acts of creation of the dwarves by the regin and of the bodies of men by the dwarves gradually came to be assimilated in favor of the former, and the original story is but faintly perceptible.See H. Gering, Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda (Halle a. S. 1927), I, 19. But see also above on the possible connection of Álfr with the Ynglings. A double origin of the name is not iniprobable.Wilkén in ZfdPh, XXXIII, 326.R. Höckert, Vǫuspád och Vanakulten (Uppsala, 1926–30), II, 15.E. Philippson, “Die Genealogie der Götter in germanischer Religion, Mythologie, und Theologie” in Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, XXXVII, No. 3 (Urbana, 1953), 46.Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, XXXI, 105 ff.E. H. Meyer, op. cit., p. 98; F. R. Schröder, Germanentum und Hellenismus (Heidelberg, 1924), pp. 11 ff., and 22.E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, 1951), p. 220; Schröder, op. cit., p. 14.At reginódomi in this strophe doubtless means “to the rule of the (former) regin, the star-gods. “The unknown god takes their place; he will rule over all just as the star-gods had once ruled. The œsir and vanir played out their part, as men did, under the ægis of the regin. In the new world the good “gods” and men are subject to inn riki.Schröder, op. cit., 135 ff., 142.84B. Nerman, The Poetic Edda in the Light of Archtœology (Coventry, 1931), pp. 18 f.G. Neckel, Walhall (Dortmund, 1913), pp. 119 f.G. Neckel, Überlieferungen vom Gotte Balder, pp. 28 f.; l75 ff.; 187.For the relationship between Beowulf and the Aeneid see Fr. Klæber in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen, CXXVI (1911), 40 ff. and 339 ff.But Krogmann (Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen, CXCI, 37 f.) makes a strong case for deriving the first element of Iõavǫllr (Eiõa- once in U) from Gmc *iõa-, *aiõa- “leuchtend, glänzend.” Thus Iõavǫllr would be “bright field,” a kind of Germanic Paradise.See W. Brecht in ZfdPh, XLIII, 451.H. Schneider, Eine Uredda (Halle a. S., 1948), p. 38; Schröder, op. cit., pp. 39 f. and 138 ff.This could not have been the original meaning of the phrase. See Germanic Review, XXXIV, 257 f.Schneider, op. cit., pp. 17 f.W. Krogmann, “Der christliche Ursprung des alts. Mūõspelli” in Abhandlungen zur niederdeutschen Philologie Conrad Borchling zum Gedächtnis (Neumünster, 1950), pp. 17–31.A. Olrik, Ragnarök, übersetzt von W. Ranisch (Berlin und Leipzig, 1922), pp. 75 f.B. Phillpotts in Ark. för nord. fil., XXI, 14 ff.J. de Vries, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte (Berlin und Leipzig, 1935–37), II, 418.Krogmann, op. cit., p. 28.B. Kummer, Midgards Untergang (Leipzig, 1927), p. 4.Gottpiod (Jena, 1939), p. 23.In this regard it is interesting to observe that kviõa “lay” in the title of many Eddic poems is almost certainly a Gothic word. Cf. E. Noreen in Festschrift Eugen Mogk zum 70. Geburtstag (Halle a. S., 1924), pp. 61 ff.H. Shetelig and H. Falk. Scandinavian Archœology, trans. E. V. Gordon (Oxford, 1927), pp. 202 ff. Nerrnan’s statement (Ark. für nord. fil., LXXIII, 3) in an article on the age of the ” Vǫluspá “that the mention of “no lack of gold” in strophe 8 must come from a period when gold was not usual, since it would otherwise be scarcely remarkable, is difficult to understand. It surely contradicts everything that he said in his Poetic Edda in the Light of Archœology (Coventry, 1931) about the value of gold as evidence for the dating of those Eddic passages in which it occurs.In order to place the rise of the poem in the second half of the seventh century, he is also forced to call hjǫr (accus.) till hjarta, an expression which “presumes a thrusting weapon” characteristic of the Migration period, a “surviving cliché” (p. 4).L. Schmidt, Geschichte der germanischen Frühzeit (Köln, 1934), p. 299.Festschrift Eugen Mogk, pp. 383 ff.
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