SORG OCH ELEGII EDDANS HJALTEDIKTNING.(Review)

SORG OCH ELEGII EDDANS HJALTEDIKTNING. By Daniel Savborg. (Stockholm Studies in the History of Literature, 36.) Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1997. Pp. 485.

One of the most vexed questions in the field of Eddaic studies is the age of the various poems preserved in the thirteenth-century Icelandic manuscript Codex regius No. 2365, 4 [degrees]. This uncertainty about the dating of the texts stems to a large degree from the uncertainty about the criteria upon which a judgment should be based (for example metrics, vocabulary, choice of motifs). The words sorg ("grief") and elegi ("elegy") in the title of Daniel Savborg's dissertation refer to two characteristics--the motif "grief" and "elegaic" tone--which have often been regarded as indications that certain Eddaic poems (Gudrunarkvida I, Gudrunarkvida II, Gudrunarhvot, Oddrunargratr, Helreid Brynhildar) are of more recent origin than others which (allegedly) do not exhibit these two features (pp. 8, 39). Savborg's monograph has a two-fold purpose: on the one hand it reexamines the distinction between poems of more "recent" origin and "older" poems drawn by Andreas Heusler and others on the basis of the criteria "grief as a motif" and "elegaic" tone, with the aim of establishing whether the traditional distinction between two groups of poems is justified (pp. 14, 25, 30-31). On the other hand it seeks to test the validity of the grief motif and elegiac tone as criteria themselves, that is, as characteristics of more recent compositions. In the first case--the …