Introductory...
In the old Icelandic Edda-manuscript (of about the year 1270) the Helgi-lays were given first place among those poems properly termed 'heroic.'
The Helgi-cycle comprises the following pieces: I. Helgakviða Hundingsbana hin fyrri (The 'First? Lay of Helgi the Slayer of Hunding, H. H., I); 2. Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar (The Lay of Helgi the Son of Hjörvarth, H. Hj.), which contains both prose and verse; 3. Helgakvia Hundingsbana önnur (The 'Second' Lay of Helgi the Slayer of Hunding., H. H., II), which also contains prose as well as verse. While the 'First' Lay of Helgi Hundingsbani closes with Helgi's victory over Höthbrodd, the 'Second' Lay goes farther, giving an account of Helgi's death and of his return from the other world to converse with his loved-one Sigrún, who survived him. All three poems formed a single group, not only in respect to 'saga-material,' but also to some extent by reason of similarity in poetic treatment.
As arranged in the MS., the Helgi-lays precede those on Sigurth the Slayer of Fáfnir (Sigurðr Fáfnisbani), a prose passage 'On the Death of Sinfjölti' (Frá dauða Sinfjötla) forming the transition. With Sigurth both heroes called Helgi are in different ways brought into connection.
As to the date of these poems, there is now practical unanimity of opinion. The view held by Keyser and Svend Grundtvig that the Eddic poems arose before the discovery and settlement of Iceland, before the days of Harald Fairhair, and even before the early Viking period represented by Ragnar Lothbrók, has been discarded. All Old Norse scholars nowadays agree that no one of the Eddic poems in its present form is older than the end of the ninth century. Several parts of the Helgi-cycle are supposed tohave originated in the tenth century; and, as to the First Lay of Helgi Hundingsbani, most scholars share Konrad Maurer's opinion (1) that it is not older than the eleventh century.
On the other hand, the question wher the Helgi-lays and the rest of the songs of the Elder Edda were composed, is still unsettled. Of late no one has been inclined to accept P. A. Munch's conjecture, (2) that the home of the Helgi-lays is to be found in the Swedish province Gautland, or the opinion defended by Svend Grundtvig, (3) that these lays as well as the great bulk of Eddic poetry, arose in Danish-Swedish lands, where, in his opinion, Scandinavian culture of the pre-Viking period reached its highest development.
With the single exception of Gudbrand Vigfusson, all modern investigators of Old Norse poetry have held that the poems of the Edda in general (including the Helgi-lays) were composed by Norsemen (i.e. men of the Norwegian-Icelandic nation). Jessen, (4) who distinguishes sharply between the origin of the saga-material contained in the poems and the origin of the poems themselves, holds that not only are the Helgi-lays Norse, but that the story of Helgi the son of Hjörvarth is also Norse, and that it was a Norse poet who brought the Danish story of Helgi the Slayer of Hunding and Höthbrodd into connection with the story of the Völsungs. Axel Olrik seems to be of the opinion (5) that most of the heroic poems in the Elder Edda arose in south-western Norway.
The question has, however, been most closely examined of late by two Icelanders, Finnur Jónsson and Björn Magnússon Ólsen. (6) The former holds that the oldest, and indeed the great majority, of the Eddic poems were composed by Norwegians in Norway. In this category of Norwegian poems he puts most of the Helgi-lays, to which he gives the following names: Völsungakviða en forna (i.e. the Second Lay of Helgi Hundingsbani), Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar, and Hrímgerðarmöl (i.e. the Lay of Hrímgerth, a part of H. Hju. as usually printed). In his opinion Helgakviða Hundingsbana (i.e. the First Helgi-Lay) is the latest of the Helgi-poems, and was composed in Greenland. Björn Magnússon Ólsen, on the other hand, defends the theory that the majority of the poems of the Edda (including those on Helgi) were composed by Icelanders.
Gudbrand Vigfusson stood practically alone in his opinions on this subject, and I therefore state his view last. Vigfusson held that most of the groups of Eddic poems, and among them the Helgi-Lays, had their origin in the British Isles. He at first sought their home in the northerly islands, the Orkneys, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man. Later, however, he wrote of the Helgi-lays as 'most distinctly southern in character,' and tried to localise them in the islands of the British Channel. (7)
As regards the authors of those Eddic poems to which he ascribed a western origin, Vigfusson was inclined to think that they were 'connected with the Southern Scandinavian emigration.' He was of the opinion that they belonged to the stream of people of the races of the Gauts, the Jutes, and the original Vikings (inhabitants of the Vík or land about the Christiania fjord), who went over from the Skage Rack to the British Isles.
Vigfusson's idea was opposed on nearly all sides, (8) and Finnur Jónsson (9) regards it as completely refuted.
In my Studien über die Entstehung der Nordischen Götter- und Heldensagen, (10) I wrote as follows with reference to Vigfusson: 'We may presume that the mythic and heroic stories containing motives taken from the English and Irish flourished earliest among Scandinavians in the West. And it is not improbable that some of the lays which are included in Sæmund's Edda first developed there.' Karl Müllenhoff, the great authority in Germany, opposed this theory so strongly as to declare (11) that I had not succeeded in pointing out a single example in the long period of Viking expeditions which plainly showed that foreign material came to the North in the Viking era and was worked over there.
The main object of the present investigation is to clear up the question of the home of the Helgi-lays. It is intended to form the beginning of a series of studies concerning the origin of the poems of the Elder Edda.
ENDNOTES:
1.
Ztsch. f. d. Philologie, II, 443. Back
2. Det Norske Folks Historie, I, 228. Back
3. Om Nordens Gamle Literatur (1867). Back
4. Über die Eddalieder, in Ztsch. f. d. Phil., vol.
III. Back
5. See (Norsk) Hist. Tidskrift, 3rd Series, III,
188. Back
6. F. Jónsson, Den Oldnorske og Oldislandske Litteraturs
Historie, Cop., 1894 ff; see I, 66, and the treatment of the separate poems.
Finnur Jónsson's opinions were opposed by Björn Ólsen in a dissertation
Hvar eru Eddukvæð in til orðin? in Tímarit hins íslenska bókmenta fjelags,
Reykjavík, vol. XV (1894). This called forth an article with the same heading
by Finnur Jónsson in Tímarit, vol. XVI, to which Björn Ólsen replied in
the same volume. Back
7. See prolegomena to his edition of Sturlunga Saga,
Oxford, 1878, CLXXXVI ff; Corpus Poeticum Boreale, Oxford, 1883, sect. 8,
especially I, lxiii f; Grimm Centenary, Oxford-London, 1886, III, 'The Place
of the Helgi-lays,' 29-36. Back
8. Especially by B. Gröndal in Tímarit, I, 24 ff,
and by Edzardi in Paul-Braune, Beiträge, VIII, 349-369. Back
9. Litt. Hist., I, 63. Back
10. Studier over de nordiske Gude- og Heltesagns
Oprindelse, Christiania, 1889, the first series of studies of which the
present volume is a continuation, translated into German by Professor Oscar
Brenner, Munich, 1889, p. 30. Back
11. Deutsche Altertumskunde, V, 49, 58. Back
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