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Scale of the Poems

Table of Contents

List of extant poems and fragments in one or other of the older Teutonic languages (German, English, and Northern) in unrhymed alliterative verse	76
Small amount of the extant poetry	78
Supplemented in various ways	79
1. The Western Group (German and English)	79
Amount of story contained in the several poems, and scale of treatment	79
Hildebrand, a short story	80
Finnesburh, (1) the Lambeth fragment (Hickes); and (2) the abstract of the story in Beowulf	81
Finnesburh, a story of (1) wrong and (2) vengeance, like the story of the death of Attila, or of the betrayal of Roland	82
Uncertainty as to the compass of the Finnesburh poem (Lambeth) in its original complete form	84
Waldere, two fragments: the story of Walter of Aquitaine preserved in the Latin Waltharius	84
Plot of Waltharius	84
Place of the Waldere fragments in the story, and probable compass of the whole poem	86
Scale of Maldon and of Beowulf	88 89
General resemblance in the themes of these poems—unity of action	89
Development of style, and not neglect of unity nor multiplication of contents, accounts for the difference of length between earlier and later poems	91
Progress of Epic in England—unlike the history of Icelandic poetry	92
2. The Northern Group	93
The contents of the so-called "Elder Edda" (i.e. Codex Regius 2365, 4to Havn.) to what extent Epic	93 93
Notes on the contents of the poems, to show their scale; the Lay of Weland	94
Different plan in the Lays of Thor, Þrymskviða and Hymiskviða	95
The Helgi Poems—complications of the text	95
Three separate stories—Helgi Hundingsbane and Sigrun	95
Helgi Hiorvardsson and Swava	98
Helgi and Kara (lost)	99
The story of the Volsungs—the long Lay of Brynhild contains the whole story in abstract giving the chief place to the character of Brynhild	100 100 101
The Hell-ride of Brynhild	102
The fragmentary Lay of Brynhild (Brot af Sigurðarkviðu)	103
Poems on the death of Attila—the Lay of Attila (Atlakviða), and the Greenland Poem of Attila (Atlamál)	105
Proportions of the story	105
A third version of the story in the Lament of Oddrun (Oddrúnargrátr)	107
The Death of Ermanaric (Hamðismál)	109
The Northern idylls of the heroines (Oddrun, Gudrun)—the Old Lay of Gudrun, or Gudrun's story to Theodoric	109
The Lay of Gudrun (Guðrúnarkviða)—Gudrun's sorrow for Sigurd	111
The refrain	111
Gudrun's Chain of Woe (Tregrof Guðrúnar)	111
The Ordeal of Gudrun, an episodic lay	111
Poems in dialogue, without narrative— (1) Dialogues in the common epic measure—Balder's Doom, Dialogues of Sigurd, Angantyr—explanations in prose, between the dialogues (2) Dialogues in the gnomic or elegiac measure: (a) vituperative debates—Lokasenna, Harbarzlióð (in irregular verse), Atli and Rimgerd (b) Dialogues implying action—The Wooing of Frey (Skírnismál)	112 112 114
Svipdag and Menglad (Grógaldr, Fiölsvinnsmál)	114
The Volsung dialogues	115
The Western and Northern poems compared, with respect to their scale	116
The old English poems (Beowulf, Waldere), in scale, midway between the Northern poems and Homer	117
Many of the Teutonic epic remains may look like the "short lays" of the agglutinative epic theory; but this is illusion	117
Two kinds of story in Teutonic Epic—(1) episodic, i.e. representing a single action (Hildebrand, etc.); (2) summary, i.e. giving the whole of a long story in abstract, with details of one part of it (Weland, etc.)	118
The second class is unfit for agglutination	119
Also the first, when it is looked into	121
The Teutonic Lays are too individual to be conveniently fused into larger masses of narrative	122

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