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Scale of the Poems

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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
Epic and Romance

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