composed for popular entertainment, and they cannot date earlier than the ninth century. To what branch of the Scandinavian race are we then to assign them?
Down to the present century, and far into it, the most extravagant views were held with regard to the ‘Eddic poems.’ They are ‘monuments of hoar antiquity’ such as Tacitus might have heard, they were the ‘sacred songs and hallowed wisdom of the ancient sages of our race,’ the ‘Bible of the North,’ and the like. Even Grimm placed them long before Charles the Great. These opinions, however, a careful examination of the poems will show to be untenable and the positive evidence of language prove to be absolutely mistaken.
In the eighth century the tongue of the Northern Teutons underwent a mighty change, which severed it from the speech of the neighbour kinsfolk of the same stock, English and Germans, and left it a stamp of its own a mere skeleton sketch of these changes is given in the Reader, pp. 464-65. Grammar was stamped afresh, words and par- ticles were as it were thrown into the crucible and recast, initial letters and syllables dropped off-a fatal change for alliterative poetry. No poems, such as these we are dealing with, could have come through this metamorphosis: stories might and did survive, and myths remain. Be- sides this, a change so deep and widely spread speaks to great changes in life and customs and taste, which must have swept away the older poetry: while our poems are too spontaneous and fresh to be ever mistaken for such pieces of traditional lore as the Twelve Tables or the Song of the Arval Brothers. Then again, though there are deep differences between them, they are not more widely severed in speech, metre, and tone than one would expect from a succession of poets of three or four generations. And there is one whole group of poems which, as we shall see, can hardly be set earlier than the eleventh century.
We have therefore the problem narrowed within these limits, 800–1100. To what branch of the Scandinavians within that period can they most reasonably be assigned?
What was the state of the North during this period? First there was the great Exodus from all the Scandinavian lands on the North Sea west- wards; fleet after fleet of rovers and colonists passed over to the British group and the neighbouring coasts. Then we have the consolidation and growth of a strong imperial dominion in Norway under Fairhair, and its effects upon the colonists and the colonies. Thirdly, in consequence of external force of a violent character, we see a certain portion of the Western colonists breaking away from the settlements they had made or were making, and going forth on a second farther and, as it turned out, final Exodus, leaving the Western Isles for Iceland and the Faroes, and thence penetrating even to Greenland and the American coast[1]. We know now that, though the connection between Iceland
- ↑ About the same time they appeared in the Black Sea. The year 774 is the first mention of them in Eastern history. See Howorth, The Spread of the Slaves, Part iv.
