Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/154

142 falls into two parts, of which the first rests inevitably upon surer foundations than the second, as indeed the author herself frankly recognises. For the demonstration of the dramatic origin of the older Eddic poems proceeds by close and clear reasoning upon definite ascertainable facts, but it is an unavoidable condition of the wider enquiry into the origin of drama that the evidence consists for the most part of hypotheses and analogies.

Miss Phillpotts examines the Eddic poems from the aspect of their literary form and content, though with a full knowledge and use of the conclusions of philological research. She finds that the poems, written in a native strophic metre unknown outside Scandinavia and never popular in Iceland, deal with native mythological and legendary subjects which they present, not in narrative form, but through the direct speech of the characters whose action is otherwise elucidated only by stage directions in prose. These poems differ in toto from the skaldic lays, which are aristocratic in tone, employ a highly artificial poetic terminology, and are of the nature of narrative eulogies of a patron or his family. The chant-metre poems are shown to precede not only the lays upon the borrowed themes of the Nibelungen and Ermanaric cycles, but also the poems written in the old-lore metre, which in some cases betray the existence of chant-metre prototypes. Miss Phillpotts contends that the oldest parts of the Edda are the poems in chant-metre, that they are popular in character with their roots in native and local tradition, and that their characteristic feature, the use of direct speech, betrays a dramatic origin. The disintegrating effect of the Icelandic migration may account for the decline of this older Scandinavian poetry in the struggle for existence. The plays, severed from their roots in local tradition, ceased to be acted or indeed to be readily intelligible to the new communities, which were destitute of a common historical tradition, because their individual members were drawn, not from any single locality, but from all parts of the Scandinavian world. Under these conditions the "narrative-plus-speech" poetry was bound to win.

In points of detail one may differ from the author. The