Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/46

28 have been extraordinarily extensive in quantity. By way of example we may mention that in that old book on the art of poetry, the work generally known as the Younger or Snorre's Edda, and in regard to which we shall have something to say later, there is found a long series of stanzas which contains a catalogue of names and other words employed in poetry. Concerning the names of sea-kings here enumerated, the learned Norwegian linguist and antiquarian Sophus Bugge remarks: "When we look at this multitude of names of old sea-kings, they seem to us like a field thickly covered with monuments. In regard to some of them, we have songs and traditions, and this must once have been the case with all of them. History seems now to have forgotten the most of them, and the empty names remain to bear witness of the multitude of the songs that have ceased to speak." Of such groups, and also of isolated "memorial stones," there, however, are a great number, and we can only say of them, that they are so many insulated evidences of ancient poems that have been lost.

There has been much dispute in regard to the literary title to what remains of the Edda. On the basis of the fact that the Edda-poems were recorded in Iceland, that is to say in a country settled from Norway, the claim has been set up that they are especially a Norwegian inheritance. Against this view no real objection can be made, when it is understood that the statement is to be applied chiefly to the form in which the poems were recorded in the thirteenth century. But the question becomes a widely different one, when we, as we of necessity must, look upon them as a link of a great chain. Then the form in which they were written down, becomes a merely accidental circumstance, while the main fact remains, that the songs, of which the Edda-poems give us a few fragments, are the true expression of the popular spirit of the North, which revealed itself around the lakes of Sweden and