Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/48

30 hear its accents in the Beowulf poem and in the oldest Christian songs. In the North, where we, in connection with various peculiarly Norse conceptions, find in part the same themes as among the Germans and Anglo-Saxons, the Edda-poetry has preserved a far more original character, and here it appears in a specifically Norse dress. In its common basis, however, it points back to a time when no difference had been developed between Scandinavians and Germans.

While the Edda-poems, therefore, originated in prehistoric times, and while their authors are unknown, we have from a later period, reaching far down into the mediæval times, knowledge of a number of poets, of which the oldest are of Norwegian, and the later ones chiefly of Icelandic descent; but the productions of these are widely different from the songs of the Edda.

The oldest Norwegian skalds, like Starkad and Brage the Old, are enveloped in mythic darkness, but already, in the time of Harald Fairhair (872–930), the song-smiths of the Scandinavian North appear as thoroughly historical personages. In Iceland the art of poetry was held in high honor, and it was cultivated not only by the professional skalds, but also by others when the occasion presented itself, and many a passage is preserved, which owes its existence to the inspiration of the moment. The art of improvising was the more easy, since more stress was laid on skill and practice than on real poetic merit. The themes of the poems were of course of great variety. They would treat of love, of the sorrow over the death of a relative or friend, and of events of every other description; but the most of them are composed in glorification of some distinguished individual, in whose presence the skald himself, as a rule, recited his poem, or they were hymns in praise of some departed king or chieftain. All poems and songs of this class were distinguished by the name drapa.