The Naming of Eddic Mythological Poems in Medieval Manuscripts

The Naming of Eddic Mythological Poems in Medieval Manuscripts In the corpus of eddic poetry, it is striking that a single name, such as Gudriinarqvida (The Lay ofGudrdn), appearstohave served as thetitlefor three distinct poems, two of which are copied one after another in the same manuscript. It is also curious that particular names are qualified by epithets, such as inn skammi ('the short'), apparently to distinguish one work from another of the same name, and that the same poem could attract different titles in different manuscripts, for example For Scirnis (The Journey ofSkirnir) in one, and Skimismdl (The Speech ofSkirnir) in another. This article focusses on the naming practices of manuscript producers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Iceland, and the manner in which traditional poems were identified as they passed from an oral mitieu into the realm of Uterary fiction. The Table on pp. 112-115 summarises the corpus of eddic poems, and their rubrics in Icelandic manuscripts of the Middle Ages. The left hand column tists works in the order in which they are preserved in the principal repository of eddic verse, the Codex Regius (GI. kgl. sml. 2365 4to ) (R), written in the second half of the thirteenth century. There is one lacuna in the codex, which occurs between texts 19 and 20. The collection is without a prologue, although the majority of poems are preserved with some kind of prose frame, which usually provides narrative background to the events or the speeches represented in the poem itself. Names printed in italics (such as Helgaqvida Hiqrvardzsonar, text 13) are those given in post-medieval paper manuscripts or m o d e m editions. The second column gives the rubrics found in a second coUection of poems, recorded in one gathering of a manuscript, A M 748 I 4t 0 (A), thought to have been produced at the turn of the century. The gathering is incomplete at its beginning and end, and lacks one or more leaves within it During the thirteenth century, a number of prose writers used quotations of eddic verse in their works, and these instances are given in the third column. O n many occasions the source of the quotation is not given, usually because the verse is spoken by an actor in the prose narrative and constitutes part of the story: this is the case with almost all the quotations in Vqlsunga saga for instance. In other prose works, most notably the Edda of Snorri Sturluson, names of poems appear to be cited to lend authority to the account akeady given in prose. A handful of poems are recorded in full outside the collection manuscripts R and A, and these are shown in the column on the far right-hand side of the table. The rubrics to poems are shown in non-itaticised print, and where I consider these to function astitlesof poems, they are printed in bold. The basis for m y designation of one rubric as atideand another as a kind of chapter heading is as 98 /. Quinn follows. The rubric in the manuscript which introduces the poem w e call VQlundarqvida (text 10) is Fra Vclundi oc NiflaSi'1 (concerning Vclundr and Nifladr), the two main actors of the poem. This heading does not function as a title in the same way as, say, prymsqvida (The Lay ofPrymr) does. One of the constituents of the compound Prymsqvida, is the noun kvida, which Andreas Heusler2 has argued is a particular Scandinavian expression for a Germanic poetic genre of narrative verse. (Thefirstconstituent of the title Prymsqvida is the name of one of its actors, the giant Prymr.) Other £v/ '5b O •a «« 55 £" ,2 J s S °? •8 .2 » en vo t— oo The Naming ofEddic Poems 113 I > .5§ > CO«w W CO > .a .s c e o o •- -0 a a o o 5 I 1« £ 2 9 s BO C - ? g a 5.53 1° ?o a|« IS 5 S 3 & 3. u u 3 09 1 3 ill M S " 1 • S 3 ^ 2 s o c xi •s 2 g •3 3 ! •3 5 3 S •= 5, 2 * * & 3 tt O I. .1" o s 3 3 - — i« a...