Medieval Oral Literature: de Gruyter

Medieval
Oral Literature
Edited by
Karl Reichl
De Gruyter
Contents
List of Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XV
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XVII
Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XIX
Note on Transliteration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XXI
I
1 Plotting the Map of Medieval Oral Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
K R
P I: C  A

2 Oral Theory and Medieval Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
J M F  P R
3 The Written Word in Context: The Early Middle Ages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

M R
4 Orality and Literacy: The Case of Anglo-Saxon England . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

K O’B O’K
5 Performance and Performers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

J H  K R
6 Oral Poetics: The Linguistics and Stylistics of Orality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

T A. DB
7 Oral Literature, Ritual, and the Dialectics of Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

P R
P II: T  G

8 Older Germanic Poetry, with a Note on the Icelandic Sagas . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
J H
9 Oral Tradition and Performance in Medieval Ireland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279

J F N
VI Contents
10 Medieval German Literature: Literacy, Orality and Semi-Orality . . . . . . . . . 295

J-D M
11 Middle English Romances and the Oral Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

A P
12 The Chanson de geste and Orality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353

D B
13 The Italian Cantari between Orality and Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

R M
14 Court Poetry, Village Verse: Romanian Oral Epic in the Medieval World . . . . 387
M H. B
15 Hispanic Epic and Ballad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411

R W
16 The Late-Medieval Ballad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429

T P
17 Medieval Greek Epic Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459

E J
18 The Song of Igor and its Medieval Context in Russian Oral Poetry . . . . . . . . 485
S. N. A
19 Oral Traditions in a Literate Society:

The Hebrew Literature of the Middle Ages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 499
E Y
20 Woman’s Song in Medieval Western Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521

A L. K
21 Popular Song and the Middle English Lyric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 555

K B-L
22 The Pastourelle as a Popular Genre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 581

L S
23 Andalusī-Arabic Strophic Poetry as an Example of Literary Hybridization:

Ibn Quzmān’s ‘Zajal 147’ (The Poet’s Reluctant Repentance) . . . . . . . . . . . 601
J T. M
Contents VII
24 Orality and the Tradition of Arabic Epic Storytelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 629

T H
25 Orality in Medieval Persian Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 653

J R
26 Medieval Turkish Epic and Popular Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 681

K R
27 Dramatic Pastime, Custom and Entertainment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 701

T P
Notes on the Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 725
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 729
8 Older Germanic Poetry
With a Note on the Icelandic Sagas
Joseph Harris
A relatively new initiative, the World Oral Literature Project from Cambridge Univer-
sity’s Museum for Archeology and Anthropology, with the object of saving what it can
of the vanishing oral literatures of the world, points out that ‘[g]lobalisation and rapid
socio-economic change exert complex pressures on smaller communities’ (http://www.
oralliterature.org). Ironically it will take a ‘global’ effort to save their oral culture from
our influence. We can imagine somewhat similar pressures – perhaps to be on the safe
side I should add that academic parachute, ‘mutatis mutandis’ – bearing on clan and
tribal groups of northern Europe as they encountered socially and technologically
advanced southern cultures, especially Roman; their oral literature was, however, saved
into writing not by any organized initiative but only very sporadically and unsystemati-
cally. The ‘smaller communities’ in question here – the ‘little traditions’ encountering
the ‘great tradition’ of Rome, to use some terminology from the anthropology of peasant
cultures¹ – were historically related by language, poetics, custom and law, certainly also
by intermarriage, and by at least some aspects of religion. Each community’s assimila-
tions of and to Latin culture in the Roman Iron Age (0–400 ), and later to Byzantine
and Roman Christianity, varied widely; and the study of these particular developments
and of the historical fates of the various Germanic peoples are among the great subjects
of European history.
A recent study by D. H. Green (1998) offers a comprehensive survey, admirably
grounded in language, of the Germanic peoples’ cultural relations with Rome in the early
period, but Green deals with oral literature only incidentally. Insofar as early Germanic
oral literature is our main concern in this chapter, the anthropological model from
recent and contemporary times, though far removed from the Germanic historical base,
can often be equally suggestive (Reichl 2000; Niles 1999). Of necessity the approach to
the study of this largely lost, haphazardly preserved oral and oral-derived literature is also
somewhat unsystematic, proceeding fragmentary record by fragmentary record. Under-
lying the fragmented prospective, however, are two factors that help to give shape to the
enterprise: 1) the principles of dealing with oral literatures in general, tempered by the
caveats just mentioned, and 2) the special aspects of the Germanic ethnic matrix at its
nexus with orality and literacy. The former is the overall topic of this book as a whole;
¹ Wax 1969: 15; Wax draws these concepts from the anthropologist Robert Redfield.
254 Joseph Harris
the latter is the subject of this chapter and an old but still productive – in a sense, still
essential – subject of study rooted in the recognition of certain ethnic commonalities.²
1 Oral Literature and Writing
Oral literature is both a product of and a part of ‘culture’, and the interrelated cultures
of early Germanic Europe produced this product partly before and outside the influence
of Rome. But it is saved, to the degree that it is saved, by writing, the archiving technol-
ogy brought in with Latin civilization and especially with Roman Christianity. Almost
as far back as we can see with any clarity, the basically oral cultures, the ‘little tradition’,
of Germania were subject to influence by the Roman contact; and when scraps of Ger-
manic oral literature are found written down through the Christian medium, it is diffi-
cult to tell exactly what the effects of the passage into letters – textualization – may have
been (Honko 2000; 2003). The relatively anodyne discussion of textualization, however,
is the recent, technologized successor of grittier cultural wars better left behind.
The purely oral culture (‘primary orality’) of a putatively isolated Germanic-speak-
ing tribal community of the western Baltic in the pre-Roman Iron Age, that is before
extensive contact with Rome, need not be doubted as a theoretical construct, and such a
community will have had its oral literature. But historical times and more direct knowl-
edge begin with information from Mediterranean writers. Especially rich, of course, is
Tacitus’s Germania (c. 98 ), an ethnography that gives considerable attention to phe-
nomena contemporary scholarship might denominate oral literature. At the same time
an intra-Germanic tradition of writing was establishing itself within Germanic oral life,
namely the runic writing that we thank for linguistic information and for at least hints
about that oral life-world. The general view is that the futhark (or runic alphabet) was
developed about the birth of Christ and that the earliest surviving examples are from the
second century  (Knirk 1993: 545–46). But the dates have been moved – tentatively
and contentiously – back by finds in modern times, and Erik Moltke, for example, places
the Meldorf fibula at about 50  and the development of the futhark ‘as far back as
100–150 ’ or slightly more conservatively expressed: ‘to say the year 0 +/– 100 (50)
years’.³
The runic alphabet itself and its uses cannot be historically understood without
Mediterranean sources and influences, and the same could be said also not only of some
common types of inscriptions (e. g., maker claims), but also of some objects themselves
(e. g., bracteates). My point is that Germanic literary culture, including its channels (oral,
runes, manuscripts, etc.), has been impure, a hybrid from an early period. Newer studies
of oral literature in medieval Europe are turning out to be studies of orality and literacy;
for example, a contemporary collection of papers on the early medieval North is based
² A valuable recent work can serve as an introduction to the broader aspect of this chapter: Murdoch
and Read 2004, with twelve mainly literary and cultural chapters by contemporary experts. Among
predecessors of this book, an outstanding handbook of the field was (and still is) Schneider 1938,
with nine somewhat more historically weighted chapters by great pre-War and transitional figures.
³ Moltke 1985: 64; similarly Moltke 1981: 7; Antonsen 1998: 150, citing Düwel and Gebühr
1981: 161; and Düwel 1981.
8 Older Germanic Poetry 255
on the idea of an orality-literacy continuum where surviving texts are to be placed with-
out preconceptions; in other quarters the mixture of an all-pervasive background orality
with influential elite literacy has been christened Vokalität and taken to characterize the
early Middle Ages.⁴ The ingredients and proportions vary by place and time, register and
social class, genre and preservation; and in plotting any given text’s position ‘along the
continuum’ no automatic GPS can be trusted.
The old quibble about the oxymoron ‘oral literature’ should not detain us, even
though Walter Ong’s great synthesis introduces a subchapter with the title ‘Did you say
“oral literature”?’ (1982: 10). Yes, the etymology of literature involves letters, and some
folklorists still favour ‘verbal art’ for the unlettered equivalent. The problem of ‘litera-
ture’ (or equally of ‘art’) lies, however, not in how to conceive literature in the absence
of writing (just one ‘channel’ among others) but in what, in essence, literature (or art) is.
I will not attempt to answer the question ‘What is literature?’ But some traditional
answers have contrasted literature with nonliterary discourse either because of a use of
language that contrasts with ordinary language (as marked vs. unmarked; a subset of the
grammar) or because of its fictive relation to the world (‘the poet nothing affirmeth’), or
both.⁵ Roman Jakobson’s famous discussion of the ‘poetic function’ would seem to be a
theoretical vehicle well suited to the appreciation of ‘literature’ or ‘verbal art’ in a con-
text of very limited background information like that on the oral literature of early Ger-
manic Vokalität, where some of the haphazardly preserved snatches of discourse appear,
as viewed retrospectively, to be striving toward verse, language on the way to literature.⁶
But the hybridity of the cultural matrix cautions against rigid application of assumptions
of purity.
The northern European pre-literary cultural traditions are grouped together primar-
ily as a language group. Language is not DNA stock, and language and ethnicity do not
always straightforwardly co-vary. But language is generally the non-negotiable central ele-
ment of a culture, perhaps especially in the pre-modern world.⁷ And when we find that a
single basic poetics is shared across all the earliest Germanic peoples where verse is in
evidence, it is reasonable to believe that the roots of this poetics follow the trail of the
dialects back to the common proto-language. For the period of this common language –
or grouping of closely related dialects – whose tight linguistic affinity began to fall apart
about 200 , we can only imaginatively reconstruct an oral literature based on much
later, but ‘traditional’, vestiges that happened to be recorded and preserved. But some of
the earliest runic inscriptions do hint of the existence of a poetic language in the period
of a Germanic proto-language still minimally differentiated into dialects. For example, a
group of inscriptions on lance blades (the oldest being Øvre Stabu, 150–200 : rauni-
jaz ‘tester’) has been persuasively interpreted as adumbrating a preform of the type of
⁴ Ranković et al. 2010; Schaefer 1992; compare Amodio 2004.

⁵ Ohmann 1971; 1974; Harris 1991: 10–12; 1979: 70–71.
⁶ Jakobson 1960; now see also Beechy 2010. A recent discussion of ‘Orality’ precisely in the early
Germanic context still echoes Ong on ‘oral literature’ (Dunphy 2004: 103); but despite views that
differ from mine sufficiently to seem sometimes distinctly wrong, Dunphy’s chapter should be read
as one of the few recent efforts in precisely our area.
⁷ See Watkins 1995: 7: ‘Language is linked to culture in a complex fashion: it is at once the expression
of culture and a part of it.’
256 Joseph Harris
verbal art we know much later from skaldic poetry,⁸ and a few slightly later, but still
Proto-Nordic, inscriptions are framed in alliterative language or use diction like that
later marked as poetic.⁹ By the time we get to the inscribed golden horn of Gallehus (c.
400), there is little doubt that the simple wording constitutes verse: Ek Hlewa-gastiz
Holtijaz horna tawido ‘I Hlewagastiz, son of Holta[gastiz], commissioned the horn.’¹⁰
If great literatures are supposed to begin with an epic,¹¹ this first preserved verse
does not look auspicious; and if we adopt Erik Moltke’s downbeat assessment – Hlewa-
gastiz is an illiterate goldsmith, who copies the runes rather incompetently; the allitera-
tion is accidental, the genre ordinary, and no verse is intended – it would be romantic to
see even the seed of an ars poetica here. But there are good reasons for considering this
line as a form of verse just antecedent to the forms we find in all early Germanic poetry.
The second half-line scans nicely by Sievers’ standards; the gratuitous presence of the
patronymic provides alliterative adornment; and its clipping may show the language
struggling toward the later attested syllabic patterning captured in Sievers’ five types
(1893). Even the mode of inscription suggests consciousness of verse: All words except
tawido are incised with double lines, hatched to give the runes visual weight, but the
line’s last word (or foot), the least important and non-alliterating stress, is inscribed with
single lines as if the ‘author’ wanted to mirror oral weight in script. Admittedly, ek,
which is unstressed and even outside the metre, is incised with the same double lines;
one could rationalize this as a visible symbol precisely that the pronoun is extrametrical
and not here a proclitic. Wessén (1930) assumes plausibly, if prosaically, that lack of
space is to blame for the single lines of tawido, and there is no denying the possibility.
Simple as it is, however, this line of verse does undoubtedly deal at the beginning – or as
close to the beginning of Germanic poetics as we can get with certainty – with poesis or
‘making’.
In any case, we can with Winfred P. Lehmann and others,¹² take this early verse
inscription as the humble first trace of the alliterative poetics, including metre, that
⁸ Beck 2006; Harris 2010.

⁹ Poetic language anticipatory of Gallehus may be found in the Kragehul spearshaft (Denmark c.
300), especially if Antonsen’s reading is correct (1975: 35–36): ek erilaz Asu-gisalas em. Uha haite
[…] (my capitalization and punctuation); Antonsen’s translation: ‘I am the erilaz of Ansugisalaz. I
am called Uha […]’; Krause’s reading is less alliterative (1966: 66). Another example is the Einang
stone (Norway 350–400 ; Antonsen 1975: 39) with a metrical second half-line and the possibi-
lity of an originally alliterating name ([ek Ra]da-gastiz runo faihido ‘[I …] painted the rune’; see
Krause 1966: 142–44); traditionally the name in Einang is completed with [ek Go]da-, but the
alliterating element proposed here is common in names, and the whole name appears in Förste-
mann (1856: 999: Ratgast).
¹⁰ Text adapted from Antonsen 1975: 41. The verb seems not to mean simply ‘made’ as in most trans-
lations (Wessén 1930: 167–69; Lehmann 1956: 28: ‘contrived’); ‘commissioned’, i. e., ‘brought
about’, is my guess based on the evidence I have seen. Antonsen and others who take the masc.
nom. sg. holtijaz (an IE patronymic formation) as based on *holta-, a short form of *holta-gastiz,
are surely right. Two equally possible etymologies of hlewa- are argued by different scholars (Anton-
sen 1975: 41); I suppose I would favour PIE *k’lew-o- ‘fame’ (compare, e. g., Moltke 1985: 88;
Krause 1966: 102).
¹¹ This canard of literary history looks different after one has read Watkins on the opening of a Trojan
(Luvian) epic lay from the sixteenth century  (1995: 146–48)!
¹² Lehmann 1956: 28–29; Russom 1998: 1; von See 1967: 1.
shapes Old Germanic poetry and lasts until remarkably late in outliers, as found in Ice-
land and in the Scottish/English alternative traditions, where, for one rare example, the
young King James VI of Scotland wrote in his Essayes of a Prentise, in the Divine Art of
Poesie (Edinburgh, 1584):
Let all your verse be Literall, sa far as may be, quhatsumeuer kynde they be of, bot speciallie
Tumbling verse for flyting. Be Literall I meane, that the maist pairt of your lyne, sall rynne
vpon a letter, as this tumbling lyne rynnis vpon F:
Fetching fude for to feid it fast furth of the Farie.
No need to comment on King James’s taste. But his term for this accentual verse, ‘tum-
bling’, as opposed to ‘flowing’ syllabic verse, is not inappropriate; and his choice of genre,
the flyting (a slanging match, competition of insults), is perfectly suited to the verse type.
The late alliterative poets may have associated their own style with vigour and even vio-
lence: In his opening prayer the poet of the fifteenth-century Alliterative Morte Arthure
asks God as Muse to let him ‘werpe owte som worde at this tym’. Anyone seeking the
historical roots of late tumbling verse or solid-built skaldic court-metre – indeed of any
early Germanic verse and its late heirs – will be led back to Gallehus and, as the foun-
tainhead, to the language features underlying it: the strong stress accent developed by
Proto-Germanic in the last pre-Christian centuries and the linguistic features that
devolve from the settlement of the variable Indo-European accent on the Germanic first
syllable.¹³
2 ‘New’ Comparative Poetics
Nineteenth-century scholars clearly recognized affinity as the key concept in comparing

the poetics of Germanic languages; they further recognized dependence of the poetics on
the languages themselves. But none of the older scholars mapped the territory of the
intersection of language and poetics or clarified the chronological layering of the basic
concepts involved more influentially than Andreas Heusler (1865–1940), especially in
his Die altgermanische Dichtung.¹⁴ Heusler, to whose brilliant work this chapter is a late
tribute, sets out three basic concepts at the beginning of his study: Urgermanisch (Proto-
Germanic); Gemeingermanisch (Common Germanic); and Altgermanisch (Old Germa-
nic).
2.1 Ordering Affinity

‘Proto-Germanic’ refers to cultural features, most reliably linguistic features, which can
be securely traced back to the period of linguistic community before about 200  and
the departure of the East Germanic groups toward the Black Sea. Tacitus is the main
¹³ For the dating of the accent shift see Voyles 1992: 76–79; on initial accent in early Northwest
Europe more generally, Salmons 1992. But my point is a standard one.
¹⁴ The first edition was published in 1923; the edition of record is the corrected and augmented
second edition, published posthumously in 1943 (the copyright is dated 1941, but the authoritative
bibliography in Heusler’s collected writings gives the later date). Important stages in Heusler’s writ-
ings on the way to the version of 1923 were Heusler 1905, 1911–13, and 1920.
258 Joseph Harris
extra-linguistic witness to this cultural community, but his variegated picture shows that
a ‘cultural community’ need not be imagined as uniform, whatever the logic of linguistic
reconstruction. ‘Common Germanic’, strictly interpreted, should designate cultural fea-
tures that were ‘common to’ all three branches, attested in North, East, and West Ger-
manic, without reference to the history of the features (descent, diffusion, and, even in
theory, polygenesis) or to any chronological criteria. (In other words, it does not matter
to the Common Germanic quality of a feature whether it devolved from Proto-Germa-
nic and therefore is material for reconstruction, whether it reflects intra- or extra-Ger-
manic borrowing, or whether the feature originated separately under similar conditions.)
Gothic, and East Germanic generally, have however left so little evidence of their poetics,
that when the topic of discussion is literature, ‘Common Germanic’ has been more
loosely applied, designating features shared by North and West Germanic (often called,
within the restricted focus, North and South). Heusler’s third category and the subject
of his book, ‘Old Germanic Literature’, includes the Common Germanic – he instances,
besides the alliterative metre itself, also genres such as magical charms and heroic poetry
– but also all more or less native literature, even if it survived or developed in only one
Germanic area, such as Iceland or England. This obviously much looser concept relies
for full significance on our prior creation (mainly through linguistic comparison) of the
Proto-Germanic and (mainly through cultural comparison) of the Common Germanic;
with Old Germanic the operative criterion is negative, the absence of controlling influ-
ence from the Church or from Roman antiquity (1943: 6–8).
Such are the underpinnings, in Heusler’s lucid interpretation, of this venerable
approach. There are problems; for example, I have already suggested that it is impossible
to get any real purchase on a period when absence of influence certainly existed, and for
Heusler, who has plenty to say about outside influences (Irish, Roman, ecclesiastical),
this definition is merely a starting point. The problems do not compromise what
remains the most stimulating gateway into ‘Old Germanic’ literature and culture.
Heusler’s great book, in its second edition of 1943, formed the crest of a long, slow
wave of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship that took a comparative
Germanic point of view. Since the Second World War, there have been excellent special
studies¹⁵ but little written for the general reader comparable to Heusler’s Die altgerma-
nische Dichtung – probably for obvious historical reasons. In the post-War period, reac-
tion to the political appropriation of Germanic antiquity and growing internationalism
have been among the forces reducing the prominence of the comparative Germanic
approach. And yet in the thirty-seven volume (one more volume is in preparation) sec-
ond edition of the encyclopedia of Germanic antiquity, the Reallexikon der Germa-
nischen Altertumskunde, the post-War period has produced the apotheosis of detailed,
professional scholarship in the area of older Germanic culture, history, archeology, and
linguistics – a magnificent reference work (Beck et al. 1973–2008).
In English a very good guide book through Germanic poetics is – still – Winfried P.
Lehmann’s 1956 The Development of Germanic Verse Form, a book well written for the
general reader by a prominent historical linguist with an appreciation and knowledge of
¹⁵ One example is Beck 1965. More typically in the post-War period the reference field has become
‘European’ rather than ‘Germanic’; two excellent examples, von See 1978, 1985.
poetry generally. One could carp (to use a favourite word of late English alliterative poet-
ry) that its linguistics is not only mellowed out for this general reader but distinctly out
of date. That may or may not matter; in any case, nothing comprehensive has replaced
Lehmann.¹⁶ A little more recent is Klaus von See’s Germanische Verskunst (1967), a short,
lively discussion stemming from the same kind of scholarly background as Lehmann’s
book and like his concerned to connect metrics and stylistics with history, literature, and
humanistic issues – not, that is, only with linguistic issues. Von See largely rejects Heus-
ler’s most characteristic innovation in Germanic metrics, the isochronous interpretation
of rhythm in terms of musically notated measures (Takte ‘beats’)¹⁷ – a theory, by the way,
based on the assumption of oral performance. But in its overall view, von See’s ‘art of
Germanic verse’ is a direct development from the great German-language tradition and
especially from Heusler. Von See goes beyond Old Germanic, Viking-Age Scandinavian,
and West Germanic verse (his three main chapters) to a brisk chapter on the decline of
the tradition, the rise of end-rhyme, and modern survivals and revivals.
Too few English-language discussions in this area sit comfortably within the tradi-
tion of Lehmann and von See. An interesting recent article that does so is R. D. Fulk’s
‘Rhetoric, Form, and Linguistic Structure in Early Germanic Verse: Toward a Synthesis’
(1996), an essay well worth pausing over. Fulk centrally stresses the dependence of poetics
from language – a venerable theme. It is also Lehmann’s central point – as von See recog-
nizes (1967: 62–65) – and Russom too tries consistently to bolster Lehmann on this topic
(1998: 204). Fulk, however, traces this dependence largely through differences among the
Germanic traditions, a contrastive stylistics that mainly comes down to eddic vs. West
Germanic. Lehmann, though of course he also discusses variety, more insistently asserts
an underlying unity (e. g., 1956: 6); but perhaps this opposition is forced, just a ‘half-full,
half-empty’ distinction. Fulk settles mainly on the difference in syntactic possibilities
between stichic West Germanic (sponsoring long, complex sentences) and stanzaic North
Germanic (which places severe restraints on complexity) and on the corollary of this dif-
ference in diction: emphasis on copia in West Germanic, less so in Old Norse, where the
form favours spare narrative.¹⁸ I am not sure, however, that ‘steady pace’ (Fulk 1996: 73) is
a more apt description of eddic narrative than, for example, the ‘leaping and lingering’ of
the ballad.¹⁹ The Hakenstil of the epic, where enjambment rules and sentences frequently
¹⁶ Crépin 2005 is a formidable handbook of poetics devoted to just one of the Germanic poetic cor-
pora.
¹⁷ Heusler 1925–29 (vol. 1, rpt. 1956); the theory is better known in its American variant by John C.
Pope (1942). Von See’s refutation takes in both forms (1967: 5–9).
¹⁸ Fulk adds a possible ‘more basic linguistic cause, as well. The loss of pretonic syllables in Norse,
driving sentence particles such as articles, pronouns, and negative markers into enclitic position,
discourages complex syntax’ (1996: 75). This is truly interesting and truly linguistic (stanzaic form
could be ‘merely a cultural difference’ (1996: 73) if ‘merely’ really applies here), but the explanation
is too brief for my understanding. Compare Heusler 1920: 532–36 on syntactic enrichment.
¹⁹ Lehmann strangely uses the term ‘ballad’ (1956: e. g., 26) where we would expect ‘lay’ (= Lied in
the German tradition) for the short narrative poem; see Kittredge (Sargent and Kittredge 1904:
xiv), who speaks of the Anglo-Saxons having ‘ballads.’ Today ‘ballad’ is reserved for the late medie-
val (and later) genre treated in ch. 16 by T. Pettitt (on the Late-Medieval ballad) in this volume;
compare also ch. 15 by R. Wright (on Hispanic epic and ballad). On eddic poetry and the ballad,
see Harris (forthcoming).
260 Joseph Harris
begin at mid-line, arguably provides ‘a driving force forward’ (Suzuki 2004: 4, citing
others), keeping an audience, as it were, on the hook as it waits for syntax at last to match
verse structure. One can measure the richness of scholarly writing by the disagreements
raised, and Fulk’s well-grounded essay demonstrates the richness still left in this field.
Many works – ‘rich’ or not – have dealt with the metre, style, formulas, poetic dic-
tion and poetic syntax of specific texts (say, the Heliand or Beowulf ) or groups of texts
(the Poetic Edda),²⁰ and many of those make limited comparative forays within the Ger-
manic literary world.²¹ One difference from the wealth of pre-War writing in this vein is
the cross-fertilization from oral studies and contemporary fieldwork.²² Nineteenth-cen-
tury scholars compiled repetitions and formulas,²³ but they usually treat such literature
without special reference to the oral or mixed milieu in which it flourished until being
recorded. Even the (often exciting) more recent essays on stylistic elements frequently
lose sight of the oral conditioning of the poems; I mention only some examples that
evince a pan-Germanic or a comparative perspective.²⁴ A clear desideratum, then, would
be a new handbook, a version of Lehmann with input from von See, Fulk, and other
recent scholars, but written with oral origins more consistently in mind.
2.2 Renewing Poetics

Besides more extensive attention to the conditions of orality and literacy, such an ima-
gined handbook could incorporate a second ‘new’ element derived from Indo-European
comparative poetics. In a recent, but already famous, book, How to Kill a Dragon:
Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (1995), Calvert Watkins provides the theoretical struc-
ture and a massive exemplification of a ‘new comparative philology’ within the classic
‘comparative method’ (3–11; 1989), the newness inhering in philology’s focus on poetics
and perhaps in greater theoretical self-consciousness. In any case, a ‘new’ Germanic poet-
ics in this spirit, as well as becoming self-aware as a subcomponent of Indo-European
poetics, could constitute itself as a field for the same double action Watkins describes,
from comparison of the descendents upward through the recognition of ‘samenesses’
toward reconstruction (compare Lehmann’s emphasis on unity) and downward again
through divergences toward derivation (difference, as in Fulk). This model, which is, in
a sense, circular, though not ‘vicious’, would deal only with reconstruction to Urgerma-
nisch, not with everything covered by Heusler’s Common Germanic and Old Germanic,
but as Watkins says of the comparative method in general, ‘it is one of the most powerful
theories of human language put forth so far and the theory that has stood the test of
time the longest’ (1995: 4).
The categories of comparison on the Indo-European level – e. g., lexicon, formulas,
themes/type scenes/topoi, syntax, rhetorical moves – yield to similar treatment on the
²⁰ For a stylistics bibliography of the Poetic Edda to c. 1984, see Harris 1985b: 131–32 and passim.
²¹ A modern example: McTurk 1981 (on variation). A classic of Old English criticism dealing inter-
pretively (and occasionally comparatively) with variation is Robinson 1985.
²² ‘Fieldwork’ in ancient literatures begins at least with Parry and Lord, but for a recent example see
Reichl (forthcoming).
²³ For example, Heinzel 1875; Meyer 1889; Paetzel 1913.
²⁴ Wolf 1965; Dronke 1978; Mittner 1955; Wilts 1968; Larrington 1993.
Germanic level; and according to Watkins’ ‘genetic intertextuality’, even texts and text
fragments may lend themselves to reconstruction. Watkins writes about Indo-European
formulas that
One of the characteristics of poetic language in many traditional societies is the extensive use
of , whole phrases which are repeated with little or no variation, rather than recre-
ated. Formulas play an important role in certain styles of improvised oral composition, where
they have been much studied; but their usage is far more widespread, and reaches back into
prehistory […]. Formulas tend to make reference to culturally significant features or phenom-
ena – ‘something that matters’ […]. A proper linguistic theory must be able to account for the
creativity of human language; but it must also account for the possible long-term preservation
of surface formulaic strings in the same or different linguistic traditions over millennia.
(1989: 792–93)
This emphasis on the ‘ethnosemantics’ of the formula, rather than on mere poetic utility,
could be an important hint for a ‘new’ Germanic poetics. Admittedly, comparable intra-
Germanic formula studies would be nothing strictly ‘new’; for example, a model of eth-
nosemantic treatment of a cosmological formula is Lars Lönnroth’s study of the cosmo-
gonic formula ‘ioͺrð fannz æva né upphiminn’ ‘neither earth nor heaven existed’ (1981).
But a wider Indo-European frame of reference might help a small effort of mine: I iden-
tified a Norse and an Old English instance of a cursing formula, ‘like a thistle’, but the
further parallels I cited and the background in Nordic texts seemed barely strong enough
for the word ‘tradition’ I applied. If I could rewrite my ‘Afterword’ on the article (Harris
1975a [2002]), I would like to draw in Watkins’s chapter ‘“Like a reed”: The Indo-Eur-
opean background of a Luvian ritual’ (1995: 335–42); the Luvian ritual is a curse with
Indic parallels.
2.3 The Role of Metrics

Watkins labels the ‘streams’ of Indo-European poetics as ‘formulaics’, ‘metrics’, and ‘stylis-
tics’ (1995: 12). Like Indo-Europeanists, Germanic scholars have mainly followed these
as independent streams. Efforts at an integrated treatment (as in Lehmann or von See)
will have to deal centrally with metrics, but metrics can be forbiddingly technical and
difficult to link in detail with the rest of comparative poetics or with the larger field of
comparative literature. As such, it will be the most difficult ‘stream’ or chapter in our
imaginary update of Lehmann. Undoubtedly, linguistic training is crucial to the study of
metrics, but I must agree with the complaints of one of the most recent contributors to
the avalanche of scholarship on Old English metre (Bredehoft 2005: 4–5): It seems
incongruous that at a time when the (few!) literary or cultural students of Old English
verse are expected to know very little about the metrics of the poems they work through,
‘critical studies of metre (or of the interaction between metre and syntax) have prolifer-
ated, with book length works by Hoover, Donoghue, Russom, Kendall, Cable, Fulk,
Whitman, Hutcheson, Momma, and Blockley appearing since 1985’ (4).²⁵ Besides his
²⁵ Hoover 1985; Donoghue 1987; Russom 1987; Kendall 1991; Cable 1991; Fulk 1992; Whitman
1993; Hutcheson 1995; Momma 1997; Blockley 2001.
262 Joseph Harris
own book, Bredehoft might have eked out his list with Obst, Creed, Suzuki, and Getty;²⁶
and this takes us only to 2005.
Despite the modest playing field implied by ‘Old English metrics’, these studies are
engaged in serious intellectual work and not at all always with the same work. Fulk, in
particular, uses metre to distinguish different chronological layers in a poetic corpus that
at first seems relatively uniform (1992 and especially brilliantly in 2007). Bredehoft
objects (2005: 7) that ‘Fulk’s History [of Old English Meter] is more properly a history
of phonological issues in Old English verse’ (than an actual history of its forms) – an
objection that cannot obscure Fulk’s enormous accomplishment. Bredehoft himself has
some success in describing the verse component of a late Old English poetics developed
from the classic form. Kendall, Donoghue, Momma, and Blockley are all especially inter-
ested in the complex integration of metrics with syntax;²⁷ but although many writers on
Old English verse make some effort to address the oral and aural aspect and to accom-
modate the formulism of Old English verse, it is especially Kendall who actually builds
in a Singer-of-Tales-like prehistory for his literate, probably monastic poet (1991: 2–4).
In any case, this harvest of only two decades constitutes a tremendous block of difficult
material for the hypothetical reviser of Lehmann; moreover, it does not encompass arti-
cles and contributions to reference works and focuses on only one of the poetic corpora
constituting Germanic.
Old Saxon²⁸ and Old Norse, especially skaldic poetry,²⁹ have their own recent scho-
larly literature on metrics – though not a boom comparable to Old English. I mention
only the most prominent or recent examples. But in the comparative context of our
chapter, one group of writings on metrics deserves special reference here for their com-
parative thrust.³⁰ Geoffrey Russom’s 1998 book applies his ‘word-foot theory’ (intro-
duced in Russom 1987) to representative regular verses from the whole Germanic cor-
pus (applied in Old Norse to fornyrðislag, not to the variant eddic metres or to skaldic).
Though the book is technical and not comparable in humanistic appeal to that of Leh-
mann, the theory is not hard to follow on the basis of an acquaintance with Sievers’
system such as a student of early Germanic poetry is likely to have. Russom examines
the branches such as Old Saxon and Old Norse from within his system, however, not
separately (like Lehmann and von See); but then the peculiarities of Continental West
Germanic are separately discussed in chapters on Old Saxon and on the Hildebrandslied.
Russom’s final chapter summarizes, partly in the form of a history under Lehmann’s title,
‘the development of Germanic verse form’; and here Russom reaches back to cognate
alliteration and initial word stress in the western Indo-European poetries and forward
²⁶ Obst 1987; Creed 1990; Suzuki 1996; Getty 2002.

²⁷ All centrally address Kuhn 1933, a study of verse syntax of primary importance for understanding
style in Germanic poems.
²⁸ Hofmann 1991; Suzuki 2004 (with a copious bibliography on all aspects of the Heliand and Old
Saxon Genesis). The preserved OS poetry is ‘book epic’, but Suzuki’s literary introduction (1–7, with
further references) shows the advantages of considering it against its more or less distant oral back-
ground.
²⁹ Gade 1995 (offering a bibliography for skaldic metrics). For Nordic, especially skaldic, poetics more
generally see Clunies Ross 2005 (with full bibliography).
³⁰ A few further titles should be mentioned in this ‘comparative’ context: Fulk (forthcoming); Russom
2002; and Gade 2002, which is comparative within Scandinavian and fills a major gap there.
(in expectation of work to come) to the verse forms not yet covered by this history of
the classic strain. F. H. Whitman (1993) makes a number of criticisms and proposals
within Germanic verse, among them a rehabilitation of Heusler/Pope and musical nota-
tion at the expense of Sievers, and contributer some interesting thoughts about weak
initial syllables (in types B and C and single-stress ‘light’ verses). But the most distinctive
aspect (for the immediate purpose here) is Whitman’s extensive comparison with other
Indo-European metrics, especially western Indo-European (principally Italic, Old Latin,
and Saturnian) accentual and alliterative metrics. Seiichi Suzuki has also written at
length of this topic, with a derivation of Germanic metre from Indo-European.³¹ Possi-
bly a new ‘development of Germanic verse form’ would start, not with the old standard
thoughts on the consequences of the accent shift learned from our language handbooks,
but with further developments from this Indo-Europeanizing trend.
3 ‘Old’ Comparative Literature
Whether or not poetics can be made ‘new’ (as discussed in the last fitt), it is not the only
component of a comparative approach to early Germanic oral literature. We retreat from
the linguistic brink to some account of studies of narrative content, genre and form,
postponing for another day the topics that should follow: comparative function and
literary history.
3.1 Heroic Legend and its Realizations

Who first noticed that certain stories, heroic or mythological, or their dramatis personae
were widespread in the oral Germanic world? That OE Weland was ON Völundr, Ger-
man Wieland (Velent in Þiðreks saga), that Þeodric was Þjóðrekr, Dietrich, and so on?
The Preface to Snorri’s Prose Edda (about 1220 if by Snorri) makes some equations with
an English genealogy (e. g., ‘Woden, whom we call Odin’). But a clearer recognition of
narrative variation in connection with ethnic origin emerges from the Collector of the
Codex Regius of the Elder Edda, the man responsible for assembling the main manu-
script of the Poetic Edda about 1270 (or one of his predecessors). For example, the prose
segment called Frá dauða Sigurðar:
About the Death of Sigurd In this poem [the preceding Brot af Sigurðarkviðu] the death of
Sigurd is related and here it is said that they killed him outside. But some say this, that they
killed him inside, sleeping in his bed. And Germans say that they killed him out in the forest.
And the ‘Old Poem of Gudrun’ says that Sigurd and the sons of Giuki were riding to the Assem-
bly when he was killed. But they all say that they treacherously betrayed him and attacked him
when he was lying down and unarmed. (Larrington 1996: 176)
Modern scholarship can be conveniently dated as beginning with Wilhelm Grimm’s

Deutsche Heldensage (1829) and the various prolegomena to it. Grimm’s emphasis in this
book was less on telling compelling stories (as in the Household Tales of 1812–15) than
³¹ Suzuki 1988. Suzuki and others have produced quite a few articles relevant to the metrical relation-
ship of Germanic to Indo-European; Suzuki 1988 must stand as representative.
264 Joseph Harris
8 – Frá dauða Sigurðar in the Poetic Edda (Codex Regius, p. 66, beginning in line 2)
on collecting and listing ‘witnesses’ (Zeugnisse) to ‘German’ – by which he convention-

ally meant ‘Germanic’³² – heroic legend. The Zeugnisse range from major early sources
(e. g., the old lay of Atli, Atlakviða, is No. 4) to brief seventeenth-century allusions, and
later scholars (Müllenhoff, Jänicke) built separate collections of further Zeugnisse in the
same spirit, which were included in the latest editions of Grimm.³³ An index made the
Zeugnisse of 1829 usable for several purposes, but Grimm also concluded the book with
an essay (‘Ursprung und Fortbildung’) that brought his thoughts on heroic legend
together with brief story reconstructions – the prototype of all later treatments of the
subject, whether popular or scholarly. Wilhelm Grimm’s collection became the basis of a
type of general presentation of Germanic heroic legend and, together with Jacob’s Teu-
tonic Mythology and the brothers’ Household Tales and German Legends, has helped to
shape the modern understanding of the major types of popular narrative tradition.
Hermann Schneider’s Germanische Heldensage (three vols. 1933–34; vol. 1 in 2nd
ed., 1962) and Heiko Uecker’s Germanische Heldensage (about 140 pages; 1972) may
stand as examples of the ‘general presentations’, but I intend no condescension by the
term: these are vital scholarly works.³⁴ One might arrange the rest of the copious litera-
ture on heroic legend as grading off from broad coverage (for instance, Klaus von See’s
Germanische Heldensage: Stoffe, Probleme, Methoden of 1971) toward special studies
³² There is now a definitive treatment of this often exasperating topic: Beck 2004.
³³ The exact additions and subtractions in the later editions are fairly confusing; see Grimm 1829 in
the References to this chapter and Ehrismann’s essay in the 1999 edition for some clarification.
³⁴ Two further standard surveys are Betz 1962 and Zink 1971.
(Caroline Brady, The Legends of Ermanaric, 1943).³⁵ Brady and Kemp Malone (e. g.,
1959) are among the few examples of anglophone scholars who wrote specifically on
Germanic heroic legend (or legends) from a position within this chiefly German-lan-
guage tradition; among recent works, I am aware only of Haymes and Samples 1996, a
book with an overview function like that of Uecker 1972 but covering a more limited
segment of legend. Under the formula ‘gods and heroes’ one could cite popular surveys
and storybooks. Von See’s study of 1971, with its mixture of theory, criticism, and expo-
sition, is the most challenging single title in the field of heroic legend and one of the best
books I know on medieval narrative; its arguments will haunt much of the following
brief discussion of larger topics within the field.
A distinction, obvious once noticed, must be made between the legend itself – that
is, a story – and its realizations. The story of Sigurd’s murder was known to the Collec-
tor in different ‘multiforms’, varieties of content; they must have been conveyed in dif-
ferent verbal or non-verbal representations. The distinction, a commonplace since struc-
turalism’s ‘story vs. discourse’ (compare the slightly longer discussion in ch. 5 above,
p. 144), should be borne in mind when we read the provocative motto: ‘Heldensage ist
Heldendichtung’ (heroic legend is heroic poetry). This exaggeration from the school of
Heusler and Schneider did not really attempt to conflate story, ‘heroic legend’, with its
realizations as specific instances of ‘heroic poetry’. Rather the scholars meant that the
mode of life of this kind of story was in its poetic realizations and especially that heroic
legend was transmitted in poetic form. Clearly, however, a story, as a form of knowledge,
is not identical with the vehicle by which it becomes known. Although knowledge is
probably most widely transmitted in an oral world in question and answer, it is not
impossible that the major, or even the exclusive, form of transmission of this (heroic)
knowledge might be a very limited channel, but that seems very unlikely in this case.
One important paper in the field reestablished the common-sense position against
Heusler’s turn-of-the-century aestheticism: Hans Kuhn’s ‘Heldensage vor und außerhalb
der Dichtung’ (1952; ‘heroic legend prior to and independent of poems’). Kuhn’s argu-
mentation, however, is not theoretical (and certainly not structuralist), rising to general
statement only in its concluding segment; though Kuhn’s reasoning is so deeply
immersed in the primary material (or for that reason!), this article should be high on
the reading list of the present-day scholar in this area.³⁶
In practice most scholarship turns, not on disembodied story, but on the legend
form of specific sources, often poems: does the difference between sources A and B
reflect evolution or simple multiforms of the same story, or is poet C modifying the
legend for identifiable purposes, and so on? Discussions that start with ‘legend’, i. e.,
story, usually default to poetry or confuse story with a prose rendering as Sage or saga;
two recent essays on Germanic heroic legend add to their titles ‘in/and Old English
³⁵ The bibliographies of Uecker 1972 are handy, but see also the fuller bibliography in Schneider
1933–34/1962 (covering 1928–60 by R. Wisniewski), continued to about 1985 in Beck
1988: 329–413 (by Beck and his students). The enormous evidence of these bibliographies makes
any offhand attempt at order (like the gradation suggested here) seem hopeless, and yet Beck’s bib-
liography is carefully arranged and potentially a great aid to study.
³⁶ Kuhn’s essay acknowledges as predecessor Genzmer 1948 and was first published in Genzmer’s fest-
schrift. See further Uecker 1972: 13–15 on this topic.
266 Joseph Harris
literature/heroic poetry’, sanctioning the default mechanism.³⁷ And yet something can be
said about the stories themselves: for example, that they cater to an aristocratic audience,
kings and their comitatus, that they run to tragedy, and so on. In his last chapter, von See
(1971) successfully generalizes about the image of man in the heroic legend and finds the
kernel of the tales in shocking scenes like Alboin’s invitation to Rosimund to drink with
her father, i. e., from the chalice made of his skull.
Discussions of essence (Wesen) often pose as questions of origin; and since its own
origin with the Grimms, the scholarly conversation on the ‘origin’ of heroic legend has
recognized three trends. Von See succinctly introduces them:
What is the ‘Germanic heroic legend’ after all? Is it a stylized historical tradition, concen-
trated on human conflict? Or is it a historicized – and so also psychologized – myth which
has sunk into non-sacred circumstances? Or is it a folktale (Märchen) that has been enriched
and ennobled with tragic motifs?³⁸
Von See’s critical machine makes short work of the strong form of the fairytale theory,
straightforward derivation, chiefly associated with Friedrich Panzer (1971: 23–30; see
Uecker 1972: 7–9). Beowulf, probably Panzer’s best-known case (1910), is still helpfully
approached from narrative folklore (as in the excellent Stitt 1992); but folkloristics is
not conceptually well suited to most of the field, and the differentiation from myth is
itself a problem.
Both older and more productive is the coupling with myth. Uecker offers a quick
typology of the greatly varying mythic approaches (1972: 9–11). Most notable since the
War are Otto Höfler’s vision of deified heroes on a Greek pattern (his slogan converts
the Heusler/Schneider thesis into ‘Heldensage ist Heldenverehrung’ ‘hero worship’)³⁹
and Franz Rolf Schröder’s more flexible descent theory (especially in Schröder 1961).
My article on Beow/Byggvir (1999) takes a Schröder-like approach and translates a use-
ful passage, worth repeating here:
It must be admitted that the Romantics – with their universal point of view, their deep
understanding and spiritual sensitivity for extrasensory, religious, mythical realms – often
saw things more clearly than did the later positivistic researchers and the purely aesthetic view
of heroic legend which developed out of positivism. [Schröder might have in mind here
Heusler’s ‘Geschichtliches und Mythisches in der germanischen Heldensage’ and its patri-
mony.] But the Romantics went too far and wanted to derive all heroic legends from myths,
and this insured an easy victory of the positivistic countercurrent. What they did not recog-
nize (and in those days hardly could have recognized) is that every heroic legend ought to be
investigated individually to see whether it has a mythic-cultic or an historical basis. Thus
within the totality of the Germanic tradition two groups or layers are to be recognized that
are different in structure and essence and at the same time present a sequence in time:
1. the mythic-cultic layer;
2. the historical layer.
³⁷ Frank 1991; Magennis 2010.

³⁸ Von See 1971: 15: ‘Was ist die “germanische Heldensage” also? Ist sie eine auf menschliche Kon-
flikte konzentrierte, stilisierte Geschichtstraditon, oder ist sie ein in profane Verhältnisse gesun-
kener, historisierter und damit auch psychologisierter Mythos, oder ist sie ein mit tragischen Ele-
menten angereichertes, veredeltes Märchen?’
³⁹ Höfler 1952, 1978 (the most developed of three versions of this study).
⁴⁰ Dumézil 1968–86. Von See thoroughly criticizes the ideas of Dumézil and his followers in von See 1988.
And to these can be added a

3. latest layer, which has borrowed from medieval narrative material (fairytales, novellas,
and the like). (1961: 293)
Comparable to Schröder’s point of view here is a contemporary monograph by Jan de

Vries (1954), and one could speak of a resurgence of myth criticism after the period of
positivism. Von See will have none of it, however (von See 1971: 31–60; 1966). At one
point he attempts to contrast myth with heroic legend by comparing a heroic lay to an
Aufreihlied, a poem that lists the accomplishments of a god (32); the default mechanism
is here in full force, diverting from story to vehicle and avoiding the question in what
way the underlying stories resemble each other or not.
Not noticed by von See in this book of 1971 is another mode of myth theory for
heroic legend, that of Dumézil, whose massive Mythe et epopée (beginning in 1968) was
preceded by numerous publications of his own and his followers.⁴⁰ In general they tried
to show how Indo-European myths, mythic schemas, religious functions, and socio-reli-
gious patterns had left their mark in ‘historical’ and heroic materials (some references
and similar trains of thought in Old Norse in Harris 1999). Craig Davis (1996), in a
valuable interpretative book on Beowulf, makes good use of the Dumézilian paradigm
and also offers ideas on the end – rather than as usual, the origin – of heroic legend.
Wilhelm Grimm, though, had already, in a passage of great beauty, intuited that heroic
legend could be concerned with the demise of the heroic world it depicts and perhaps
with its own demise.⁴¹
All scholars admit a major role for historical events in the rise of heroic legend; one
could hardly come to another conclusion in view of historical figures such as Ermanaric,
Theodoric (the Great), Attila, Odoaker, Theodoric (the Frank), Gundaharius (Gunther,
etc.), Gibiche (Gjúki), and probably Brynhildr (if her prototype is the Frankish Bruni-
childis). And almost everyone agrees (mainly with Heusler) that historical events were
personalized, psychologized, and made into family tragedies. But beyond this there are
many shades of ‘historical theory’, for example the extent to which a real historical view
or a political purpose should be read in. Von See (1971: 61–95) and Uecker (1972: 11–
13) give good accounts and references. Probably we should with von See reverse Schrö-
der’s first two layers: the story from a historical context is privatized (doesn’t rumour do
that?) yielding the exorbitant or shocking kernel (Rosimund’s toast); mythic motifs may
enter, especially in the later Scandinavian versions, or, especially on the Continent, med-
ieval folklore-related motifs (von See 1971: 60). I would add sympathy for de Vries’s idea
of selection by homology with an ‘archetype’: ‘From a historical event arises a heroic
legend only then when an archetype has been recognized in its main figure.’⁴²
⁴¹ ‘Wunderbare Werke ungenannter Dichter, erfüllt von reinster Poesie, schlicht und zwanglos, tief-
sinnig und unausmeßbar, bewahren sie das Bild eines jugendlichen, in unverletzter Sitte kraftvoll
blühenden Lebens. Sie verkündigen zugleich den Untergang dieser Herrlichkeit und es scheint
nicht, als ob spätere, wenn auch in anderer Hinsicht geistig begabte Zeiten, in welchen jener ein-
fache Zustand und das Gefühl frischer Jugend verschwunden ist, fähig seyen, Werke dieser Art her-
vorzubringen.’ (Grimm 1829: 335 = ‘Ursprung und Fortbildung’, p. 1.)
⁴² de Vries 1954: 162 (von See 1971: 38): ‘Aus einem geschichtlichen Ereignis entsteht erst dann eine
Heldensage, wenn in seinem Träger ein Archetypus wiedererkannt worden ist.’ De Vries uses ‘arche-
type’ here also in Éliade’s sense, and the passage illustrates with cosmogonic motifs such as the slay-
ing of a dragon.
268 Joseph Harris
Whatever else it is, an archetype is a repeated figure, and ‘patterning’, a recurring

order, has played a significant role in the study of heroic legend, though more in folklor-
istic, structural, and cross-cultural traditions than in the Heuslerian strain we are chiefly
examining. Olrik included heroic legend among the folklore forms that exhibited ‘epic
laws’, structures of narrative more common in oral literature (1965 [1909]); Lord
Raglan’s well-known twenty-two point life pattern of ‘the hero’ included Siegfried, and
this approach from 1936 had forerunners and successors in scholarship, where patterns
were given psychological or ritual significance.⁴³ De Vries adopted neither wholly but
shows considerable influence of the pattern approach to his question ‘What is a hero?’
(1963: 180–93; 1954: esp. 136–79). The consummation of this trend must be the recent
and very substantial The Epic Hero by Dean A. Miller (2000), where various hero sche-
mata come together with Dumézil and every imaginable reflex of structuralism and
many influences from anthropology. Although the biography of ‘the hero’ shows only a
few points of connection with the action of folktale, Propp’s famous analysis has influ-
enced students of Beowulf, offering an updated approach to the Märchen affinities of its
narrative.⁴⁴ In fact, pattern has played such a large role in late nineteenth- and twentieth-
century humanistic scholarship generally that it might be appropriate to ask why it is
relatively less represented in the tradition of Altgermanistik.
3.2 Old Germanic Genres

Heusler had a firm sense of the text-types of his Old Germanic (oral) literatures, and
they fell into ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ classes. The presentation of genres, with supporting
material and discussion of problematic issues of individual texts and types, forms the
core and bulk of Die altgermanische Dichtung. Heusler begins with the lower genres,
supposed archaic and simple forms,
– from ‘ritual poetry’ (a wide variety of functional types somehow associated with
ritual broadly defined, including hymn, prayer, legal verse, verse from wedding and
funeral ritual, the magnificent Old Norse reconciliation oath, the Tryggðamál, and
so on)
– on to ‘magic charms’ (again functional, often ritual, but a clear international type
like the ‘Second Merseburg Charm’, with its echoes in the Atharvaveda and widely
in Europe, and, for example, the Old English ‘Nine Herbs Charm’)
– and on to ‘wisdom verse’ (mostly the verse of ‘sayings’ and gnomes, but here also
riddles),
– to ‘memorial verse’ (thulas, like the ancient lists of Widsith; the rune poems; sapien-
tial poems of the Edda, which typically have lists at their core),
⁴³ Segal 1990 contains one forerunner complete, Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909),
Raglan’s The Hero (1936), in excerpts, and Alan Dundes’ long article ‘The Hero Pattern and Life of
Jesus’ (1977), together with a good history of scholarship; one can look here, for example, for refer-
ences and analysis on the famous pattern-study by Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand
Faces (1949).
⁴⁴ Shippey 1969 and Barnes 1970.
– ending with the presumably most developed subgroup, the ‘minor lyric’ (a hodge-
podge of short forms, including Old Norse improvised stanzas, lausavísur, and the
flyting).
In this way Heusler leads his reader through the major representatives of virtually all the
verse types in the poetic corpora of Old High German, Old English, and Old Norse and
through all the most important early references (Zeugnisse) to this or that type of verse.
There is no pretension (in this part) that we are reading a literary ‘history’, but implicitly
we are encouraged to see the material as arranged in a cultural hierarchy from primitive
word-magic to a degree of literary complexity that brings us to the threshold of the more
aesthetically valuable literature. Heusler’s is ‘an order of words’ not unworthy of North-
rop Frye’s phrase for the goal of the literary student.
Heusler’s design in the book is thus elegant and powerful, leading ‘up’ to the higher
genres, the sphere of the court poet and his aristocratic audience, and within this higher
domain through the functionally transparent encomium finally to the heroic lay, his
‘crowning genre’ (124). The eulogy, widely paralleled on the Indo-European level, is
attested from the Migration Period by Latin and Greek Zeugnisse (e. g., Priscus, Jor-
danes, Venantius Fortunatus), from the Merovingian period by Beowulf ’s references to
Hygelac’s raid on the Rhineland, from the eighth century by Hrothgar’s poet’s improvi-
sation on Beowulf ’s victory and by Widsith’s self-promotion; beginning in the ninth
century, we have, in Scandinavia, the riches of skaldic poetry. Tacitus’s reference to the
praise ‘still’ (adhuc) sung of Arminius (whose great victory over the Romans took place
some ninety years before Tacitus wrote) causes Heusler problems: it must represent a
‘forerunner’ of the full-fledged praise poem (124). Heusler always seeks clear lines, and
this genre should, like the heroic poem, be a creature of the militarization of the Migra-
tion Period, whatever its immediate origin. The fully extant West Germanic representa-
tives, Ludwigslied (c. 881) and Brunanburh (c. 937) also require some special considera-
tion (126–28); but in my opinion, the (oral)-literary ancestry of these poems is correctly
placed within Heusler’s overall plan.⁴⁵ The genre, which he names with the bipolar – or
as recent scholars seem to think, schizoid – Preislied/Zeitgedicht, contains within it both
tendencies: the tendency to list accomplishments of the patron and the tendency to
narrate one or a few victories as ‘news’ or contemporary history. The model of the skal-
dic praise poems supports especially the encomiastic wing while these West Germanic
battle poems support the other.
The twenty-five pages on ‘The Common Germanic form of the heroic lay’ (150–
75) are arguably some of the most influential pages ever written in the historical huma-
nities. Less than half the space is actually spent on historical matters: the earliest Latin
and Greek allusions (Zeugnisse), chronicle summaries of lost heroic poems, the theory of
Gothic origin within the limited period of the Migrations, possible outside stimulus
(Armenian, Thracian, and the Roman mimus, for example), the theory of intra-German-
ic narrative development out of praise poetry; a convincing picture of the life history (if
not of the origin) of the heroic lay emerges with a South Germanic peak in the sixth
⁴⁵ Beck 1974; Harris 1985a: 249–51 (and other references, 274). For recent convincing modifications
see Ebenbauer 1988 and Ghosh 2007.
270 Joseph Harris
century. The bulk of the chapter is Heusler’s widely referenced phenomenology of the
heroic lay, the description of form and structure, internal character, actors, types of fable,
and especially verbal style. The following shorter chapter discusses all the types of lay
attested only in Scandinavia and of course much later than the West Germanic rem-
nants. It is a complex and strongly reasoned growth-chart of narrative: the lay (kviða)
becomes a model for narrative mythological verse; there are younger heroic imitations of
the old form and new forms treating the old Continental material or stories like it in
dramatic or retrospective monologue. It is here that Heusler places most of the poems
called elegies.
In the 1923 first edition, the penultimate chapter, ‘Looking forward toward the
epic’ (Ausblick auf das Epos), is part of a coda of two symmetrical chapters: Old Germa-
nic oral literature did not have epic in the sense of the long narrative poem about kings
and heroes, only the short lay; real epic enters with writing and models like Virgil and
his Christian imitators. Beowulf and even the Heliand are heirs of the heroic lay on one
hand and of Virgil on the other. The original final chapter, ‘Looking back over Germa-
nic style’ (Rückblick. Germanischer Stil), completed the coda, first, with caveats against
such a thing as ‘Germanic style’ but finally with some success at capturing it, mainly
under the concepts form, rhythm, and the dramatic. Heusler the philologist, habitually
attendant upon the particular, seems uncomfortable with this basically art-critical con-
cept; it seems as if his philological integrity undermines what must have been a desire for
artistically strong closure.
Thus Heusler’s treatment of the ‘higher’ genres, from the Preislied/Zeitgedicht
through to ‘book epic’ shows literary entailment, cause and result, literary history in a
largely oral zone, while the approach to the ‘lower’ genres presented static pattern except
in the implicit evolution toward ‘higher’ (barbarian!) cultural forms. Together the pic-
ture presented is so elegant, complete, and convincing that I wonder that contemporary
scholars in the area of oral literature or any branch of early Germanic do not feel
obliged to begin with Heusler. They do not. But it is useful to distinguish between
post-War German scholarship, where Heusler’s views on the oral sources of the Nibelun-
genlied and ‘epic’ of the twelfth-to-thirteenth century seemed an obstacle to the newer
understanding of those texts in their high-medieval context, and our own resolutely early
medieval field.⁴⁶ In Die altgermanische Dichtung the ‘prospect’ (Ausblick) is one that
looks ahead only as far as the ninth-century Heliand and the eighth- or ninth-century
Beowulf. The serious effort to revise Heusler’s model by Walter Haug is partly motivated
by those high-medieval concerns (1975, 1980); Theodore Andersson’s incisive response
to Haug, however, not only gives a truer picture of Heusler on the early period but also
explains for international or English-oriented readers the German reaction against him
(1988).
There remain many points for productive disagreement. One is the place and his-
tory of elegy.⁴⁷ Another is the real existence of the lay as against (a looser sense of ) epic,
effectively the problem of idealization of literary categories, as debated by Haug (1975,
⁴⁶ For a pointed explanation of this resistance, see Andersson 1988; for a much broader treatment of
the whole area covered by Heusler as background to the Nibelunglied, see Andersson 1987.
⁴⁷ My main thoughts on this subject: Harris 1983a, 1988, 1994, 2006, 2007.
1980) and Andersson (1988).⁴⁸ Still another is the possible existence of early oral epic
on the South Slavic model (also a factor in the discussion of Haug and Andersson) as
against memorial tradition.⁴⁹ I have already touched on the matter of ‘story’. One parti-
cular very recent study of the origin and evolution of the heroic lay may be briefly dis-
cussed (Ghosh 2007). The author examines the historical background of his example, the
fall of the Burgundians, with great care, caution, and skepticism (222–39); this carries
over to the literary-historical portion of the article (239–52), although in the end his
differences from Heusler seem to nuance rather than revolutionize (see the goals, 222).
Some of Ghosh’s points: oral heroic poetry will have evolved out of praise poetry, but
forms will not have been frozen from the Migration period until the Carolingian period;
the significance and function of the evolving heroic poetry will have changed when it
was cultivated by distant folk groups (as the Franks took over the Burgundian narrative
material); it will have taken longer (than Heusler seems to allow) for proper heroic
legend to develop from eulogy, leading to a later peak for the lay. One might intervene
that already for Heusler the genre we habitually call ‘eulogy’ (rather than ‘eulogy-cum-
contemporary history’) contained historical impulses; Andersson (1988), in particular,
demonstrates that Heusler did not rule out adventitious historical influences along the
way of legendary development. The logic of Ghosh’s modifications of the traditional
picture is, however, persuasive; he makes room for legend as story (243) and by no
means ignores Heusler’s work.
Die altgermanische Dichtung is nearly ninety years old if we date from the first edi-
tion of 1923, and that dating seems proper when the two editions are compared: a great
many details were changed in the second edition (1943: unnumbered first page of Fore-
word), but the only conceptual innovation is the addition of the chapters on the Icelan-
dic sagas – important material but an excrescence on the elegance of the original form. It
is a unique book in the annals of comparative literature – Hans Naumann’s Foreword
calls it ‘innovative, totally one-of-a-kind, and inimitable’. I know of only one other close-
ly comparable effort, Georg Baesecke’s Vorgeschichte des deutschen Schrifttums (1940),
which, though fiercely learned, is more compromised by its time, less literary, and intel-
lectually not of Heusler’s quality; one can learn from reading Baesecke but not imagine
it as adaptable for contemporary use. Elsewhere we find only the Germanic prehistory of
national literatures. A new version of Heusler’s classic would have much to modify and
amplify in the treatment of orality/literacy and performance and a vast updating respon-
sibility for individual texts and groups of texts. A twenty-first-century comparatist would
expect a more explicitly theoretical approach, especially to genre and the elements of
composition below genre.⁵⁰ Assumptions about cultural evolution and the ethnic-histor-
ical background would become problematic, as they were not in Heusler’s day.⁵¹ Perhaps
the 1920s was the last period when a comparative study of early Germanic poetry based
on genetic relationship and cultural community could have been accomplished on the
⁴⁸ Stanley 1987; Frank 1991: 96 and n. 13.

⁴⁹ Haymes 2000 and bibliography there; see also Mellor 2008 for a new beginning in eddic formula
analysis and a fresh start on the relevance of oral theory. My views and early references on this
subject are found in Harris 1983b, 1985b.
⁵⁰ My ideas in this area are to be found chiefly in Harris 1975b, 1979, 1990.
⁵¹ For some notion of where studies in ‘barbarian identity’ stand today, see Ghosh 2007.
272 Joseph Harris
scale of Die altgermanische Dichtung – even if today we would settle for less self-assur-
ance, clarity of argumentation, and verbal elegance. Even if a new version of Heusler’s
masterpiece is a less realistic idea than the same idea applied to Lehmann, it is perhaps
not bad for a comparatist to retain it in mind as a distant model.
4 A Note on the Icelandic Sagas
Aesthetically speaking, Heusler spoiled the form of his 1923 book by the addition in the
1943 version of three chapters on the Icelandic sagas, inserted between his Ausblick and
his Rückblick chapters. And despite the scholarly value of these pages (about 38 of them)
on the saga, the topic is of debatable relevance. This Heusler may have recognized even as
he made a good case: The sagas are literature (Dichtung) but prose and a uniquely Ice-
landic form of literature; they are arguably imbued with a heroic mentality, but this could
be a new growth in the rulerless frontier settlement. In Heusler’s day, however, it was
common belief that the sagas were a late (thirteenth century) manifestation of Germanic
continuity, a mentality that survived from the heroic age of the Migrations, and to some
degree the literary heir of the heroic lay.⁵² Sagas were certainly not ‘Common Germanic’;
but in the pre-War scholarly environment they fulfilled the criteria for ‘Old Germanic’,
namely freedom from deep influence from the culture of the feudal court or from
Roman antiquity.⁵³ Above all their ‘root cause’ (Wurzelgrund) lay in oral narrative art.⁵⁴
Starting about 1960 new winds blew through scholarship on the saga literature,
European winds that carried with them resistance to any alleged Germanic continuity
and more affinity with the high-medieval period of actual saga writing. This cultural
trend has only strengthened over the decades, but the question of orality and literacy in
saga origin and continuity is still lively and of interest to readers of a handbook of med-
ieval oral literature. Heusler (citing Liestøl 1930 as the chief authority) lays out the pri-
mary evidence for an oral narrative art, but he is well aware of the ‘Icelandic School’,
writing in the 1930s about the sagas as the novel-like written composition of ‘authors’.
Heusler is usually identified with the codification of the positions into ‘free prose’ school
and ‘book prose’ school, but near the end of his life he wanted to avoid these terms:
‘They have something rigid about them and easily mislead into exaggeration, into dis-
torted pictures of the opponent’s point of view […]. Is it so hard to think in terms of
gradations, of shades of meaning?’⁵⁵ It was also in the 1960s that a new element was
⁵² Andersson 1967: 65–93 (ch. 3: The Heroic Legacy) gives a thorough history of research on this
topic as well as his own new ideas. In the compressed context of the present article I speak simply
of ‘the saga’ or ‘sagas’, but Heusler made careful distinctions among different classes within what we
now refer to as ‘the saga literature’, sorting out the more or less native classes to which his criticism
applied.
⁵³ The criteria of 1943 (202: ‘das Vorrömische und Vorritterliche’) deviate significantly from those of
1923 (1943: 8: ‘das von Kirche und antiker Bildung nicht greifbar bestimmte Germanentum’).
⁵⁴ Heusler 1943: 203: ‘Wir sprachen eben von dem Wurzelgrund der isländischen Sagakunst […]. Wir
bekennen uns zu den Sätzen: Das Urphänomen der “Saga” ist eine mündliche Prosaepik.’
⁵⁵ 1943: 216: ‘Die Schlagworte “Freiprosa” und “Buchprosa” haben wir bis eben gemieden. Sie haben
etwas Starres und verführen leicht zum Übertreiben, zu Zerrbildern der gegnerischen Ansicht […].
Macht es soviel Mühe, sich in das Gradmäßige, das Abgeschattete hineinzudenken?’
introduced into the old free-prose/book-prose debate through Albert B. Lord’s The Sing-
er of Tales (1960). Although this strictly poetic theory did not directly apply to the prose
sagas, the revitalized interest in the oral world in general did spread to saga scholarship.
A great deal of interesting writing has ensued, the fortunes of the oral and written rising
and falling in the kind of gradations Heusler desired. Luckily I do not have to trace these
shadings or cite more than one recent work. Gísli Sigurðsson’s book on the saga and oral
tradition (2004) puts forth new ideas as well as summarizing the history of the subject
(see the full bibliography). It can serve us as a contemporary handbook on this part of
our subject, but a reading of Heusler on the sagas is still a rewarding pleasure.
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Medieval

P I: C  A

3 The Written Word in Context: The Early Middle Ages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

4 Orality and Literacy: The Case of Anglo-Saxon England . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

5 Performance and Performers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

6 Oral Poetics: The Linguistics and Stylistics of Orality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

7 Oral Literature, Ritual, and the Dialectics of Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

P II: T  G

9 Oral Tradition and Performance in Medieval Ireland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279

10 Medieval German Literature: Literacy, Orality and Semi-Orality . . . . . . . . . 295

11 Middle English Romances and the Oral Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

12 The Chanson de geste and Orality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353

13 The Italian Cantari between Orality and Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

15 Hispanic Epic and Ballad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411

16 The Late-Medieval Ballad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429

17 Medieval Greek Epic Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459

19 Oral Traditions in a Literate Society:

20 Woman’s Song in Medieval Western Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521

21 Popular Song and the Middle English Lyric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 555

22 The Pastourelle as a Popular Genre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 581

23 Andalusī-Arabic Strophic Poetry as an Example of Literary Hybridization:

24 Orality and the Tradition of Arabic Epic Storytelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 629

25 Orality in Medieval Persian Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 653

26 Medieval Turkish Epic and Popular Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 681

27 Dramatic Pastime, Custom and Entertainment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 701

Notes on the Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 725

1 Oral Literature and Writing

⁴ Ranković et al. 2010; Schaefer 1992; compare Amodio 2004.

⁸ Beck 2006; Harris 2010.

2 ‘New’ Comparative Poetics

Nineteenth-century scholars clearly recognized affinity as the key concept in comparing

2.1 Ordering Affinity

2.2 Renewing Poetics

2.3 The Role of Metrics

²⁶ Obst 1987; Creed 1990; Suzuki 1996; Getty 2002.

3 ‘Old’ Comparative Literature

3.1 Heroic Legend and its Realizations

Modern scholarship can be conveniently dated as beginning with Wilhelm Grimm’s

on collecting and listing ‘witnesses’ (Zeugnisse) to ‘German’ – by which he convention-

³⁷ Frank 1991; Magennis 2010.

And to these can be added a

Comparable to Schröder’s point of view here is a contemporary monograph by Jan de

Whatever else it is, an archetype is a repeated figure, and ‘patterning’, a recurring

3.2 Old Germanic Genres

⁴⁸ Stanley 1987; Frank 1991: 96 and n. 13.

4 A Note on the Icelandic Sagas

Haymes, Edward R. 2000. ‘Heldenlied und Eddalied.’ In Erzählen im mittelalterlichen Skandina-

Schneider, Hermann. 1933–34. Germanische Heldensage. 2 vols. in 3. Berlin: de Gruyter. [Vol. 1:

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