I have two items I'd like to document in this thread, items I stumbled over in the course of my haphazard reading.
The first is from a little dictionary I took with me on my recent Viking sighting expedition: "Vikingatidens ABC", which might be rendered in English to somthing like "ABC of the Viking Age". (The observant will note the "tidens" in the title which is (tid) the same root that appears in the -tide of Yuletide and Eastertide--I digress.)
With reference to my musings and Tim's (post 18)
Quote:
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I regard it as 8th C. and written in Scandinavia. It is monotheistic, no Christ, no conception of the trinity, no mention of the Germanic pantheon, only the All-father. So I date the poem by its theology. I believe the poet had some familiarity with the Old Testament, not the New. So it certainly couldn't have been written in England after St. Augustine converted the country.
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this entry is interesting:
Allfader, ett av Odens epitet. Förekommer i isländsk skaldediktning och bl a i eddadikten "Grimnismål". I "Snorres Edda" är A. den främste och äldste av gudarna.
This entry is authored by CO Carin Orrling, antiquary at the Swedish History Museum.
Quick translation:
All-father, one of the epithets applied to Odin. It occurs in court poetry and (among other places) in the Eddaic poem "Grimnismål". In "Snorres Edda" Allfather is the foremost and eldest of the gods.
Note: The translation of "skadediktning" to "court poetry" follows "A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture", edited by Rory McTurk.
The second item I'd like to document is from "Women in Medieval English Society" by Mavis E. Mate.
Quote:
(...) During the second half of the twelfth century literate women turned from Latin to French and command of the Latin language and grammar disappeared, even from the nunneries (Orme, 1984: 158-60). The court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, as she moved from Poitiers to England and back, played a dominant role in the promotion and diffusion of the ideals of troubador lyric poetry and became the catalysing factor in the integration of Celtic myths into continental literature (Lazar 1976). By the end of the fourteenth century, however, French was ceasing to be the spoken and literary language of gentility and writers such as Chaucer and Langland had shown the power and flexibility of the native tongue. (...)
This seems pertinent because one can extrapolate that in a similar way, in an earlier age, the oral Beowulf was transported from court to court by entertaining bards and when it finally came to be written down the religion of the original stories had been changed--in keeping with the times.
Again I want to stress that I am not declaring a scholarly breakthrough
, but simply re-stating my suspicions that Beowulf, though transcribed in English, is an old oral poem that retains relicts of its Scandinavian and pagan origins: Allfather Odin morphed to the Christian Allfather, Loki morphed to Cain, and that damnably joyful raven is a typo.
I haven't yet delved "The Lost Gods" so I may be back.
