SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

86 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
beginning of the poem with one flash of his knife. 21
Boer 2 2 distinguishes between two principal authors ­
2I stanzas are by the earlier and 20 by the later. All the
rest, he thinks, is opus diaboli (i.e. still later accretions).
In my own edition I unhesitatingly follow the rule not
to depart from the best available manuscript reading until
every expedient has been tried, whether in individual
words or whole stanzas. I have not done this because
of any undue faith in the manuscripts. I do not doubt,
for instance, that the Catalbgue of Dwarves is an
interpolation, for all older explanations which attempted
to connect it to the previous stanzas are unacceptable. 23
But the reasons are rarely so obvious. On the other hand
it is amazingly daring to reject stanzas solely because a
Mr X thinks that the author of V oluspd would never have
expressed himself in this way, that he would never have
bothered with such a digression, and so on. Heusler
pointed out the consequences of too blind a faith in the
manuscripts. One would then have had to follow the text
of Hauksb6k throughout, if Codex Regius had been 10st. 24
Very well! Let us carry this thought a step further:
would any editor of today trust himself to emend the poem
into a similar form to the R text if he had to follow the
H text alone? That is the principal point. The answer
to this question must be No. We do not stop because the
manuscripts are reliable, but because the methods of
editing do not allow us to go any further without going
astray. Comparison between studies of the poem urges
us to be careful. Some of the things that Miillenhoff and
Finnur Jonsson call additions are considered by Boer to
be among the oldest parts of the poem.r" Wilken
21 'Zur Ordnung der Voluspa', Zeitschrift fUr deutsche Philologie xxx (1898),
448-86, and 'Zur Erklarung der Voluspa', ibid. XXXIII (1901),289-330.
22 'Kritik der Voluspa', ZfdP XXXVI (1904), 289-370. Cf. also Boer, Die
Edda (1922), II 1-32.
2. E.g. Hallgrimur Scheving, 'Kritisk Undersogelse om et Par Stropher i den
saakaldte Voluspa', Skandinaviske Litteratur Selskabs Skrifter (1810), 175-220;
and F. Hammerich, Nordens ieldste digt (1876).
2< Boer, Kritik, 289.
25 Cf. my commentary to st. 37, 55 and 65.