SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Saga-Book of the Viking Society
ascribing Germanic epic poetry to those prehistoric times.
It was an irrefutable dogma that the poetry handed down
to us is the reflex of the extraordinary experiences of the
migrations. To be sure, the overwhelming part of the
heroic figures reflect historical persons of this time:
Ermanaric of the Goths, Gunther of the Burgundians,
Walter of Aquitania, Attila andlast but not least Theodoric
the Great. But is it not thinkable that these eventful
centuries readjusted the epic tradition rather than
engendered it? Is it not evident that earlier generations
too honoured their heroes? Is it not almost certain that
the period of the great Germanic expansion in the early
Iron Age saw equally startling events which could
crystallize into a heroic poetry? Or that the conflicts
with the Roman Empire were equally fruitful for the
coming into existence of heroic figures and themes?
Of course we are only speaking of possibilities. Nothing
has survived from these prehistoric times. Siegfried at
any rate does not belong to the poetry of the migrations;
he is anterior to it. And Tacitus informs us that the
Germanic peoples of his time knew carmina aniiqua, their
only kind of annals and tradition.s" We may infer from
this sentence that heroic as well as mythical poetry reaches
back into hoary antiquity.
I am now less diffident about the existence of heroic
poetry in the La Tene Period, when Celts and Teutons
were in close contact on the borders of the Lower Rhine.
Very recently the Swedish scholar Stig Wikander has
discovered remarkable parallels between the Scandinavian
tale of the battle of Bravellir and the Indian epic of
M ahdbhdraia. 29 These parallels are, moreover, of such
a kind, that we must exclude all idea of accident, even of
an independent parallel development. It may be
interesting to mention some of these common motifs. In
the famous battle of Bravellir a Frisian champion Ubbo
28 Cf. Germania, ch. 2.
29 Cf. his paper 'Fran Bravella till Kurukshetra', Arkiv for nordisk filologi
LXXV (1960), I-II.