Epic and Romance. W. P. Ker
Scale of the Poems
| List of extant poems and fragments in one or other of the older Teutonic languages (German, English, and Northern) in unrhymed alliterative verse | 76 |
| Small amount of the extant poetry | 78 |
| Supplemented in various ways | 79 |
| 1. The Western Group (German and English) | 79 |
| Amount of story contained in the several poems, and scale of treatment | 79 |
| Hildebrand, a short story | 80 |
| Finnesburh, (1) the Lambeth fragment (Hickes); and (2) the abstract of the story in Beowulf | 81 |
| Finnesburh, a story of (1) wrong and (2) vengeance, like the story of the death of Attila, or of the betrayal of Roland | 82 |
| Uncertainty as to the compass of the Finnesburh poem (Lambeth) in its original complete form | 84 |
| Waldere, two fragments: the story of Walter of Aquitaine preserved in the Latin Waltharius | 84 |
| Plot of Waltharius | 84 |
| Place of the Waldere fragments in the story, and probable compass of the whole poem | 86 |
| Scale of Maldon and of Beowulf | 88 89 |
| General resemblance in the themes of these poems—unity of action | 89 |
| Development of style, and not neglect of unity nor multiplication of contents, accounts for the difference of length between earlier and later poems | 91 |
| Progress of Epic in England—unlike the history of Icelandic poetry | 92 |
| 2. The Northern Group | 93 |
| The contents of the so-called "Elder Edda" (i.e. Codex Regius 2365, 4to Havn.) to what extent Epic | 93 93 |
| Notes on the contents of the poems, to show their scale; the Lay of Weland | 94 |
| Different plan in the Lays of Thor, Þrymskviða and Hymiskviða | 95 |
| The Helgi Poems—complications of the text | 95 |
| Three separate stories—Helgi Hundingsbane and Sigrun | 95 |
| Helgi Hiorvardsson and Swava | 98 |
| Helgi and Kara (lost) | 99 |
| The story of the Volsungs—the long Lay of Brynhild contains the whole story in abstract giving the chief place to the character of Brynhild | 100 100 101 |
| The Hell-ride of Brynhild | 102 |
| The fragmentary Lay of Brynhild (Brot af Sigurðarkviðu) | 103 |
| Poems on the death of Attila—the Lay of Attila (Atlakviða), and the Greenland Poem of Attila (Atlamál) | 105 |
| Proportions of the story | 105 |
| A third version of the story in the Lament of Oddrun (Oddrúnargrátr) | 107 |
| The Death of Ermanaric (Hamðismál) | 109 |
| The Northern idylls of the heroines (Oddrun, Gudrun)—the Old Lay of Gudrun, or Gudrun's story to Theodoric | 109 |
| The Lay of Gudrun (Guðrúnarkviða)—Gudrun's sorrow for Sigurd | 111 |
| The refrain | 111 |
| Gudrun's Chain of Woe (Tregrof Guðrúnar) | 111 |
| The Ordeal of Gudrun, an episodic lay | 111 |
| Poems in dialogue, without narrative— (1) Dialogues in the common epic measure—Balder's Doom, Dialogues of Sigurd, Angantyr—explanations in prose, between the dialogues (2) Dialogues in the gnomic or elegiac measure: (a) vituperative debates—Lokasenna, Harbarzlióð (in irregular verse), Atli and Rimgerd (b) Dialogues implying action—The Wooing of Frey (Skírnismál) | 112 112 114 |
| Svipdag and Menglad (Grógaldr, Fiölsvinnsmál) | 114 |
| The Volsung dialogues | 115 |
| The Western and Northern poems compared, with respect to their scale | 116 |
| The old English poems (Beowulf, Waldere), in scale, midway between the Northern poems and Homer | 117 |
| Many of the Teutonic epic remains may look like the "short lays" of the agglutinative epic theory; but this is illusion | 117 |
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Two kinds of story in Teutonic Epic—(1) episodic, i.e. representing a single action (Hildebrand, |