Sorg och elegi i Eddans hjältediktning Av Daniel Sävborg. Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 36. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1997. Pp. 485. SKK 329.60.


Daniel S'vborg has written an important and self-confident (if somewhat pugnacious) book, which will have great impact on the future study, not only of the elegies, but also of the entire corpus of Eddic poetry. Since its first appearance in 1923, Andreas Heusler's Die Altgermanische Dichtung has dominated the field of the Poetic Edda. Here Heusler identified a group of "older " heroic poems that he considered to be fundamentally different from a "younger " cluster of elegies voiced mainly by women. Writing with authority, Heusler employed a comparative method whenever possible but reached his conclusion mainly through intuition. Later scholarship has nonetheless unquestioningly accepted his chronological division between "older " heroic poems (from the Viking Age) and "younger " emotional elegies (from the High Middle Ages). Focusing on the latter, Wolfgang Mohr (in the 1930s) and Ulrike Sprenger (beginning in the 1980s) have suggested geographic origins and inspirational sources different from Heusler's, but they have not questioned his chronology. Only in recent years has Joseph Harris begun to identify an "old " Germanic tradition behind the assumed "young " elegies.

Jenny Jochens
Baltimore, MD