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From the Introduction to "The Elder Edda and Early Forms of the Epic" by Elezar Meletinsky, Translated by Kenneth H. Ober. Studies in Western Literature and Civilization Volume VI. Edizioni Parnaso - Trieste - 1998.

Until the 1870's the study of the Elder Edda and other monuments of Old Germanic poetry was dominated by Romantic notions concerning the extreme antiquity and lack of sophistication of all these monuments: they were looked on as directly embodying the "folk spirit". The individual lays of the Elder Edda, as well as the Hildebrandsleid, Beowulf, and others were regarded as weakly differentiated; they all seemed to be basically the fruit of a common Germanic culture, a common folk culture. The heroic themes were for the most part treated symbolically and interpreted (especially the legend of Sigfrid-Sigurdur) in the spirit of celestial (solar, meteorological) mythology, while the real mythological lays were compared with the Rigveda and the Avesta, and were represented as a fragment of common Indo-European mythology. The brevity of the lays was considered as additional proof of their antiquity, and an extended epos of the Nibelungenlied type was thought to be the result of the mechanical combining or editorial compilation of a number of short songs.

The Romantic trend, the initiators of which were Friedrich von Schlegel, Jacob Grimm, Ludwig Uhland, and other famous figures of the German Romantic movement laid the foundation for a scholarly investigation of the Germanic epos, in spite of its limited historic view, "mythologism," and its mysticized conception of folk character. The outstanding works of Karl Müllenhoff (which still have not lost their significance), and more particularly the brilliant monograph of Richard M. Meyer concerning the form of the Germanic epos (1889) are also associated with this school. Meyer succeeded in singling out and describing in great detail numerous common stable features of the Germanic epos, relying largely on the texts of the Elder Edda.

In Germany and the Scandinavian countries during the last decades of the nineteenth century, positivist reaction against Romantic syncretism - the lack of differentiation between the Scandinavian and the Common Germanic, between the ancient and the late, between the literary and the folkloric, between the original and the borrowed, and between the mythological and the
heroic - grew. This reaction was supported by the significant successes in linguistics, archeology, ethnography, and the like.

...The significance of folklore was acknowledged less and less, and the ancient lays were studied with the methods of modern textual criticism, with the detection of a series of authorial redactions. Similar motifs and stylistic turns of speech in different lays began to be regarded, in
contrast to the views of Richard M. Meyer, as the result of conscious borrowings by one author from another. The highest achievements of the "positivist" study of the Elder Edda and the Germanic epos are represented by the scholarly work of Andreas Heusler, the greatest authority on Scandinavian and Germanic studies of the first half of the twentieth century. Heusler completely rejected the ideas of the folk spirit and the folkloric character of the Germanic epos. The formation of the epopee, the great epic form, he pictured only as a particular literary creation, with its orientation toward literary models. He recognized a connection with folklore only for the "lower" (according to his definition) genres, such as ritual lyric poetry and proverbs. The heroic epos in his opinion, had always been in verse and was genetically related to the court poetry of the ancient Germanic bards.

...In contemporary Scandinavian studies there predominates the interpretation of the Eddic lays as purely literary works which took form in Iceland from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries partly on the models of songs brought over from the continent. Scandinavian innovations are
regarded - following Heusler - exclusively as the result of a great stylistic refinement, a psychological deepening, and generally as a manifestation of the modernization of the classic heroic songs. The mythological lays to a considerable degree are regarded as the fruit of a
relatively late "scholarly" creativity or of an archaizing, antiquarian stylization.

In every possible way, the traces of the influence of skaldic poetry, the fantastic sagas, and even the medieval ballads are stressed. In particular, all distinct elements of folkloric style are explained by the influence of the ballads. Thus, for example, Þrymskviða, formerly considered one of the oldest (with which judgment, it would seem, both its archaic mythological theme and the folkloric nature of its style accord), began to be regarded as one of the latest, and Peter Hallberg has even expressed the supposition that it was composed by Snorri Sturlusson.

These tendencies, evident in many of the most recent investigations, were distinctly reflected in the extensive compendium on the history of Scandinavian literature by the great Dutch Germanist, Jan de Vries.

… It is characteristic that the Elder Edda has not until now been affected by the scholarly movement for the acknowledgment of the folklorism of the epic literature in the works of Menéndez Pidal, Rychner, Parry, Lord, Maugon, and others, which throw new light on Homer, the epos of the Latin peoples, and even Beowulf, by a comparision of the style of these monuments with that of epic songs existing in oral form, for example, among the Serbian guslars.

…'Anti-folklorism' and positivistic modernism in general in contemporary works on the Edda, which comprise the extreme manifestation of a constantly deepening reaction against the naive Romantism of the first investigators of this monument, find support in a number of peculiarities of the Eddic lays. These are chiefly the unusual stylistic variety of the separate lays; the rather well-developed strophic formation, not typical for folklore; the weak and questionable traces of musical accompaniment; the rather restrained use of repetitions and parallelisms, and the strong development of synonymy, which as it were, runs contrary to the folkloric principles of "commonplaces".

… These and other peculiarities of Eddic poetry in many respects explain the extremes in contemporary investigations without however justifying them. In some very important points, Edda scholarship in the course of a hundred years has, so to speak, arrived at completely opposite results, compared to that with which it began. Rather than very old poetry preceding
the poetry of the skalds, the sagas, and the ballads, the Eddic lays have "proved" to be almost their offspring. These lays were to a great extent torn away from their folk sources, from the early forms of the epos, and from the ancient myths. The mythological lays of the Elder Edda began to appear to be to a certain degree, the result of exercises of consciously
archiazing, stylizing and restoring; and the heroic lays began to seem the fruit of decadence, of the genre degeneration of the classic epos of the continental Germanic peoples.

… Contemporary scholarship, it seems to us, is faced with the task of reexamining some widespread conceptions of Eddic poetry with a view to recognizing its folkloric sources and genre-poetic archaic character and taking into account the most complex interlacing of oral and written. Common Germanic and Scandinavian, Eddic and skaldic traditions. In other words, it is a question of a kind of synthesis of the naive, but often basically quite reliable, views of nineteenth-century scholarship with the concrete achievements of the scholarship of the last hundred years, and with the contemporary methodology of philological and folkloric study.

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