Manchester Memoirs, Vol. xliv. (1899), No. %. 3 



Anglo-Saxon influence on the Edda, and to slur over 

 Irish, without however abandoning th^' latter. Thus in his 

 latest utterance, the Introduction to the Home of the Eddie 

 Poems, his theory is stated as follows : that the Norse 

 myths were " shaped by Scandinavian mythological poets 

 who associated with Christians in the British Isles, es- 

 pecially with English and Irish ' ; further, that " The great 

 majority of both mythological and heroic poems were 

 composed by Norwegians in the British Isles, the greater 

 number probably in Northern England, but some, it may 

 be, in Ireland, in Scotland and in the Scottish Isles. Very 

 few Eddie lays seem to have arisen outside of the British 

 Isles."! 



Dr. Vigfusson's theory (with which presumably Prof. 

 York Powell agrees, as it is stated also in the introduction 

 to the Corpus Poetieum Borea/e, their joint edition of the 

 Northern poetry) is much the same : " That these poems 

 (with one or two exceptions) owe their origin to Norse 

 poets in the ' Western Islands ' — that the Lays are, in fact, 

 to these Islands, what the Saga was to Iceland.""^ 



I. Gaelic Loan- Words in the Eddie Poems. 



The most weighty argument for this theory would 

 naturally be the production of loan-words ; a few are 

 advanced, most of which have been left unchallenged. 

 Professor Bugge gives the following : 



I. Krds^^ a dainty, "wahrscheinlich aus ir. crois, craes,"* i.e., 

 excess, gluttony; but he saw himself the impossibility of this 

 derivation, and withdrew it in an appendix.^ 



^ Home of the Eddie Poems, pp. xiv. , xviii. 



- Sturltinga Saga{0\ioT(l, 1878), Prolegomena, p. clxxxvi. 



^ ]i!ymskvi]>a, 24. (Wimmer and Jonsson, Facs. of Cod. Reg., p. 34, 

 1. 22, krasir allar). Rigsmdl 1. 69 (omitted in Bugge's edition). Helgi 

 Hundingsbani, I. 36. 



* Nordisehe Gdtter- und Heldemageii, pp. 6, 7. 



* ib. p. 574. 



