DISCOVERY 



lOSf 



shouts across to the ferryman wlien the river comes 

 down in spate, and Loki's face that leers from the green 

 gnarled bark of the trees in the woods ; Weyland's 

 smithy stands by the brawling ford, and Woden, the 

 maker of secret spells, is the hooded figure abroad in 

 the darkening fields. These are the gods of the Elder 

 Edda, not yet ascended into Valhalla, not yet detached 

 from the stone and the tree-trunk that was their 

 earliest shrine. 



This is why Miss Philpott's study of the Elder Edda 

 is for all men, and not for scholars only. " My aim," 

 she writes, " is simply to place before scholars a theory 

 of the dramatic origin of the Elder Eddie poems." 

 But in unravelling the ritual of which drama was born, 

 the old world has staged itself, and the flame again 

 wakens about the barrows of the dead. Even the 

 beast disguises that so revolted St. Egbert and St. 

 Theodore, for which one did three years' penance, are 

 seen no longer bestial, but guises of the friendly 

 creatures who wept for Balder, and once shared our 

 life as they do to this day, until one grows tall enough 

 to stoop to pat a dog. The only drawback is that so 

 tine a gift of translation has been used so sparingly. 

 .Miss Philpotts had intended, she writes, to give a 

 translation of the more important poems in an appendix, 

 and did not, lest she should forestall another and a 

 better hand. But there is no marc clausum in transla- 

 tion. Some of us, knowing the druid world that masks 

 itself behind the formal scholar's title of the Corpus 

 Poeticum Borealc, w^ould have held that felicity of 

 translation could no farther go. " Now I swear that 

 there shall never be a greater marvel than this, early 

 or late at Sevafell. ... It is time for me to ride the 

 reddening roads, to let my fallow steed tread the paths 

 of air. I must be west of Windhelm's bridge before 

 Salgofni awakens the mighty host." Yet hear this — 

 " Now I swear that men at Sevafell shall marvel at 

 naught hereafter, neither soon nor late. . . . But it 

 is time for me to ride the reddening w^ays, to urge my 

 pale steed on the paths of the air. I must be west of 

 the bridge of Windhelm before the cock on ValhoU 

 awakes the warrior host." 



As to the development of the actual thesis, it marches 

 like the sea. One's pleasure in reading it — it had better 

 be read at a sitting — is the satisfaction of a demonstra- 

 tion in mathematics. Every chapter is " the stroke 

 of a strong swimmer." One is the more malcontent 

 that the last two chapters have somewhat suffered from 

 the toll that the last five years have taken from scholar- 

 ship. The analogy between Greek drama and this 

 other, arrested at the moment when tragedy was about 

 to break the ritual mould, might have made another 

 book. For the last, on the bearing of the theory on the 

 ballad, the epic, the folk and the Church play, it is a 

 chapter of valuable suggestion ; but when it ceases to 



be suggestive and becomes dogmatic, consent is less 

 secure. " The religious origin of the heathen drama 

 will hardly be questioned. But the heathen origin of 

 the ecclesiastical drama practically follows from that 

 premise." Now, it is to be remembered that ecclesi- 

 astical drama rose first, not in places where the heathen 

 tradition was strongest, but in the great Benedictine 

 strongholds such as Fleury and St. Martial of Limoges 

 and St. Gall, side by side with the enriching of liturgical 

 music, the art of stained glass and of engraving in gold, 

 all of them tributaries of the great liturgical develop- 

 ment that centred in Cluny, the magnifying of the 

 opus Dei which was the ideal task of the Benedictine 

 Order. " Religious drama in England was known in 

 the Anglo-Saxon period," but it was founded on the 

 customs of Fleury and Ghent, and it is the vexation o£ 

 scholarship that it seems to have taken so little root 

 till after the Conquest. Moreover, the liturgical play 

 was not " discouraged by the ecclesiastical autho- 

 rities," except by some of the austerer sort, the eternal 

 Puritan voicing himself in Gerhoh, or our own Grosse- 

 tete of Lincoln ; and the famous decretal of Innocent 

 III against ludi theatralcs was almost certainly directed 

 not against the " representationes " of the mystery of 

 the faith, but the abuses of the Feast of Fools. Never- 

 theless, the very over-emphasis with which the theory 

 is stated may help the balance to right itself. It has 

 been the tendency of recent scholarship to stress too 

 much the provenance of the dramatic seed, and ignore 

 the " shaping spirit of imagination " inherent in the 

 soil where that seed was flung. The Elder Edda has 

 proved the richness of it, not only in promise but in 

 achievement. When the author of the Lay of Helgi 

 Hundingsbane saw Sigrun face to face with her lover, 

 and between them the bodies of the father and brother 

 that he slew 



Helgi said : " Take comfort, Sigrun ! A Hild hast thou been 

 to me. 

 Kings cannot withstand Fate." 

 Sigrun said : " Fain would I that some should live who now aro 

 dead, 

 And yet would I clasp thee in my arms " — 



he saw tragedy, the thing itself, as the Greeks saw it. 

 It is small wonder that Miss Philpotts speaks a little 

 wistfully of " that tragic drama which suffered no 

 untimely death, but was allowed to develop to its full 

 stature." The tragedy of the ElderEdda is broken, 

 but it is the broken figure of a god. 



Helen Waddell. 



The " Oresteia " oj .Eschyliis. Agamemnon, Chcephori, 

 Eumenides. The Greek Text with an English 

 Verse Translation by R. C. Trevelyan. (Bowes 

 & Bowes, 5s.) 



