alleged significance of supernumerary characters in the chant-metre poems is in itself a legitimate point, but is perhaps too definitely pressed. Narrative stories no less than dramatic quite normally contain supernumerary characters. Nor am I quite persuaded that incremental repetitions are necessarily indications of improvisation. They are frequently to be met with in popular poetry other than the Eddic.[1] Often they may be due simply to that love of cliché which is characteristic of the popular muse and even of our duller minded friends in ordinary life; sometimes they have a definite artistic value in the emphasis given by repetition. Miss Phillpotts' main arguments, however, appear unassailable, and they are marshalled with a clarity of arrangement and style which accompanies logical and precise thinking.
The second part of the book attempts to trace to a fertility ritual of the type made familiar by The Golden Bough, the origin of the Scandinavian popular drama of which the older Eddic poems are the legacy. These poems are found to deal with the slaying of gods or the slaying of opponents by gods, with wooings and marriages of more than mortal brides, and with flytings across a strip of sea. Stories of a king who marries a divine bride, and of a royal fratricide who marries his brother's wife and is himself slain, are themes repeated in these dramatic poems, in the legendary history of the Swedish kings, and in the family relations of Odin.
The names Helgi, "Holy One," and Hethin, "One clad in beast skins," have themselves a ritual appearance. It all works beautifully out, and it must be confessed that Miss
- ↑ I take a genuinely random example, the first ballad at which my Oxford Book of English Verse opens. No. 370:
"O are ye come to drink the wine
As ye hae doon before, O?
Or are ye come to wield the brand
On the dowie banks o' Yarrow?
"I am no come to drink the wine
As I hae don before, O,
But I am come to wield the brand
On the dowie houms o' Yarrow."It is difficult to trace evidence of improvisation here in what is surely a literary device or, if you will convention.
