The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia

"He was a pupil of mine, and I’m very proud of him, although I wouldn’t presume to take any credit for his work. His book, The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia (an ambiguous title that might give the impression that all drama originated in Scandinavia!) is based on his PhD thesis. He’s now a Professor in Folkloristics at the University of Iceland. He’s mainly discussing the poems of the Poetic Edda, and what he’s arguing in the book is that it’s almost impossible to recite some of these poems, which consist largely of dialogue, without drama, without acting, without needing more than one person to play the parts of the characters. He also shows – and this is the most original feature of his book – that the way in which speeches are indicated and attributed to characters in the manuscripts is comparable to the way in which speech directions are given in other medieval drama traditions – in French drama in particular. He is indeed. It’s an approach that makes the poems that much more attractive and interesting to present-day students. In teaching them, one can make the students read the parts, and so on. The best-known one is the one in which the god Thor has his hammer stolen by one of the giants, and is told that he won’t get it back unless the goddess Freyja comes to Giantland and marries the giant in question, whose name is Thrym. The climax of the poem is that Thor himself dresses up as a bride (a comic situation, as Thor is one of the most masculine of the gods) and goes to Giantland, where fortunately the giants don’t see through the disguise. Thor seizes his hammer and kills Thrym. This poem is composed in the metre known as epic metre (or ‘old story’ metre), but the metrical form that Terry Gunnell makes most of for the purposes of his theory is the one known as chant metre."