SOURCE: "Eddic Poetry," in Old Norse Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide, edited by Carol J. Clover and John Lindow, Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 68-156.

In the following excerpt, Harris discusses critical debates about the oral nature of Eddic poetry.

Eddic Poetry as Oral Poetry

[The] study of the oral nature of eddic poetry—to the extent that this is its nature—bears on almost every branch of research on the poems and, I would argue, changes some of the terms under which we must understand them. In a sense eddic scholars have always "known" that eddic poetry was oral poetry, but that knowledge was mostly an unspoken assumption based on the age of the verse and the introduction of writing to the north. This is still our basic assumption: eddic poetry flourished in a milieu in which writing did not play a major role in the conception, creation...