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The Right Side of the Franks Casket

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Eleanor Grace Clark*
Affiliation:
Bryn Mawr College

Extract

Professor Napier, discussing the Franks Casket a quarter of a century ago, concluded with these words:

I hope that these suggestions may have thrown some light on the mysterious inscription on the Florence fragment, or at any rate may advance us nearer to its complete elucidation. A thoroughly satisfactory solution of all the problems connected with it is scarcely to be hoped for until we know to what the carving refers, who the actors, and what the scenes were thereon depicted.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1930

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References

1 An English Miscellany, in honor of Dr. F. J Furnivall, Oxford, 1900.

2 London Academy, Aug. 2, 1899, p. 90.

3 Translation of H. A. Bellows, Oxford Univ. Press, 1926.

4 See Eng Misc., p. 364, note 3.

5 Wadstein, it is only fair to say, is not the only one to take the figure in this sense. Many others, including Viëtor, Grienberger, Boer, Walker, Poggi, and Imelmann, refer to it as a horse, or a man with a horse's head, or a horse with a human body.

6 Theodore von Greinberger, Zs. f. deut. Phil., XXXIII (1904), 409-21.

7 Francis C. Walker, Washington Univ. Stud., II, 2 (1915), pp. 165-76.

8 He assumes that the mysterious risci means rush.

9 For an interesting account of these burial mounds are Vigfusson and Powell, Corpus Poelicum Boreale, I, 415-417.

10 The death-Thing near Urd's fountain. See below p. 345.

11 I have since discovered that this fact had previously been noted by Walker, but at that time neither Professor Chamders nor I had seen his article.

12 Tr. Vigfusson and Powell, Oxford, 1883.

13 Teutonic Mythology by Viktor Rydberg . . . . tr. by Rasmus B. Anderson, London, 1889, p. 350.

14 Ibid., p. 345.

15 This word, variously spelled Odainsacer, Odainsaker, Odinsaker, Odinsacre, means “the-acre-of-the-not-dead” (Rydberg, p. 208).

16 Rydberg (pp. 208-210) gives a summary of the account in the Flatey-book.

17 Rydberg, pp. 212-213, and Saxo, Hist. Dan. viii.

18 Rydberg, p. 217.

19 Guthrun Song ii, 21. Tr. by Rydberg, ibid., p. 351.

20 For this story, see below, p. 348.

21 Rydberg discusses elsewhere, ibid. p. 287, more than one of these winged, subterranean dragons; Nidhog is one, described by Gylfaginning, and the dragon which, according to Eric Vidforle's saga, obstructed the way to Odainsaker, is another.

22 Rydberg, ibid., p. 352.

23 See The Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani, Tr. by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, Medici Soc. London, 1913, I, 176

24 Pp. 37-38 in Oliver Elton's translation, London 1894 but the version here given is the summary given by Rydberg, ibid., p. 213.

25 Note that Saxo does not actually say “the head came back to the neck of the chicken;” he merely says it “came to life again and testified by a loud crow to its recovery of its breathing. There is certainly some connection between this strange cock of Saxo's story and the ”Sooty red cock“ of the Voluspa (str. 42) which crows under the earth near Hel's walls (see Rydberg p. 305).

26 For further discussion of the retation between Nipt Njorva and Urd see Rydberg, ibid., p 422.

27 This is not the first time that Grane made a journey to the lower world. He probably at one time bore Volund himself. At all events, the way traversed by Volund from his own golden realm to the Wolfdales is, in the Voluntharkvitha (14) called Grane's Way . . . . see Rydberg, p. 664.

28 Rydberg, p. 329 and p. 344.

29 Translation from Rydberg, p. 33.

30 Thing here seems to be used synonymously with the barrow in which the dead was buried.

31 Vigfusson and Powell, op. cit., I, 205.

32 Rydberg, p. 334.

33 Vigfusson and Powell, op. cit., I, 287.

34 Rydberg, p. 342.

35 Rydberg, p. 344, and Vigfusson and Powell, I, 418.

36 Vigfusson and Powell, I, 205