June 2025: Let’s Hear Some Sievers

Have you ever wondered what Old Norse-Icelandic poetry has sounded like? If your answer is “no”, I congratulate you on your scholarly integrity. If your answer is “yes”, I have to tell you: We will never truly know.

This sad little fact has not stopped generations of scholars in our field from ventilating a variety of different approaches on how to reconstruct the sound and form of Germanic alliterative poetry. Here, for an example, you can listen to Eduard Sievers’ (1850–1932) rendition of his Völuspa (his spelling):

Source: Lautarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Shelf mark: Altnordisch (Deutschland), Edda-Liedtext - PK 1666/1. Speaker: Eduard Sievers. Content: Extract of Sievers’ Die Eddalieder (1923), p. 3. Date of Recording: 17. April 1925. Catalogue entry: https://www.lautarchiv.hu-berlin.de/objekte/lautarchiv/15647/

The photograph on the left shows us the memorable day of that recording session. However, let me first provide some context before we return to it.

Sievers was perhaps one of the most active scholars in the study of Germanic alliterative poetry. Whereas his antagonist Andreas Heusler (1865–1940) eventually managed to diminish his influence on scholarly discourse in the German-speaking world during the 20thcentury, Sievers’ Fünftypensystem (“Five type system”) still enjoys a particular popularity in Anglophone scholarship. This popularity probably owes its existence to a certain air of “scientific method” that emanates from his almost obsessive categorisation of syllables. If you have a closer look at said system, you quickly realise, however, that its results often amount to truisms and banalities. Heusler was one of the first scholars polemically commenting on that fact. In his Habilitationsschrift Zur Geschichte der altdeutschen Verskunst (1891), he notes (page 26):

“Wenn eine so entfernte Familienähnlichkeit genügt, um der löblichen Sippe der Fünf-Typen beigezählt zu werden, so möchte der Versuch, einen beliebigen Zeitungsartikel in die nämlichen Grundformen zu zerlegen, schwerlich erfolglos bleiben.” (If such a distant family resemblance were enough to be counted among the laudable clan of the five types, the attempt to break down any newspaper article into the same basic forms would hardly be unsuccessful.)

That comment and the general, frankly speaking quite justified, allegation of reducing poetry to a mere heap of statistics must have stung. Already in 1893, we see a shift in Sievers’ approach that I want to let speak for itself. On page 372 of his article Zur Rhythmik und Melodik des neuhochdeutschen Sprechverses (published in 1894) we read:

“In der Regel wirkt das Dichtwerk durch eine schriftliche Überlieferung hindurch, die doch nur als ein kümmerliches Surrogat für das lebendige Wort gelten kann. Um voll wirken zu können, muß das in der Schrift erstarrte Dichtwerk erst durch mündliche Interpretation, durch Vortrag wieder ins Leben zurückgerufen werden. Das kann aber nicht anders geschehen, als indem der Vortragende sich zunächst in Inhalt und Stimmung der Dichtung so versetzt, daß sie in ihm, wie einst in ihrem Urheber, wieder lebendig wird, daß er von ihr so ergriffen wird, als ob er sie im Augenblick aus eigener Stimmung heraus selbst erzeugte. Und so ist es nicht unrichtig, wenn man sagt, daß ein guter Vortrag, eine gute Aufführung der beste Kommentar zu einer Dichtung sei.” (As a rule, poetry works through a written tradition, which can only be regarded as a poor surrogate for the living word. In order to be fully effective, the work of poetry that has solidified in writing, must first be brought back to life through oral interpretation, through recitation. But this cannot be done in any other way than by the performer first putting himself into the content and mood of the poetry so that it comes alive again in him, as it once did in its author, so that he is seized by it as if he had produced it himself at the moment out of his own mood. And so, it is not incorrect to say that a good recital, a good performance is the best commentary on a poem.)

Here we can see the first traces of his Schallanalyse (“sound analysis”), an approach often forgotten or ignored by posterity. However, it was in many regards just a logical continuation of his earlier studies, as it strongly relies on experiments, measuring instruments and statistics. So, how do you put yourself in the content and mood of the poem? Take a look at the photograph on the left again. Recite the Völuspa as you hear it in the recording while waving your hands just like Sievers and one of his colleagues in the photograph. According to Sievers, you will then be able to feel which stanzas were written by Icelanders and which by Norwegians, where the text has been interpolated and so on. After all, these features are according to Sievers based on racial characteristics of these two groups. If you do not believe me, and I hope you do not at first glance, you can double-check the whole method in his Die Eddalieder from 1923 (Link to digital version).

Sievers’ approach to Germanic alliterative poetry and poetry in general is an odd mix of “scientific method”, esotericism and racism. That was not particularly uncommon in said field, albeit Sievers is among the extreme cases. We have already seen that Heusler was one of his fiercest critics. Has he actually produced a metrical system more adequate to the study of Germanic alliterative poetry? Yes and no. We will return to the topic in a future Find of the Month.