Meletinsky the scholar of Scandinavia

Abstract

The author of the article analyses the main areas of Old Norse studies which were studied by Eleazar Meletinsky and shows the impact of his research on the development of Russian and European scholarship. The article is concentrated on the reception of Eleazar Meletinsky’s ideas in the works of contemporary scholars, e.g. his conception of Old Norse mythology as a system, of the folklore origin of Old Norse heroic and mythological lays and their inherent proximity to the archaic variants of myth and epic, and of the oral poetic tradition as a source of their composition, structure and language (loci communes, formulaic style, lexical repetitions, rhythmical-syntactic parallelism, ornamental epithets). The author of the article gives a critical account of contemporary research dedicated to subjects which were formulated and investigated for the first time in the works of Eleazar Meletinsky, i.e. the skaldisation of eddaic style, the function of formula in modelling epic situations (or type scenes), the dramatic and comedic nature inherent to the eddaic genre (e.g. flyting), the means of expressing feelings and emotional states in the Poetic Edda, the mythopoetic symbolism of colour, the genetic proximity of eddaic elegies to lamentations.