ABSTRACT
In a recent discussion of Old English studies by various writers, a distinction appears to be made between 'analogies', defined as 'resemblances in style, structure, mood or idea between works which have no other connection' (Lapidge 1997, 20), and 'analogues', defined as 'two or more texts which draw either immediately or at greater distance upon the same source, although none is in the same line oftransmission from that source as another' (Scragg 1997, 40). In the second section of this chapter I shall argue for certain analogies, in the sense of the term just indicated, between Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, composed mainly in the last two decades of the fourteenth century, and the prose Edda, composed by the Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson (d. 1241 ), most probably in the third and fourth decades of the thirteenth. In the third section I shall consider the possibility that one of the stories told in the part ofSnorri's Edda known as Skizldskaparmizl ('The language ofpoetry') is an analogue, also in the sense just indicated, to Chaucer's poem The House of Fame, composed probably in the late 1370s.
