Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1981, Page 106

104 Kristján Árnason
It seems that two prosodic features were available on the basis of
which a distinction could be made between a strong and a weak beat:
stress and quantity (cf. Kristján Árnason 1980:107-14). As will have
been noted, what I have called strong beats are, in the lines just cited,
carried by heavy stressed syllables whereas the weak beats are filled
by light and/or unstressed ones. It is a well known fact that a dróttkvætt
line always ends in a heavy stressed syllable followed by a light un-
stressed one, so that in the sense described above, the line has a trochaic
ending, and a restriction existed to the effect that the final strong beat
was carried by a heavy syllable. If we extend this principle to the rest
of the line and say that it was a necessary condition for a strong beat to
be formed that the syllable was stressed and heavy, the result will be
that a line can have no more strong beats than it has heavy stressed
syllables. (Note on the other hand, that I am not suggesting that a lin-
guistically heavy stressed syllable constitutes a sufficient condition for
a metrical ictus, all the principle does is to exclude light syllables from
a strong position; it allows for the possibility that under certain condi-
tions heavy syllables were metrically weak (and this occurs, particularly
in morphosyntactic categories like verb, adverb, pronoun).)
In a survey carried out of poetry from the 12th century (from
Sturlunga saga) and poetry ascribed to Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld, I have
managed to classify all lines (with what seem only minor exceptions that
can be blamed on bad textual preservation or aberrations by the poets)
into seven types, the two shown in (1) above and five others, which can
be exemplified by lines from Sturlunga-poetry:
(2) C. glaðan hyggjum svan seðia (135.3)
D. sverðs nema hefndir verði (132.8)
E. ok valkpsto vestan (147.5)
sion of poetic levels (‘form’, ‘structure’, ‘composition’ and ‘performance’). ‘Form’
is said to define the general type of metre, for example sonnet or dróttkvætt,
whereas ‘structure’ refers to particular patterns allowed for within the realm of
a particular form. The level of ‘composition’ is „the implementation of the struc-
ture in terms of its linguistic realization“ (Allen 1973:104), and finally, one can
speak of the ‘performance’ of the poem by particular persons at particular times
and places. Within this model the dróttkvætt line can be seen as a form (or as
a part of one, the stanza), alloing for a (limited) number of variant structures
(cf. Kristján Árnason 1980:108).