Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1981, Blaðsíða 111

Did dróttkvætt Borrow its Rhythm from Irish? 109
3. To what extent was the metrical form remodelled in the borrow-
ing process in order to ease the conceivable tension between the
prosodic structure of the borrowing language and the rhythmical
form of the original metre? In other words, to what extent was the
metre formed or reformed by the Nordic poets?
There is no room here to deal with all these questions, and I will
ignore the first one, however central it may seem. (Indeed, dróttkvætt
was not the only ‘ungermanic’ metre that was used by Icelandic poets.)
But I would like to end by submitting a few tentative comments on the
other two.
To start with the second question, it seems, as far as can be judged,
that the accentual pattems of Old Norse and Old Irish were remark-
ably similar. Initial dynamic accent seems to have been basic in both
languages, and a distinction between long and short stressed vowels
formed a potential base for a dichotomy between heavy and light
syllables. Here it must be noted that quantity has not, as far as I know,
been shown to have played a role in Irish verse.
As to the last question, a certain amount of remodelling or reorganis-
ation in the mapping of linguistic stmctures onto metrical ones must be
assumed to have taken place if the rinnard was borrowed into Nordic.
In the first place, there is the restriction in the use of light stressed
syllables, which in a way introduces quantity into the rhythm.
In the second place, we must assume that a certain amount of stan-
dardisation towards increased formalism took place in the Nordic
tradition. (This probably also occurred independently in the Irish tradi-
tion.) This may to some extent have been a gradual development after
the actual ‘borrowing’ took place. The internal rhyme became more
regular and followed partly different pattems from those found in Irish
poetry. The rhyming patterns are assumed to have gradually become
more regular in dróttkvætt as time passed. In addition the alliteration
(of course a Germanic inheritance) is more regular in dróttkvætt than
in Irish metres. As to the rhythm, it seems that if we assume that the
rhythm of dróttkvætt can be accounted for by assuming a limited
number of structures generated as variants of one basic form, we
would have to assume likewise that the dróttkvætt rhythm was more
regular than the rinnard rhythm. In particular, if my analysis of the
dróttkvætt lines is correct, we may say that in the Nordic pattems