Íslenzk tunga - 01.01.1959, Side 46

44
PETER G. FOOTE
of II, as, for example, the use of oj and umb in that part shows.
Alternatively, the Norwegianisms might be due to an Icelander
influenced by Norwegian speech and spelling.49 As Professor Seip
says of forms like hot-, horvetna: „Dersom formene ... fins brukt i
isl. skrifter som ikke kan ha no. forelegg, má de vurderes anner-
ledes.“50 But if this is true of part of a text, it must be true of the
whole as long as it shows similar forms throughout.
This is not to say that no Norwegian text of a Jvs. ever existed, or
that there could be no connection between such a text and the known
Jvs. The author of Fsk. presumably had a manuscript of an indepen-
dent Jvs. in Norway, and between the source he used and the extant
redactions there must certainly have been some link.51 Possibly the
explanation which Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson rejects will in time prove
the most likely, viz. that there was an early Jvs. (1) which served as
a source both for the Jvs. (2) used in Fsk. and for the known Jvs.
(3).52 The great differences between (2) and (3) might then be
due to the fact that the one was a Norwegian, the other an Icelandic
re-creation. This is pure speculation and there would be no way of
knowing whether the postulated Jvs. (1) was a Norwegian or an
Icelandic work. What is certain is that a form like hotvetna in 291
could not be derived from it.
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are egi for eigi and æi- for ei-. The forraer is regular throughout the manuscript
and the latter common. It is obvious though that the more often an Icelandic
scribe uses a Norwegian form, the less significance it has as a Norwegianism.
49The absence of o/ in I (a) might in such an early text suggest a non-
Icelandic hand at work.
B0 „Edda-diktning,“ 134.
51 Cf. the parallel texts in Jvs. and Fsk. set up by Bj. Aðalbjamarson,
Sagaer, 209 ff.; the similarities seem best explained by written connection
between them, however that connection itself is to be explained.
52 Bj. Aðalbjarnarson, ibid., 214.