Íslenzk tunga - 01.01.1964, Page 30

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STEFÁN KARLSSON
SUMMARY
1. The rímur of Egill Skallagrímsson are preserved in the MS AM 610a 4to,
written by Þórður Jónsson, Strandsel (ísafjarðarsýsla) in the second half of
the 17th century. The rímur were composed in 1643 by Jón Guðmundsson,
Rauðseyjar (Dalasýsla), on the basis of a K-type MS of Egils Saga, and were
used in the compilation of a new version of the saga in the 17th century.
2.1. The earliest evidence in Icelandic versification on the Quantity Shift is
from ab. 1500, and Bishop Jón Arason (died in 1550) is the last poet to main-
tain the old quantity system in his prosody. The most thorough treatmcnt of the
question is by Bjöm K. Þórólfsson (see reference in footnote 11), who has shown
tliat in their rímur and other poems designed to be sung two late 16th century
poets, the pastors Einar Sigurðsson (born in 1538) and Jón Bjarnason (born ab.
1560), still maintain the old system to the extent of using, with very few excep-
tions, only long syllables, according to the old system, as the arsis of a final
trochee ('x) of a line. In Einar Sigurðsson’s poetry, deviations from this rule
amount to only 0.2%. Björn K. Þórólfsson’s dialectological conclusion was that
the quantity shift originated in the West, whence it spread across the North and
the South in the course of the 16th century.
2.2. The present author has examined the rímur of Egill by Jón in Rauðs-
eyjar, 40 in all, consisting of 13252 lines, and found that in most of them the
same rule (that Bjöm K. Þórólfsson found in the poetry of Einar Sigurðsson and
Jón Bjarnason) is strictly observed. The total deviations amount to only 0.8%
if lines ending in a bisyllabic word in -ur from earlier -r (‘glide-words’, e. g.
góSur < góSr, jagur < fagr) are not counted (see 13.1 below), and to a little
more if they are. This indicates that the spreading of the new quantity system
was neither as rapid nor as regular as has been thought.
3.1. If all the 339 lines ending in a glide-word are counted as trochaic, the
final arsis is short, according to the old quantity system, in 43.4% of them. This
proportion is quite different from the rest of the trochaic lines, as shown above
(§2.2). Besides, glide-words are more frequent at the end of lines which are
normally catalectic (i. e. end in an accented syllable) than at the end of the
trochaic lines (3.4% as against 1.4%). Therefore, all lines ending in a glide-
word are best taken to be catalectic. The distribution of these lines according
to metre seems to support this view.
3.2. There are only two examples in the rímur of a glide-word rhyming with
a word in original -ur (not coming from -r); in both cases the word is móSur
(oblique form of móSir ‘mother’). The explanation may be that, due to the ana-
logy of the old monosyllabic oblique forms of the kinship terms, mœSr etc.,
monosyllabic by-forms, móSr etc., had arisen beside the bisyllabic ones, móSur