Gripla - 20.12.2009, Side 258

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opening memorial formula of two lines followed by three sections of nar­
rative materials, each structured as two teasing Questions followed by an
Answer. The first two sections consist of somewhat less controversial
heroic materials while the third and climactic section, which is constructed
around a sacred story, is little understood and heavily contested. Lönnroth’s
structural analysis, while basically very revealing, turned out to be too strict
in some details. We differ, for example, on the intended arrangement of
the three sections and on the damaged l. 20, which I believe constitutes a
meta­level introduction to Section 3 rather than a concluding frame.5
underlying the Rök inscription is almost certainly an oral genre, a tra­
ditional question-and-answer routine in skaldic verse known as greppa­
minni. Remarkably enough, all three scholars responsible for this impor­
tant development in modern Rök scholarship were present at the reading
of this paper.6 In fact, however, Sophus Bugge, the founding father of Rök
scholarship, had already noticed this analogy before 1910,7 but, unlike
Lönnroth, Bugge did not integrate his insight into a larger interpretative
structure where it could enter the chain of inference. In another of his
proleptic insights, Bugge interpreted runic mukmini as mǫg-minni, which
he translated ‘erinnerung an den Sohn’; later he retracted this suggestion
in view of the preserved final -u after a short stressed vowel in sunu and
fiaru, assuming that the language of Rök would require a form like *magu­
minni; but Bugge never accepted múg­minni ‘volkserinnerung’ or ung­
menni ‘dem jungen Mann’ (or later ‘the youth’) – the two main interpretive
variants after Bugge’s period – and at the time of his death was working on
a new explanation.8 In recent years Prof. Gun Widmark has revived
My Rök articles were produced independently of, but contemporaneously with, a “new
wave” of writings on this earliest masterpiece of Swedish literature, including: Andersson
2006; Barnes 2007; Ralph 2007a, 2007b; Schulte 2008; Malm 2008. I hope in the near
future to take positions on these and a few other recent studies not noticed in Harris
2006b, 2009 (including: Lönnqvist 1999; Widmark 2001; Petersson 1991); I should
mention already, however, that the far-reaching arguments of Bo Ralph (in 2007a, 2007b)
are incompatible with my beliefs and assumptions though a closer engagement is not
possible here.
5 Harris 2006b and forthcoming.
6 vésteinn ólason (1969); Lars Lönnroth (1977); Margaret Clunies Ross (Lönnroth 1977, 17,
n. 21).
7 Bugge 1910, 39, 244–45.
8 Bugge 1910, 13–15 and olrik’s editorial addition 15, n. 1.