Studia Islandica - 01.07.1963, Síða 93

Summary
1. The Snorri-Egla investigation in retrospect. (Pp. 9—18). The
present paper begins with a retrospect of and some further observa-
tions on the author’s previous publication in this series: Snorri Sturlu-
son och Egils saga Skallagrímssonar. Ett försök till spráklig författar-
bestámning. Reykjavík 1962. (Studia Islandica 20). (With a Summary
in English).
To the philological arguments, which were there advanced in fa-
vour of the hypothesis that Snorri Sturluson was the author of Egils
saga Skallagrímssonar, or Egla, are now added two more characteris-
tics of his language.
The most important of them is the one which is here named “epic
nu”, i. e. the author applies the adverb nú ‘now’ to past time in the
same sense as þá ‘then’: “Ok nú ferr hann”; “ok skiljask nu'\ “Nú
mælti Áskell’ — three instances from Reykdœla saga. (In this cate-
gory such epic phrases as “Nú er at segja”, “Nú er sagt, at” etc. are
not, of course, included.) The epic nú corresponds in some degree to
the use of presens historicum and often goes together with that tense,
but it need not do so.
In comparison with other Old Icelandic saga-texts, Heimskringla and
Egla reveal an extremely low frequency of epic nú. The statistics,
comprising a comparison material of about 831000 words in addition
to the “Snorri texts”, are presented in Table 1 (pp. 13—14). In the
column to the right are given the numbers of epic nú per 5000 words
in each text. Here, as in the Snorri-£gZa paper, Heimskringla has been
divided into two parts, Snorri A and Snorri B, approximately equal in
size. The average frequency 'for the comparison material (22.3 per
5000 words) turns out to be fifteen to eighteen times higher than the
figures for the “Snorri texts”. Even the two sagas — Eyrbyggja saga
and Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu — which come next to Heimskringla
and Egla, show three and a half to four and a half times as high a
frequency.
The rareness of epic nú in Heimskringla and Egla stands out yet