Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Page 309

þorgeir sigurðsson
Presentation of the main topics
of the doctoral thesis
The poem Arinbjarnarkviða is not easy to describe because of the many uncer-
tainties associated with it. It is ascribed to Egill Skallagrímsson, who is either a
fictional or a real person in the tenth century. Editions of Egils saga include the
poem, but it may not belong to the saga. Some of its text in current editions may
not stem from its only medieval manuscript, and the meter and its level of regu-
larity are not well understood.
Apart from some citations in Snorra-Edda and the Third Grammatical Treatise,
the poem is only preserved in the fourteenth-century Möðruvallabók on a single
leaf, number 99v, located after the Saga of Egill. The hand that wrote the main
text in Möðruvallabók did not write the poem; it may be a late addition, even
from a later century. The leaf is currently unreadable. It is not clear when this
became the case. The last quarter was probably already unreadable when Möðru -
vallabók came to Copenhagen in 1684. Árni Magnússon called the poem Drápan
ólæsilega ‘The unreadable poem’ (see my dissertation, p. 14). The first editor of
the poem in 1809, Guðmundur Magnússon, thought that most of it was missing.
Some later editors assumed that a leaf was missing, or else, that a substantial part
of it was never recorded. Without a glimpse of the last lines of the leaf, it is dif-
ficult to provide tangible arguments on the issue.
In my doctoral thesis, I wish to reduce the number of uncertainties. I have
two new tools for the task. One is the technique of Multispectral Imaging (MSI).
It involves analyzing pictures of different wavelengths of light. This technique
enhances and brings forth faded letters, but their reading still requires conven-
tional human interpretation of a barely discernible text. The other tool is my own
re-analysis of the meter, which aims at referring to easily recognizable linguistic
properties rather than abstract metrical concepts to produce more convincing and
conclusive arguments.
One clear conclusion of the thesis is that the text in current editions of
Arinbjarnarkviða corresponds indeed to the text written on leaf 99v. Another
conclusion is that the poem adheres strictly to a very restrictive meter.
Íslenskt mál 41–42 (2019–2020), 309–337. © 2020 Íslenska málfræðifélagið, Reykjavík.