Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Side 317

matthew driscoll
Comments from the first opponent
at the doctoral defence of Þorgeir Sigurðsson
As a “new” or “material” philologist, I believe, among other things, that the phys-
ical circumstances in which a text came into being can have an effect on its mean-
ing. An extreme example of this would be texts written clandestinely by political
prisoners and smuggled out and later published. It would be almost impossible
to read such a text without the knowledge of the circumstances of its origin
affecting one’s reading of it. So too, I believe, can the circumstances under which
a text is received — read or heard — affect the receiver’s understanding and appre-
ciation of it. For this reason I should probably explain that I read Þorgeir
Sigurðsson’s thesis The unreadable poem of Arinbjǫrn over the Easter holiday, in
glorious sunshine on Langeland in southern Denmark, wearing sunglasses.
Whether this has unduly coloured my appreciation of the thesis I cannot say, but
I think it not impossible that it can have had some effect.
In my comments I will deal primarily with the more literary and editorial
aspects of the thesis, and leave to my learned colleague Klaus Johan Myrvoll the
aspects relating to Old Norse prosody and language history.
I will start with what in Denmark is referred to as Småtingsafdelingen ‘the
bagatelle department’.
Although the thesis is for the most part well written, with few typographical
errors or other such problems, there are many strangely unidiomatic formula-
tions, such as “the 169 scribe” instead of “the scribe of 169”, and some peculiar
uses of terms, for example speaking of “page 99v”, rather than “folio 99v”, and
referring throughout to “transcripts” of texts, rather than “transcriptions” — tran-
scripts and transcriptions have somewhat different meanings. Also questionable
is the repeated use of “lacuna/lacunae” for places in the manuscript now unread-
able, rather than spaces left blank or missing through physical damage, which is
that term’s usual meaning. All of these are easily remediable; all that is needed is
a good copy-editor with a sound knowledge of English.
Somewhat less easily remedied is the punctuation, which is also odd and
unhelpful in many places, particularly as regards the placement — or more usu-
ally the complete lack — of commas. I imagine this has something to do with the
curious decision to eschew entirely the use of commas in Icelandic, a decision
that was made at some point after I left Iceland and moved to Denmark, where
despite several attempts at reform it is still seen as a positive virtue to cram as