Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Blaðsíða 318

many commas as possible into any sentence. Some middle ground must be pos-
sible, one feels. In any case, commas do have a function and are required in most
languages, but once the rules for their proper placement have been relaxed to the
point of torpidity in one’s own language it can be hard to know how to place
them in another one.
Another bagatelle I would like to mention is a stylistic feature which, like the
absence of punctuation, seems to reflect a deliberate change in policy relating to
academic writing (though with its origin I suspect in the world of marketing).
The candidate has clearly been told that, in a piece of written academic work, the
author should start by telling the reader what he is about to be told, then tell him
that, and then tell him what he has just been told. Saying everything three times
may be a sound practice pedagogically, but it does result in a great deal of repeti-
tion, which can quickly become irksome.
Having got these trivialities off my chest, I can now address more substantial
matters. Þorgeir Sigurðsson has written a fine thesis, with many original and
important contributions to Old Norse studies. The focus of the thesis is Egill
Skallagrímsson’s poem Arinbjarnarkviða, which is preserved only in the manu-
script AM 132 fol., commonly known as Möðruvallabók. The poem has been
added, in a younger hand, after the text of the saga, on f. 99v, which had been left
blank. Owing to damage and wear, the text is now largely illegible, but a number
of copies of it were made when more of it could be read (with the naked eye) than
is now the case. Through the use of multi-spectral scanning, Þorgeir has been
able to recover more of the poem than has previously been possible, and by
meticulous comparison of what can now be seen with the older transcriptions,
coupled with extremely detailed metrical and linguistic analysis, he offers a
reconstruction of the text. All in all, this is a very impressive piece of work.
The question of prosimetrum
The thesis would, however, have benefitted from the inclusion of a discussion
of the context of the poem, i.e. on its role and that of the other poems and sin-
gle verses in Egils saga; in particular it would have been interesting to have some
reflection on how verse and prose work together and why, for example, the
poems attributed to skalds like Egill are almost never cited in extenso in the
sagas about them. Surely this must be significant. Was it because the authors/
compilers of the sagas assumed their audience would know the poems, so there
was no need to cite them in full? There has of course been a fair bit of discus-
sion on the question of prosimetrum in the scholarly literature, but Þorgeir makes
no mention of this. A brief summary by the candidate would not have been out of
place.
Matthew Driscoll318