Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Page 320

Normalisation
In his reconstruction Þorgeir reproduces the text on three different levels,
according to the Medieval Nordic Text Archive (Menota) style:1 a facsimile-level
transcription, a diplomatic transcription and a normalised text. For the normali-
sation he uses “samræmd stafsetning forn”, the standardised orthography for Old
Norse-Icelandic developed by the Danish philologist Ludvig Wimmer, which is
found for example in the series Íslenzk fornrit (ÍF). In its editions, however, ÍF
as a rule uses more archaic orthography for skaldic verse, based on the assump-
tion that the poems are older than the prose texts in which they are embedded.
Þorgeir explains both in the introduction and elsewhere why he has not used
such archaic spelling — because the thesis focuses on the recovery of the text of
f. 99v of Möðruvallabók, not the reconstruction of the original poem, which he
believes on linguistic and other grounds to be from the 10th century. My question
is, given that his aim was to recover the 14th-century text of Möðruvallabók, was
the use of a standard based on the state of the language at the beginning of the
13th century not equally inappropriate? Should he not rather have normalised the
orthography of the text to reflect the language in the middle of the 14th century,
when Möðruvallabók was written, or, which would have been equally justifiable,
used modern Icelandic?
Accompanying the normalised text is a literal translation of each verse into
English, which this reader at least will confess he found very helpful.
Each stanza occupies a single page, at the bottom of which there are some
general notes about the stanza, its meaning and, occasionally, literary qualities.
Detailed notes on each stanza, sometime spanning several pages, are found in
Chapter 10. It would have been extremely useful to have these together with the
texts. I appreciate that this would have caused serious layout-problems, but I can
only urge Þorgeir to try and find a way of doing this when he actually does pro-
duce an edition. An electronic edition, rather than a print-based one, would seem
the obvious solution.
Matthew James Driscoll
Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics
University of Copenhagen
mjd@hum.ku.dk
Matthew Driscoll320
1 For information on Menota, see ⟨https://www.menota.org/forside.xhtml⟩.