Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Page 328

On several occasions in Part I, Þorgeir turns to certain Norwegian linguistic
developments (due to some recurring features of the Arbj scribe in M). In these
parts, he is not always as accurate as is to be desired. I will give some examples:
(1) In the presentation of the Old Norwegian vowel harmony on pp. 42f.,
Þorgeir misses the point that unstressed ‹i› and ‹u› also followed stressed
/ǫ/ and /æ/ (cf. Myrvoll 2014a).
(2) Not very convincing is the hypothesis that the use of the abbreviation
mark, the tittle, for the ending -ar both in a document from 1339 in
Skaga fjörður (in the pl. prestar and in the dat. Einari) and in the word
magar (gen. sg. ‘son’) in Arbj in M was a conscious adaptation to reduc-
tions in Norwegian word-endings, as it is argued on p. 41 and again on
p. 61. At this early stage, the ending -ar was still thriving in Norwegian,
and moreover, it is unlikely that an Icelander would accommodate such
details as inflectional endings.
(3) Another example of misinterpretation appears in the analysis of the
obscure verse “veklinga ‘tø̨s’” in Arbj st. 19, where Þorgeir identifies the
first word as an equivalent to Modern Swedish and Norwegian vekling
‘weakling’ (p. 238). This is, however, not possible, since the modern vek-
ling must be derived from the adjective corresponding to Old Norse veikr
‘weak’, with monophtongization ei > e (see Norsk Ordbok 12, s.vv. vekla,
vekling etc.); the Old Norse form (if indeed it existed) would have been
*veiklingr.
The historical placing of the poem
An important aspect of this thesis is the greater confidence it gives us in the
poem itself, Egill Skallagrímsson’s Arinbjarnarkviða. Recent formal — metrical
and linguistic — analyses of the kviðuháttr poems (Sapp 2000, Myrvoll 2014b)
have concluded that both Egill’s poems in this metre, Arinbjarnarkviða and Sona -
torrek, should be regarded as genuine productions of the tenth century. Even
though the dating of Arbj is not treated as a separate topic in any chapter of
Þorgeir Sigurðsson’s thesis, dating and chronology inevitably play a central role
in many of the discussions throughout the dissertation, not at least in the metrical
Part II. Already in the introduction to the thesis, the author states that he will
provide “strong arguments in favor of the poem’s authenticity, by showing that
the poem fits well into the timeline of linguistic changes and changes in the
kviðuháttr meter” (p. 3). This promise is fulfilled, and the thesis is thus also an
important contribution to the discussion of chronological developments within
Old Norse poetry. One example of this is Þorgeir’s original discovery of the strict
employment of “restricted syllables” in the dips of the oldest kviðuháttr poems, a
rule that eventually was relaxed in later poetry.
Klaus Johan Myrvoll328