Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Page 333

þorgeir sigurðsson
Replies to the opponents
I am pleased by the constructive opposition of my thesis by Matthew Driscoll
and Klaus Johan Myrvoll. In the following I give my response to their com-
ments.
Driscoll commented on the literary and editorial aspects of the thesis. He said
he missed a discussion on why poems are almost never cited in extenso in sagas.
He asked: Was it because the authors/compilers of the sagas assumed their audi-
ence would know the poems, so there was no need to cite them in full? My
answer is yes, because on many occasions the saga writers appear to expect their
audience to know the poems that are mentioned. Another reason that applies to
Arinbjarnarkviða is that the poems were not always easy to incorporate into the
sagas. In his preface to Egils saga, Sigurður Nordal (1933:XVI) said that Arin -
bjarnar kviða did not serve the plot of the saga. He included it anyway, and said
it would not deceive anyone to do so (“ætti það ekki að villa neinn”). This is di -
sputable. Egils saga has a very different character without the two poems Arin -
bjarnar kviða and Sonatorrek, because they expose a much gentler Egill than Egils
saga.
Also, Driscoll misses a discussion on what would be the implications of
assuming Arinbjarnarkviða was written in full on leaf 99v and no part of it was
initially missing. There are many implications, and Myrvoll discusses some of
them. I only note that it removes an excuse for not discussing the genre of the
poem, and how it rewarded Arinbjǫrn.
Driscoll is right in noting that a discussion on new or material philology
would have been appropriate in the thesis. I did not opt for a traditional edition
of the poem for several reasons, one of them being that I wanted to avoid the
many decisions that this would bring, which were mostly unrelated to the task at
hand, to recover as much as possible of the poem. Some level of normalization is,
however, desirable. I find the option attractive to use modern Icelandic spelling,
adjusted for distinctions that are made in the poem. I agree with Driscoll that
including all the notes together with each stanza would be desirable. Reading the
notes without the stanzas can be confusing. I tried to make it easier by including
with the notes a normalized long-line version of each stanza. An electronic edi-
tion would facilitate a better solution.
Klaus Johan Myrvoll divided his opposition into four parts: methodology,
metrics, linguistics, and the historical placing of the poem. His two parts on met-