Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1985, Qupperneq 82

74
is unlikely, in view of the learning which he displays elsewhere, that
the author was ignorant of this date. On a literal interpretation, ‘seven
hundred years’ from the expulsion of the Picts would bring us down to
c. 1540, which is obviously too late to be described as ‘eighteen hun-
dred years and more’ after the reign of Fergus and is also incompatible
with the age of the Royal and Asloan manuscripts as discussed above.
The only satisfactory explanation of these difficulties is that the author
reckoned his dates to the nearest half century. Such a line of reasoning
would establish a terminus a quo more than six and a half centuries
after the expulsion of the Picts, i.e. sometime in the 1490s.
A linguistic analysis in no way conflicts with the view that the Latin
work lying behind the extant Chronicle of Scotland in a Part belonged
to the end of the fifteenth century. In the discussion of Early and
Middle Scots linguistic developments prefixed to his edition of Ratis
Raving, Ritchie Girvan remarked that the relative distribution of the
pronominal forms the quhilk(is) and quhilk(is) in the three known
copies of the chronicle is such as to suggest varying degrees of modern-
ization of the language of an older archetype: on the evidence of this
isolated point the Dalhousie manuscript would be slightly more mod-
ernized than Asloan, while the Royal manuscript (which has the older
form the quhilk(is) much more often than the younger form without
the definite article) would be “the most accurate representative” of an
archetype which Girvan would place in “the first half of the [fifteenth]
century.”60 This conclusion is, of course, in disagreement with the
internal evidence which I have adduced, but it is also invalid from the
point of view of linguistic methodology: it ignores the faet that the
Dalhousie copy generally conforms to the orthographic and morph-
ological norms of earlier Middle Scots, whereas the Asloan and Royal
copies both regularly display such unambiguously sixteenth-century
features as the use of -i as a diacritic mark for vowel length, and the
a/ie-form of the indefinite article before substantives with initial con-
sonants. In the absence of other archaisms in what is a demonstrably
late copy, the pronominal usage in the Royal manuscript need be no
more than an idiosyncracy. The same may also apply to the archaic at
(for that), which occurs in the Asloan manuscript but not in Royal or
60 R. Girvan (ed.), Ratis Raving and Other Early Scottish Roems on Morals, STS ser.
IH, 2 (1939), p. liii.