Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Blaðsíða 116

96
Part One
Book iv [Hymiskvida, Hyndluljod, Rigspula] as the Norwegian poets’,
and so on” (Corp. Poet. Bor., vol. 1: lviii; cf. “Classification of Eddaic
Lays”, pp. lxiv-lxxi). In his edition he put the poems in roughly chrono-
logical order, whereby he intermingled Eddie and skaldic poems be-
lieved to belong to the same age.
Sophus Bugge
A particularly significant point in Gubbrandur Vigfusson’s chronolo-
gical argument was the use of the linguistic boundary between Proto-
Nordic and Old Norse as a terminus a quo. In the late 1860s Sophus
Bugge and Ludwig Wimmer had demonstrated that the language of the
runic inscriptions in the older runic alphabet was not Gothic, as was pre-
viously believed, but Proto-Nordic, thereby “adding half a millennium
to the history of our language” (cf. Olsen 1925: 360). Further, in studies
of Eddie metrics Jessen and Bugge detected the importance of syllable
quantity in verse endings; according to “Jessen’s rule” a drottkvætt line
will end in a long stem bisyllabic word, while “Bugge’s rule” implies
that a Ijodahåttr full line does not end in such a word - to put the rules in
a somewhat simplified form (Jessen 1863: 285, cf. 258; Bugge 1879:
142-44). If the poems in Ijodahåttr were restored in the language form
of the Iron Age, as known from runic inscriptions, Bugge continued, his
newly detected rule would be broken; consequently all poems in
Ijodahåttr must be posterior to this language shift, which means that the
9th century is a general terminus a quo.45 According to Bugge this dating
might have some relevance also for poems in other metres.
In 1880 Anton Edzardi expressed similar points of view in an intro-
duction to a revised edition of von der Hagen ’ s fornaldarsaga transla-
45 “Søger vi at føre de i Ijodahåttr forfattede digte tilbage til den i mellemjæmalderen
bragte sprogform, som vi kender den af runeindskrifter, så skér der på mangfoldige steder
brud på den regel, at sidste hovedtone i langlinjen ikke må hvile på lang næstsidste stavel-
se. [Examples from Håvamål.] Enhver af disse ordformer strider sidst i langlinjen mod
den af mig påviste regel. Det samme gælder mange andre langlinjer i Håvamål og i alle an-
dre i Ijodahåttr forfattede digte. Efter min mening må den nævnte kvantitetsregel have
været iagttaget fra først af, allerede af selve digterne. Det er da dermed bevist, at alle de i
Ijodahåttr forfattede digte uden undtagelse er yngre end mellemjæmalderen. De kan tidli-
gere ikke have eksisteret, i al fald ikke uden i en form så forskellig, at man ved den måtte
tale om andre digte” (Bugge 1879: 144-45).