Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 178

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Part One
pointed to influences from the languages of the British Isles on the voca-
bulary of Rigspula.19,
A great deal of this older discussion pertained to the age and origin of
Eddie poetry as such, but clearly the study of the words used may pro-
vide valuable evidence for the absolute or relative dating of a particular
poem as well. Apart from the loan word studies alluded to, however, this
method has not been mueh used; but in the following some notable ex-
ceptions will be discussed. Even if the tangible results have not been
overwhelming so far, I believe this is a method likely to bring more res-
ults in the future.
In 1911 Rudolf Meissner published a very promising but extremely
short summary of a conference paper on the vocabulary of Vgluspå.
Starting from an article by Jakob Sverdrup on suffixes in Old Norse
which had appeared the same year, he stated that the suffixes -lig, -liga,
-la were absent from the oldest skaldic poems and apparently also from
the oldest group of Eddie poems. In particular, attention was drawn to
the double suffix -sam-ligr and the word undrsamligr, occurring in
Vgluspå (st. 61), which according to him was characteristic of poems in-
fluenced by clerical language.79 Meissner made a collection of similar
suffixed words belonging to the same sphere, typical examples being
hordomr (Vgluspå st. 45), with a taste of homiletic language, and nomi-
na agentis in -ari followed by objective genitive, like tungis tjugari
(Vgluspå st. 40).
Meissner concluded without any reservation that Vgluspå showed in-
78 Mogk 1904: (48) = 1901-09: 602; Heusler 1906: 275-76 = 1969: 187-89; Finnur Jons-
son 1917: 165-67; Meissner 1933: 128-29; von See 1957: 2 = 1981: 85; GuSbrandur Vig-
fusson in Corp. Poet. Bor. (1883), vol. 1; lix.
79 This opinion is falsely attributed to Sverdrup: “Von den vier adj. auf -ligr, die in der
Vsp. vorkommen (hættligr, spakligr, me ginli gr, undrsamligr) ist das letzte beachtenswert.
Sverdrup hat nachgewiesen, dass diese adj. auf -samligr durchaus der geistlichen prosa
angehoren; bei undrsamligr wird -samligr schon als einheitliches suffix aufgefasst”
(Meissner 1911: 451). Sverdrup repeatedly argued that adjectives in -ligr, with base word
in the genitive are late and belong to the leamed style, whereas the form undrsamligr is
an older form compared to these (Sverdrup 1911: 41, 48). I can find no separate state-
ment by Sverdrup on the age of undrsamligr, but on the basis of his general view, which
implies that the tendency to lengthen a non-compound adjective by these suffixes is a
characteristic of the learned style (Sverdrup 1911: 31), it is a natural assumption that
undrsamligr is a relatively late form, even if it is older than adjectives with base word in
the genitive.