Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Blaðsíða 239

VII The expletive particle
219
unequally careful in their copying of the particle, which in this period
had no obvious semantic meaning, and this variation will appear to be
much greater in the relatively free Eddie metres than in skaldic poetry. I
therefore consider only texts copied in one single manuscript, i.e. Codex
Regius.
In order to get entities which might be compared in a meaningful
manner, Kuhn excluded all poems of fewer than 30 stanzas, thus reduc-
ing the corpus to entities varying from 30 to 95 stanzas. This reduction
corresponds to my exclusion of “minor” skalds from the corpus of skal-
dic poetry. If we are somewhat more generous than Kuhn and go down
to poems of 10 stanzas (i.e. 80 lines), however, we will be able to in-
clude all the Codex Regius poems. On the other hånd, we take account
of the difference in reliability due to the difference of length of the texts
by dividing the observed deviation by its “theoretical standard devi-
ation”, in the same way as for the skaldic poetry. This necessitates a
doser assessment of the length of each poem. In his statistics Kuhn only
counted stanzas or half stanzas, but since the stanzas are of varying
length, I prefer to count verse lines instead - even though verse lines
also show some variation in length.12 These considerations leave me
with Table 8 in place of the table found in Kuhn, Table 5 above.
12 One might raise the question whether the average length of verses should also be con-
sidered. According to spot tests, each verse in fornyrdislag comprises on average 2.8
words, whereas a målahåttr verse comprises on average 3.4 words and a Ijodahåttr verse
as many as 3.6. It might be possible to reduce the number of lines to a theoretical standard
line, but this recalculation would have no meaning unless the number of particles in a
given context is strictly proportional to the number of words. The particle cannot occur
everywhere in a sentence, since it only precedes a noun or a verb. My feeling therefore is
that it is more likely that there is a proportionality between particles and verses than be-
tween particles and words, even if it is difficult to be absolutely sure. Line length may
have importance, but I do not see any realistic means of evaluating it. If we had chosen to
reduce the number of lines to a common denominator according to line length, the con-
sequence for Table 5 would be that poems in målahåttr and Ijodahåttr would get smaller
deviations than they do in my list, and the difference from Kuhn’s list would be reduced.
Since we confine ourselves to simple verse counting, it is probable that the deviations in
poems in målahåttr and Ijodahåttr have been somewhat exaggerated. This is in particular
worthwhile considering for poems in Ijodahåttr. I have chosen to define verse line as
“short line” or Ijodahåttr “full line”. Perhaps it might be argued that a “full line” should
rather be equated with a “long line”, and this option would mean a considerable rehabilita-
tion of Kuhn’s list as far as poems in Ijodahåttr are concemed.