Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Page 243

VII The expletive particle
223
However, when these occurrences are deleted, the poems by the same
operation become shorter. In Alvtssmål the repetition of the particle is
the consequence of a half stanza being repeated 13 times, and by delet-
ing all these half stanzas we shorten the whole poem by nearly one fifth.
In order to apply this deletion in a consistent manner, similar reductions
must be carried out in the whole corpus, where verses or greater parts of
the stanzas are repeated. Such a reduction entails a number of problems,
however: some repetitions contain minor variations, making it impos-
sible to draw a clear-cut distinction between a repeated line, which
should be deleted, and a varied line, which should not be deleted, be-
cause the variation in principle may affect the use of the particle. It is
also easy to overlook some real repetition. What I present here is thus an
attempt, and a doser inspection of the material would certainly lead to
some adjustment of the numbers. So far my counting has led to reduc-
tion of the length of the poems Vgluspd, Håvamål I, Håvamål II, Vaf-
prudnismål, Gnmnismål, Skirnismål, Lokasenna, Prymskvida, Vglund-
arkx’ida, Alvissmål, Helgakvida Hundingsbana II and Fåfnismal.'4
After having carried out these two operations, I have arrived at Table
10. This table is meant to correspond to Kuhn’s list of relative frequency
of particles in Eddie poems (reproduced above as Table 5). In spite of
certain problems conceming both the use of statistical method and in the
treatment of philological problems, where more or less arbitrary choices
had to be made, Table 10 does in my opinion give a more correct and
statistically more defensible overall picture than Kuhn’s figures, without
pretending to give the final answer.
14 A list of repetitions is given in Table 13 below, pp. 229-30.