79
The causes of
dal á Svína and
í dalmiskunn
fiska are identical: the metre’s unyielding
requirement to fill the close with a long
disyllable. Also identical are the processes of
splitting the compound
and re-arranging stems
and the overall results of a sequence of stems
that meets the metrical rules but is not readable
without reverse-engineering. Nevertheless, the
material to which this procedure is applied and
the particular re-arrangement are different, with
our poet’s result breaking rules of classical
dróttkvætt as we know it from the classical
corpus.
Lexical and Syntactic Features
Several lexical and syntactical features ‘reveal’
the text as a late composition and an imitation.
One such feature is the predicative use of
kennings and kenning-like structures. In
classical
dróttkvætt, kennings and heitis for
men and women are used as replacements of
their names and of respective pronouns; a
typical classical
dróttkvætt sentence would
sound like ‘the tree of battle [
MAN
/
WARRIOR
]
waved the fire of wound [
SWORD
]’ or ‘the tree
of linen [
WOMAN
] served the dew of the cup
[
BEER
]’. One never
encounters phrases such as
‘King Haraldr
was the tree of battle’; this is
typical of other types of poetry which rely on
metaphors and such like for building images
and is thus absent from classical
dróttkvætt
where the syntactic function of a kenning is
that of a pronoun.
Our poem seems to have a few cases in
which this rule is broken. Stanza 1, for example
if we read the sequences
órræða-snor and
ørlyg-tróða as kennings for
WOMAN
, we find
such a case in line 1.5
Auðr var... órræða-snor
[‘Aud
was… sister of solution’] and in line 1.1
Auðr var ørlyg-tróða (see commentary below).
The poet would appear here to rely on the old
system of coining nonce poetic words, heitis as
well as kennings, and to use it inventively, yet
in a manner that stresses the gap between his
poetic idiom
and that of classical dróttkvætt.
Further, classical
dróttkvætt is not a metre
in which long strings of epithets would
normally be used. The exception to this rule is
certain usages in Christian skaldic poems, and
this could be the influence on our poem, where
such strings are encountered several times. In
stanza 3, for example, lines 3.2 and 3.3 consist
of almost nothing but adjectives describing
qualities of Kjartan, joined together without
even the verb
to be; in a similar vein are the
descriptions of Auðr in stanza 1, joined
together in something resembling sentences
coordinated via an (ellipted) conjunction ‘and’
and with the verb ‘to be’ ellipted everywhere
but in the first sentence in line 1.2. Such syntax
is alien to traditional skaldic poetry.
An example of an entirely different nature
that also shows lateness of the text is the
sequence
Þorkell Eyjólfs from line 6.1. It
stands for
Þorkell Eyjólfsson (fourth husband
of Guðrún daughter of Ósvífr). The genitive
forms like
Eyjólfs instead of full
Eyjólfsson are
not used in ON, either in prose or poetry.
Forms such as this are typical for MI, and are
usually explained as truncated patronymic
compounds that omit the
-son [‘son’] or
-dóttir
[‘daughter’] element. Truncated compounds
are indeed typical for Icelandic, however,
normally the truncated element
is not the core,
as it would be in this case, but the modifier.
Perhaps a fuller explanation for this usage
would be to regard it
as parallel to the one that
gave rise to certain Icelandic family names,
essentially a form of place-name related
nicknames, which were popular in Iceland in
the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries: e.g.
Kaldalóns in the
name of famous Icelandic composer Sigvaldi
Stefánsson Kaldalóns is identical in usage to
this
Eyjólfs, as is the ‘last name’ of Halldórr
Laxness. This
Kaldalóns-type usage, with the
nickname in the genitive coming
after the
proper name, appears to be a simple inversion
of the regular word order that is widely attested
in ON sources. Examples of personal names
plus place-name nicknames that come first are
numerous, including many famous Icelanders
such as
Tungu-Oddr [‘Oddr from Tunga’] (
tunga
[n.fem. ‘promontory formed by confluence of
two rivers’]), whose feud with Þórðr
gellir
[‘the
Bellower’],
Þorkell
Eyjólfsson’s
grandfather, resulted in splitting Iceland into
quarters, or
Síðu-Hallr [‘Hallr from the Slope’]
of
Njáls saga, a person who played a key role
in adoption of Christianity in Iceland, and
others. In the ON names, the personal name
comes last and the nickname first, thus forming
a regular compound noun; in
Kaldalóns-type
usage, the compound is split and its first part,
complete with genitive marker, is placed
second. When
Þorkell Eyjólfs in stanza 6.1 is