Hi Scott,
Which version are you working from? I'm I don't know much about the
dating of Old Norse poems, but I gather that the poem dealing with the
war of the Huns and Goths, around which the final chapters of Hervarar
saga are
based, is supposed to be of similar age to the oldest poems
of the Elder Edda. In his introduction to the Viking Society edition,
Christopher Tolkien compares it to Hamðismál for "great variation in
the syllabic length of its lines". He talks about a possible
`pre-Norse' layer in the poem, suggested by the unusual sense of
certain words. That is to say that it may have been based on an
earlier version in some West Germanic language. Turville-Petre notes
in the above mentioned edition that skálkr is used here in the sense
of `servant', as are its equivalents in Gothic, Old English and Old
High German, while the normal meaning in Old Norse is `rogue', and
that skattr, which normally means `tax, tribute' in early texts, here
has the sense `treasure, wealth', as can OE sceatt and OHG scaz; so
too in the expression `Niflunga skattr' in Snorri's Edda. The formula
drekka ok doema `drink and speak' has been likened to OE druncon
and
drymdon `drank and made merry' (Genesis 2781), OS druncan dromead
(Heliand 2054). The expression rymr var í ranni `there was a
commotion in the hall' is reminiscent of glamr var í höllu (Hamðismál
18) and rósta varð í ranni (Ragnarsdrápa 3), but I don't know if it's
possible to tell which is oldest. It may have been a set formula
older than any of these poems. In any case, it fits the context in each.
Besides the large number of unstressed syllables in some lines,
another feature which might point to an early date is the irregular
length of certain strophes, although in some cases these might just be
the result of strophes being shortened as parts of them where turned
into prose, or parts forgotten or lost in the course of transmission,
or of parts of originally separate strophes being joined together.
The confused state of the poem and the corruption of some lines could
imply a long textual history. It's been observed
that, unusually for
Eddic verse in fornaldarsögur, this poem contains narrative sections
as well as dialogue, which may not say much about its age, except that
it adds to the evidence that the poem predates the prose text that
it's embedded in. One linguistic test that has been used to date Old
Norse poems is based on the idea that the expletive particle of/um is
supposed to have declined in frequency. of (the earlier form?)
appears a couple of times in the poem: þeim er of fara `those who
travel'; her of samna `muster an army'. I don't know how that
compares with Eddic poems of comparable length, or whether any
statistical significance can be read into that.
A book which I haven't read, but which sounds useful: The Dating of
Eddic Poetry by Bjarne Fidjestøl, edited by Odd Einar Haugen,
Bibliotheca Arnemagnæana 41, C.A. Reitels Forlag, Copenhagen.
According to Peter Orton's review in Saga Book XXVI, 2002, this is
quite
sceptical of the linguistic methods traditionally used to date
these poems. Cf. also John Lindow: "the dating of eddic
poems...remains all but insoluble, and to the extent that poems may
have been recomposed or changed during transmission, it loses
importance" (`Mythology and Mythography' in Old Norse - Icelandic
Literature). On the other hand, linguistic dating issues are dealt
with in the new Frankfurt commentary to the Poetic Edda (Kommentar zu
den Liedern der Edda, published by Universitätsverlag Winter). If you
read German, you can get an idea of the topics addressed from the
online pdf of their provisional index of grammatical and phonetic
phenomena in volumes 2-4, third from the top [
http://www.skandina vistik.uni- frankfurt. de/edda/download / ].
As far as I know, there isn't anything in the form, as such, of the
word Tyrfingr that
pinpoints a particular date, but together with the
other names, the fact that it's used in this context implies that the
poem preserves an ancient oral tradition, rather than being purely a
13th century Icelandic creation. The names Tyrfingr and
Grýting(a-liði) are probably Norse forms of the Gothic tribal names
recording in Latin as Tervingi and Greutungi (not equivalent to
Visigoth and Ostrogoth, according to the historian Peter Heather).
The line `eða Tyrfing í tvau deila' seems to refer to something other
than the cursed sword that bears this name in the framing prose,
perhaps to the nation itself or their territory (more evidence that
poem and prose weren't composed together). Of particular interest is
the name Harfaða fjöll which is thought to be the name of the
Carpathian Mountains, inherited from Proto-Germanic (rather than a
later borrowing from some Latin source), hence the change from [k] to
[h] in the initial
consonant. Other place-names too suggest that the
tradition originated among people with at least some awareness the
political geography of eastern Europe at the time of the Goths.
Danparstöðum is most likely `the banks of the Dniepr' (which Jordanes
calls Danaper). Less precisely, Árheimar could mean
`river-settlements' . Christopher Tolkien suggested that the Jassar
fjöllum of the poem are the Jeseník mountains on the northern border
of the present-day Czech Republic, and that the Norse form and the
German Gesenke are corruptions of the Slavic name which means `ash
mountain'. Dúnheiðr may be the Danube heath/plain, or is perhaps
derived from the name of another river, the Dvina.
Incidentally, the infinitive of albúinn (allbúinn) is búa, which has
the past 3rd person plural bjoggu / bjuggu. The word is also used in
medieval prose and in Modern Icelandic.
A number of personal names, as you probably know, are also found
in
the Old English poem Widsith. The name of Heidrek's Hunnish concubine
Sifka matches Old English Sifeca, Middle High German Sibeche. The
fact that this character is a woman in the Norse version, but a man in
West Germanic, could be another clue that the tradition came from the
south, since West Germanic had masculine ôn-stem nouns, while North
Germanic treated this ending as feminine.
Llama Nom
--- In
norse_course@ yahoogroups. com, Scott Schroder
<speculum_terra_ incognito@ ...> wrote:
>
> Hello -
>
> I'm experiencing extraordinary difficulty with e-mail; this either
did not go out or I simply didn't recieve it back from the list when I
sent it previously. If the latter is the case, I apologize for
therepetition.
>
> I'm on the last few pages of translating of one of the three
variants of Hervarar saga og
Heidreks. In addition, I've been writing
about the some of the themes in the saga and their corollaries in the
traditions of other Indo European cultures, in history, etc. I am
curiousto what extent linguistic evidence could further indicate the
origin of various elements of the text. For instance, the final
episode, wherein there is a confrontation between Hunnish and Gothic
armies, is frequently noted to be based on real conflicts between
these groups that likely took place in the late 4th century, but
certainly before a significant degree of assimilation into Roman
culture took place. I read in the Wikipedia entry for the saga that
the forms of the Gothic names used in the saga precede Roman
influence, including that of the sword Tyrfing. The Gothic episode in
the saga is extremely different in character from the preceding text,
and gives an immediate and pronounced impression of
> composition seperate from the rest of the
saga. I noticed one case
where this can be quantitatively established in the language of the
Gothic/Hunnish episode, in that compound adjectives starting with
"all" are used frequently, such as allbuin as the past participle of
bjugga, in this case meaning "all prepared".
>
> I am wondering to what extent ON text can be dated on linguistic
grounds. I know the compositional dates of the poetic Eddas is not a
matter of scholarly consensus and that deliberate archaism is always
going to be an issue in this kind of material, particularly
fornaldsaga. Can anyone refer me to a good text on analyzing
linguistic features of ON text to establish dating? Also, does anyone
know of good papers on the dates of Hervarar saga og Heidreks and on
dating sagas in general? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thank you.
>
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