"This book offers new dating of the poems of the Old Norse Poetic Edda, perhaps our best sources about the mythology and legends of the Viking Age. This study compares the anonymous Eddic poems to dated skaldic poems with respect to five phenomena that develop diachronically in early Old Norse: the expletive particle of, types of negation, word order, types of relative clause, and metrical criteria. After examining these dating features individually, the three most reliable criteria-the particle of, negation, and relative clause type-are combined into a multifactorial analysis using a Naïve Bayes Classifier. The classifier assigns a date to each Eddic poem, and these proposed dates have interesting implications for our understanding of these texts as sources for the medieval history, mythology, linguistics, and literature of the Germanic peoples. This book will have broad interdisciplinary interest, not just to historical linguists and philologists but also to scholars of Norse history, literature, and mythology"--.

• Dating the Old Norse Poetic Edda
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
  • 1.1 On the importance of dating Eddic poetry
  • 1.2 A brief introduction to Old Norse poetry
  • 1.3 Corpora
    • 1.3.1 The Eddic poems
    • 1.3.2 The skaldic poems
  • 1.4 Overview of book
• Chapter 2. Previous scholarship and methodological considerations
  • 2.1 The debate on the age of Eddic and skaldic poetry
    • 2.1.1 Early speculation; early scholarship
    • 2.1.2 More recent scholarship
    • 2.1.3 Dating skaldic poetry
  • 2.2 Literary scholarship on individual poems
    • 2.2.1 Vǫluspá (Vsp)
    • 2.2.2 Hávamál (Háv)
    • 2.2.3 Vafþrúðnismál (Vm)
    • 2.2.4 Grímnismál (Grm)
    • 2.2.5 Skírnismál (Skm)
    • 2.2.6 Hárbarðsljóð (Hrbl)
    • 2.2.7 Hymiskviða (Hym)
    • 2.2.8 Lokasenna (Ls)
    • 2.2.9 Þrymskviða (Þrk)
    • 2.2.10 Vǫlundarkviða (Vkv)
    • 2.2.11 Alvíssmál (Alv)
    • 2.2.12 The Helgi poems: HH I, HHv, and HH II
    • 2.2.13 Grípisspá (Grp)
    • 2.2.14 Young Sigurðr poems: Rm, Fm, and Sd
    • 2.2.15 Elegiac poems: Br, Sg, Gðr I, Hlr, Gðr II–III, and Od
    • 2.2.16 Atlakviða (Akv)
    • 2.2.17 Atlamál in grœnlenzku (Am)
    • 2.2.18 Guðrúnarhvǫt (Ghv)
    • 2.2.19 Hamðismál (Hm)
    • 2.2.20 The Eddic appendix: Bdr, Rþ, Hdl, Grt, and Svm
    • 2.2.21 Summary of proposed dates
  • 2.3 Linguistic and metrical methods for dating Old Norse poetry
    • 2.3.1 Why linguistic and metrical criteria?
    • 2.3.2 The particle of/um
    • 2.3.3 Alliteration of *vr- with r-
    • 2.3.4 Contracted vs. hiatus forms
    • 2.3.5 Syncope
    • 2.3.6 Mythological kennings
    • 2.3.7 Kuhn’s laws and Fremdstofflieder hypothesis
    • 2.3.8 Other criteria for dating Eddic poetry
    • 2.3.9 Dating skaldic poetry
  • 2.4 My assumptions and methods
    • 2.4.1 Dating the extant poem
    • 2.4.2 Selection of my dating features
• Chapter 3. The particle of/um
  • 3.1 Background
    • 3.1.1 Kuhn’s (1929) foundational study
    • 3.1.2 Fidjestøl’s use of the particle to date Eddic poetry
    • 3.1.3 Recent work on the particle in skaldic poetry
  • 3.2 The particle of/um in my Eddic corpus
    • 3.2.1 Selection of data
    • 3.2.2 Effect of independent variables
  • 3.3 The particle of/um in my skaldic corpus
    • 3.3.1 Selection of data
    • 3.3.2 Effect of independent variables
    • 3.3.3 Combining the two genres
  • 3.4 Discussion
• Chapter 4. Change in negation markers
  • 4.1 Background
    • 4.1.1 Negation types in Old Norse
    • 4.1.2 Negation as a dating criterion
  • 4.2 Negation in my Eddic corpus
    • 4.2.1 Selection of data
    • 4.2.2 Comparison of rankings
    • 4.2.3 Effect of date
  • 4.3 Negation in my skaldic corpus
    • 4.3.1 Selection of data
    • 4.3.2 Effect of date
    • 4.3.3 Combining the two genres
  • 4.4 Discussion
• Chapter 5. Verb placement in subordinate clauses
  • 5.1 Background
    • 5.1.1 Old Norse word order in prose and poetry
    • 5.1.2 Kuhn’s laws and Old Norse word order
    • 5.1.3 Evaluations of Kuhn’s hypotheses
    • 5.1.4 Word order in specific meters
    • 5.1.5 An alternative to the Fremdstofflieder hypothesis
  • 5.2 Verb order in my Eddic corpus
    • 5.2.1 Selection of data
    • 5.2.2 Comparison of rankings
    • 5.2.3 Effect of independent variables
  • 5.3 Discussion
• Chapter 6. Relative clause types
  • 6.1 Background
  • 6.2 Relative markers in my Eddic corpus
    • 6.2.1 Selection of data
    • 6.2.2 Comparison of rankings
    • 6.2.3 Effect of independent variables
  • 6.3 Relative markers in my skaldic corpus
    • 6.3.1 Selection of data
    • 6.3.2 Effect of independent variables
    • 6.3.3 Combining the two genres
  • 6.4 Discussion
• Chapter 7. Metrical criteria for dating
  • 7.1 Selection of metrical criteria for this study
  • 7.2 Variation in metrical types
    • 7.2.1 Previous studies of type variation
    • 7.2.2 The Eddic data
    • 7.2.3 Comparison of rankings
    • 7.2.4 Effect of independent variables in Eddic corpus
  • 7.3 Increase in heavy dips
    • 7.3.1 Previous study: Myrvoll (2014)
    • 7.3.2 The Eddic data
    • 7.3.3 Comparison of rankings
    • 7.3.4 Effect of independent variables in Eddic corpus
  • 7.4 Discussion
• Chapter 8. A multivariate system of dating Eddic poetry
  • 8.1 Background
    • 8.1.1 Text classification with Naïve Bayes Classifiers
    • 8.1.2 Applying Naïve Bayes Classifiers to philology
  • 8.2 Dating Eddic poems by the Naïve Bayes Classifier
    • 8.2.1 Training the model on the skaldic data
    • 8.2.2 The NBC model and its application to the Eddic poems
  • 8.3 Implications of the proposed dates
    • 8.3.1 Comparison to classifications by other scholars
    • 8.3.2 Evaluation of other dating criteria
    • 8.3.3 On the ages of the individual poems
  • 8.4 Discussion and conclusion
• References
• Appendix 1. The meters of Eddic and skaldic poetry
• Appendix 2. Summaries of the Eddic poems
• Appendix 3. Instances of the particle of/um in the corpora
  • Particle of in my Eddic corpus
  • Particle of in my skaldic corpus
• Appendix 4. Instances of negation in the corpora
  • Clitic ne in my Eddic corpus (29 instances)
  • ne … -at in my Eddic corpus (13 instances)
  • Clitic -at in my Eddic corpus (246 instances)
  • eigi/ekki in my Eddic corpus (42 instances)
  • Clitic ne in my skaldic corpus (17 instances)
  • ne … -at in my skaldic corpus (2 instances)
  • Clitic -at in my skaldic corpus (86 instances)
  • eigi/ekki in my skaldic corpus
• Appendix 5. Verb order in subordinate clauses in the Eddic corpus
  • Verb-first (98 instances)
  • Verb-second (148 instances)
  • Clause-final (295 instances)
  • Line-final (63 instances)
  • Clause-late (31 instances)
  • Ambiguous order (344 instances)
• Appendix 6. Relative markers in the corpora
  • Relative clauses with only er in my Eddic corpus (142 instances)
  • Relative clauses with adjacent sá er in my Eddic corpus (172 instances)
  • Relative clauses with sá distant from er in my Eddic corpus (78 instances)
  • Other relative clauses in my Eddic corpus
    • hinn adjacent or distant to er (8 instances)
    • hverr adjacent or distant to er (11 instances)
    • sem (4 instances)
  • Relative clauses with only er in my skaldic corpus (27 instances)
  • Relative clauses with adjacent sá er in my skaldic corpus (157 instances)
  • Relative clauses with sá distant from er in my skaldic corpus (14 instances)
  • Other relative clause types in the skaldic corpus
    • hinn adjacent or distant to er (27 clauses)
    • hverr adjacent or distant to er (8 clauses)
• Index