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The Passive Constructions in the 16th and 17th century Danish and Swedish
The paper discusses the diachronic developments the passive voice constructions, morphological s-passive and periphrastic bli-passive, in closely related North Germanic languages, Danish and Swedish. The point of departure is the different distribution of the constructions, as well as their different semantics, in modern languages. The study is based on a corpus of late 16th and 17th century texts, which have been annotated for a number of factors connected with voice and tense. The results show that although the modern passive system is not yet fully formed in either language, by the end of the 17th century significant differences between the languages have already arisen, with respect to the distribution of the passive constructions. In particular, the results show that the Danish s-passive is found with modal verbs to a higher extent than the s-passive in Swedish. At the same time, the bli-passive in both languages is connected with animate subjects.
Den fornsvenska Apostlagärningarna i den svenska bibelöversättningens historia
An Old Swedish translation of Acts of the Apostles is preserved in MS Stockholm, Kungliga biblioteket, A 110, which was written the year 1385 or some years after in the newly established birgittine Vadstena monastery. One part of Chapter 9, in which Saul is struck to the ground by God on his way to Damascus, also appears in two fifteenth century manuscripts in a collection of legends, most of them derived from Legenda aurea. This legend text has been believed to have been copied from the Acts translation (Ståhle 1940), but a close study reveals that the legend text likely predated the Acts translation and was incorporated in it. The time and place of of the Acts translation is discussed from various perspectives and it is suggested, in line with Anderssons’s (2001) interpretation of the MS A 110, that it was carried out for the use within the Vadstena monastery, inaugurated in 1384.
This article deals with the puzzling fact that the manuscript AM 28 8vo, ‘Codex runicus’, was chosen as base manuscript in the most recent scholarly edition of the old provincial law of Scania, prepared by Johs. Brøndum-Nielsen in 1933. Like all his predecessors as editors of the law, Brøndum-Nielsen wanted to use the manuscript which preserved the most archaic language available, and according to his own research in the nineteen twenties this language was not represented by Codex runicus, but by the totally neglected or misjudged manuscripts Stockholm B 69 and B 74. In a retrospective view of the scholarly editions of the law hitherto published (Stockholm 1676, Copenhagen 1853, Lund 1859 and Copenhagen 1933), Brøndum-Nielsen’s choice would rather seem to be the last stroke in a protracted Swedish-Danish ping-pong match concerning which manuscript of the law was the oldest and had the most archaic language. Inevitably, the only two contemporaries among the editors, the sensitive P.G. Thorsen (1853) and the belligerent C.J. Schlyter (1859), got into a rather unfortunate confrontation, also involving the solitary Danish philologist, Edwin Jessen. The article offers a brief presentation of editors as well as editions, and an attempt is made to identify the historical, ideological, scholarly and/or practical reasoning behind each choice, Brøndum-Nielsen’s in the 1933 edition included. – Codex runicus is introduced separately as a most important, although very tricky, player in the story.
The newly born definite article spreads along two paths – a theoretical discussion and a case study in Old Scandinavian
This article contains an investigation of the spread of the definite article in Old Scandinavian on its way towards obligatorification from the very scant use of the newly born article. On an overall level, it turns out that the process is significantly earlier in West Norse than in East Norse. The empirical analysis is preceded by a theoretical discussion of which referential categories there is reason to distinguish, alongside the (direct and indirect) anaphora, where the development is generally assumed to begin, as definite articles normally arise from demonstratives in anaphoric use. When it comes to the non-anaphoric NPs, it is argued, with inspiration from Löbner 2011, that there is reason to pay regard to whether or not the head noun expresses inherent uniqueness and/or relationality. This view is confirmed by the empirical analysis, which shows that scribes can be significantly more as well as significantly less inclined to use the definite article in NPs with such features than in NPs without. Moreover, this result suggests that definiteness marking does not progress strictly linearly along one single path, contrary to what various models in the literature presume (including the scale of uniqueness in Löbner 2011). Instead, a two-path model is proposed.
This article deals with a runic inscription scratched into the plaster on one of the inner walls of the tower of Vallstena church on Gotland. The inscription was discovered in 1924 and is published as G 235b in the preliminary manuscript of the third volume of Gotlands runinskrifter, but with a very cautious reading and no interpretation. The present author argues that it can be read as so͡ltiọrurfir[ar]ṇoyiþr, which seems to render a runic cipher based on the rune names and spelling out the word stufan i.e. stuvan ‘the cottage’. This word appears also two times carved with runes on the same wall surface (stufan G 235c and stuf-‑ G 235e). It is not fully clear why this word was hidden in cryptic runes, but it might be some kind of pun referring to church towers used as hospices for pilgrims or temporary dwellings during trouble times.
Jackie Nordström has recently presented a new reading of the runes at the Ribe skull. She claims that the two words dvärg ‘dwarf’ and dvärgynja ‘female dwarf, dwarfess’ occur in the inscription, written tuiᴀrki and tuirkuniu (both words in dative singular). She transcribes them dværgi and dværgyniu, i.e. with æ, which in both cases is unlikely. Instead, the words should be transcribed as dwiargi and dwergynju – the first word with a breaking e > ia. Broken forms of this word are well attested in some Swedish dialects as djärg, järg or järv. In the end of the inscription the pronoun þaim probably is dative plural, referring forward to both the dwarf and the dwarfess.
Recension: Objekt i svenskans historia. En studie av varierande objektsplacering i fornsvenska
Håkansson, D., professor of Swedish language, Department of Scandinavian languages, Uppsala University. Review of Mikael Berger, Objekt i svenskans historia. En studie av varierande objektsplacering i fornsvenska (English summary). ANF 138 (2023), pp. 191–198.
Recension: Dansk Sproghistorie 6. Forfatternes dansk
Krogh, S., associate professor of German Linguistics, School of Communication and Culture – German, Aarhus University. Review of Dansk Sproghistorie 6. Forfatternes dansk (Danish Language History 6. The Danish of Authors). ANF 138 (2023), pp. 181–190.
In the Nordic countries, municipal courts experienced a vast increase in the production and use of administrative and juridical records during the Early Modern period. Among other external factors, in Sweden, this intensification can be linked to the steadily increasing use since the fourteenth century of the vernacular as the written language in legal contexts. With the establishment of the Svea Court of Appeal in Stockholm (1614), it was decided that all lower courts would send their records there. In consequence, town scribes, in addition to writing a draft (in Swedish koncept) and a transcript (renskrift), had to formulate yet another version of the court record for the higher court (renovation). This led to a dynamic writing process: differing versions of the court record were created, each one written at a different time for a somewhat different purpose and with different requirements in terms of content and linguistic style, but all of them legally valid. Empirical comparisons show there may be vast differences between the first draft and the edited transcript, both in style and content, with the second text a modified version, with greater use of legal linguistic markers. In this article, we discuss the empirical and theoretical aspects of the textual transmission of court records in Early Modern Sweden. We focus on Stockholm municipal court records 1634 in draft and transcript and analyse the scribal strategies in the two versions. First, we present a comparative analysis of the versions and describe how the draft and transcript were rephrased and stylized. Second, we present a material-philological analysis of the manuscripts in order to enhance the discussion of the function and use of the versions. The study shows that the town scribe Eggert Matsson Aurelius has made use of the following strategies when transforming the draft into a transcript: copying, rephrasing, expanding, summarising, and omitting.
Uppbyggjingi av Fagrskinna B og sunnmørsættleggene
The manuscript known as Fagrskinna B was destroyed in the fire of Copenhagen in 1728. Its text has been preserved, however, in three academic transcripts from the late seventeenth century. The transcripts show that the manuscript had several lacunae, and some uncertainty about the location of these lacunae within the original manuscript has persisted. This article presents a new reconstruction of the quire structure of the manuscript and the placement of the lacunae, based on a comparison with transcripts of the sister manuscript Fagrskinna A, as well as the only surviving fragment of B, NRA 51. This reconstruction demonstrates that the genealogy called Arnmœðlingatal is complete in the transcripts. Moreover, the reconstruction reveals that the manuscript had a conspicuous blank space, spanning over one and a half page, which provides the key to understanding the connection between Fagrskinna B and some genealogies regarding families in Sunnmøre that Dr. Henrik Høyer (d. 1615/16) copied into AM 22 fol. at a time he had access to Fagrskinna B in Bergen.
Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements) is one of the most important historical texts composed in medieval Iceland. It describes in considerable detail the settlement of Iceland by the Norse in the ninth and tenth centuries. In this article the key differences between the three medieval versions of Landnámabók are analysed. It is argued that there is very little material in later versions which can be traced directly to this earliest version which was purportedly composed in the twelfth century. However, it is argued that two lost versions from the early thirteenth century are likely to have influenced later versions. The surviving versions of Landnámabók were all composed during the first decades of royal rule in Iceland. In these versions the emphasis is placed on the status and nobility of the settlers, who are depicted as involved in high politics in Norway before their move to Iceland. However, there are notable differences between each of three surviving versions from that time, which reflect the different viewpoint of the redactors
This article goes through the different interpretations of the Rök runestone that have been proposed during the last 120 years and presents new contributions to the so-called standard interpretation. It is proposed that the function of the Rök runestone was to give the death-doomed son answers to certain questions about the Einherjar and Ragnarök that he supposedly would be asked upon his entrance into Valhǫll. The motif and the questions are similar to those of Vafþrúðnismál, Alvíssmál and Gylfaginning. The Rök runestone should hence be seen as wisdom poetry, as defined by de Vries (1934) and Schorn (2017). Later interpretations that particularly deviate from the one proposed (Ralph 2007, 2021, Holmberg et al. 2020, Williams 2021) are scrutinized and partly argued against. I do not agree that the runestone deals with the sun and its demise but maintain that it i.a. contains a drapa over the mythological hero Dietrich/Þjóðrekr/Þiðrekr of Bern. A completely new interpretation is offered for question 12, which is read as hværʀ hæstʀ sē kunnaʀi ’t vēttvąngi æn kunungaʀ tvæiʀtigiʀ svāð ą̄ liggia ’Which horse is more famous on the battlefield than twenty kings that lie on it?’ The answer must be Sleipnir, the horse that Ōðinn rides on when he gathers the Einherjar on the battlefield. By using 3D-scans of the runestone, the last rune on line 23 is read as u (in agreement with von Friesen 1920) instead of l. With shift cipher, it yields the word niþʀ niðʀ ’descendant’. Moreover, the last rune on the top side of the stone is read as s instead of i, which yields the form vīavars ’of the temple warden’, which in agreement with Vǫluspá and Hymniskviða is interpreted as a heiti for ÞōrR. In partial agreement with Ralph (2007, 2021) lines 26–27 are interpreted as Ōl ne ryðr sifi Vīavars ’The troll woman never clears away the relative of the temple warden’. The troll woman is interpreted as a heiti for the axe, as described in Skáldskaparmál 61 and ’the relative of the temple warden’ as a kenning for Þōrs son, named in the previous question. The meaning is that Þōrs son will never die on the battlefield, which is explained by Vafþrúðnismál 51, which says that Þórs sons will survive Ragnarök. Thus, the whole ciphered section gets a coherent interpretation, as opposed to previous proposals.
Corrigenda to "The etymology of the Nordic negative enclitic -a/-(a)t" (ANF 136)
Eric T. Lander has submitted a corrigenda to his article, ”The etymology of the Nordic negative enclitic -a/-(a)t”, published in ANF 136.
Er politiet sikker eller sikre? Adjektivkongruens ved kollektiver i norsk
This is an empirical study of adjectival agreement in Norwegian. We investigate sentences with a collective noun as a subject and a predicative adjective in the singular or plural. On the basis of data from two corpora and a survey, we demonstrate that plural agreement is widespread in Norwegian sentences of the relevant type. The following factors are shown to be significantly associated with the choice between singular and plural: animacy and semantic type of subject, distance between subject and predicative adjective, adjective vs. participle, and the adjective’s role as an indicator of agency. The corpus data are analyzed by means of a logistic regression model.
The scribes of the Gráskinna manuscript of Njáls saga. Observations on scribal contact and social identity
The Gráskinna manuscript of Njáls saga, GKS 2870 4to, dated to around 1300, is the work of four contemporary scribes, Scribe B, who is responsible for writing the bulk of the text, and three others, Scribes A, C, and D, who wrote shorter sections. The Gráskinna manuscript thus offers an opportunity to study the collaboration of four seasoned scribes and compare different aspects of scribal practice. In this paper, one orthographic feature, the denotation of the dental fricative /þ/ in non-initial position, is used as a case study exploring scribal contact and social identity. The scribes differ in the denotation of the dental fricative, and it is suggested that among scribes and readers these differences may have had social and cultural connotations at the time, contrasting at once conventional against modern scribal practice and Icelandic as opposed to Norwegian scribal tradition. It is proposed that contact with Scribes C and D motivated Scribe B to alter his orthographic practice midway in his work, effectively dissociating himself with Scribes C and D and identifying instead with the exemplar from which they copied the text.
Kaos og kapital. Et tredje mønster i islændingesagaerne?
This article is an attempt to understand the significance of money and capital in relation to honor and the larger value system of the sagas of Icelanders. Even though men of honor in the sagas are often rich, money is – in itself – not a value to which the saga writers attach great importance in their assessment of human beings. On the other hand, the saga writers are by no means disinterested in money, and the heroes’ behavior with money has direct impact on their honor and status in society. The article is thus not preoccupied with the historical value that gold, silver or cattle had in the Middle Ages or in the age of the sagas, rather it studies the relationship and behavior of the saga heroes to economic capital and the significance that capital has in the society of the sagas. The saga writers did not lack a theory of how to behave around money. The value system of the sagas appears to follow advice and rules in the Bible about how to behave with money and debt. According to the sagas and the Bible, money is a perilous power that must be handled with extreme caution.
Skalds against ‘the System’.The Kennings of Þjóðolfr Arnórsson’s Harvest Metaphor
The four helmingar recently edited as stanzas 27–29 of Sexstefja (‘Six-Refrained [Drápa]’) share similarities in imagery and structure. In the past, various scholars had therefore construed them as one thematic sequence containing a running metaphor on different moments of the agricultural cycle. The present article supports this idea by addressing a number of textual difficulties which have contributed to obscuring the metaphor’s unity. By discussing the problematic readings and by addressing some well-established biases of modern kenning scholarship – such as a dogmatic avoidance of overdetermined kennings – the present article aims at improving our understanding of the text while, at the same time, re-evaluating some methodological premises to the interpretation of skaldic verse. When editorial guidelines become too strict, inferences predicated on the alleged regularities of the so-called ‘kenning system’ may, in fact, compromise the poem’s internal logic. Rather, an investigation of the text’s possible poetic precedents may prove helpful, shedding light on the trade-off between the skald’s innovativeness and his indebtedness to tradition.
Bo Ralph has recently in his publication on the Rök stone argued for a new and different analysis of some aspects of the phonology and orthography of the inscription. He claims that in the words faþiʀ ’father’, histʀ ’horse’ and fatlaþʀ ’buckled’ the last rune ʀ is used analogically (instead of r) to express the morphological category of nominative masculine singular. However, there is a simpler phonological explanation for this: The Rök stone represents a stage of language development where the palatal assimilation ir > iʀ has occurred, but not yet assimilation from a dental or alveolar consonant resulting in ʀ > r. This claim of Ralph in one instance has bearing on the interpretation of the text. He suggests that the word miʀ should be understood as mæʀʀ ’famous’. The expected form however should be mærr with an assimilation rʀ > rr, but Ralph also here suggests that the palatal ʀ is a morphological nominative marker, a very unlikely claim without the sup-port from faþiʀ, histʀ and fatlaþʀ. It is also improbable that the i-rune in miʀ should be understood as æ, since this elsewhere in the inscription is written as ɑ (with the possible exception of histʀ ’horse’, which however could be explained as hestʀ < hæistʀ). Ralph describes the orthography of the Rök stone as basically phonematic and morphologizing, but it does not differ in principle from the usual runic orthography before the introduction of dotted runes, a broad phonetic orthography.
Watching Star Wars with Viking Age Subtitles
The famous early Viking Age Rök runestone inscription has been considered missing linguistic links which would have shown how its passages are connected. This study challenges these previous assumptions. It shows, to the contrary, that the riddles of the front side can be understood as closely connected to riddles of the opposite side. A key to the interpretation is that the riddles are taken to concern what is visible from the stone: the lunar changes of the year, the sunrise at the autumn equinox and the movement of stars the same night – all conceived as dimensions of an ongoing cosmological battle.
Skärpning i den estlandssvenska dialekten på Stora Rågö
Until the end of the Second World War, Swedish dialects were spoken on the northwestern coast of Estonia. There, on the small island of Stora Rågö, the dialect had a phonetic feature in which -ggv- or -gg(j)- appeared between two vowels: e.g. troggver ‘think’, äggja ‘the island’. The results of this study show that these stop insertions are almost identical in form to the sound law known as Verschärfung, appearing in Old Norse and Gothic, as well as in modern Faroese. Comparisons between the Stora Rågö dialect and Faroese, in particular, show that the Stora Rågö insertions also seem to appear in a similar phonetic context as the Faroese equivalents. It is therefore argued that the stop insertions in the dialect of Stora Rågö is a fourth case of Germanic Verschärfung.
This article offers a primarily linguistic analysis of the language used by Halldór Laxness in his novel Gerpla (1952), compairing that language with Old Icelandic. This linguistic description has multiple prongs, as it examines the novel’s orthography and phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. It compares the novel’s language to the linguistic model followed by Laxness, Old Icelandic, and for what concerns the lexicon, Fóstbræðra saga, the novel’s primary literary model. No attempt was made to provide a detailed analysis of the literary models for this novel, since such a venture is clearly beyond the scope of this investigation. The results of the linguistic inquiry may be summarized by saying that the novel’s language is a variant of Modern Icelandic from the phonological standpoint but it remarkably adheres to 14th-century Old Icelandic for what concerns morphology (with a few exceptions) and syntax. The lexicon is overall richer than that of the sagas of the Icelanders. Even the longest of them, Njáls saga, has a significantly smaller lexicon. Finally, based upon a close inspection of the corrections Jón Helgason (1899–1986) made on the proofs of the novel, a philological appraisal of his contribution to the shaping of the language in Gerpla is offered, concluding that Jón Helgason had a crucial influence on the final form of the novel’s language.
The Significance of Script Proportions in the Medieval Swedish Charter Script
This article focuses on the extraction, measuring and evaluation of script pro­portions in the medieval Swedish charter script. The methods for the extraction and the measuring are taken from the field of digital image processing, and the material consists of a selection of charters constituting ground truth regarding the identity of the scribe. In these charters, the scribes explicitly state that he (only males in the material) has written with his own hand. The script proportions in this context mean the relative difference between the script elements of medium height, e.g. minims, and high elements such as ascenders and low elements such as descenders. The results show that the scribes are fairly consequent regarding the script proportions. The charters produced by the same scribe in most cases hold a similar value, even though there are incidental outliers. The earliest scribes of the corpus, active in the earlier part of the 14th century, differ from the later scribes in that they have longer ascenders than the rest. This can be interpreted from a chronological perspective, in that the script may have become more compressed during the later part of the 14th century. Scribes could also vary the script proportions for codi­cological reasons, if the space demanded that the lines must be placed close to each other. There is also an element of incidental variation, meaning that the scribes actually were not altogether consistent in this respect.
The etymology of the Nordic negative enclitic -a/-(a)t
This paper provides a critical assessment of the etymological hypotheses that have been put forth through the years for ON -a/-(a)t ‘not’, a negative particle suffixed to finite verbs, found in Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian. The four main etymologies evaluated are: (i) the connector/generalizing particle PGmc *-(u)hw (cf. Go. -uh); (ii) the numeral for ‘one’, PGmc *ainã/*ainat- (cf. Go. ain, ainata); (iii) the (negative) indefinite phrases PGmc *(n-)aiwa- ‘(n)ever’ and *(n-)aiwa-weht- ‘(n)ever a thing’; and finally (iv) -(a)t as an extended version of -a, with -t originally a second person singular marker, i.e. *ā (< *ai) ‘ever’ + 2sg *-t. Etymology (iv) is a new hypothesis, and much of the paper is spent testing it, using evidence from the Poetic Edda. It turns out that there is good support for etymology (iv). Still, it is difficult to decide the question once and for all, and progress on this front depends mostly on the prospect of new empirical material emerging, in particular new runic inscriptions.
The Origin of the Periphrastic Future in Old Norse
The article investigates the linguistic conditions under which future periphrasis emerged in Old Norse (or its predecessor). Old Norse holds a special position within the Germanic branch since it was the first language where a future periphrastic construction was grammaticalized and became the main means of referring to the future, while other old Germanic languages mostly used the present tense in future meaning. The principal exponent of the Old Norse periphrastic future was the auxiliary verb munu, attested in this function as early as the 9th century. It is argued that it expressed a remarkably non-modal future and that it had also developed an early epistemic use which is derived from the futural meaning. This, as well as the morphological development of munu, is indicative of an early origin of the periphrastic future. In order to account for that it is argued, through comparison with other Germanic languages, that Proto-Germanic made use of verbal prefixes (particularly *ga-) to provide present tense forms with perfective aspect, and hence with future meaning. Since unaccented prefixes were all lost in North Germanic at an early point, future periphrasis with the verb munu started to develop as a reaction to the loss. It is further argued that another unique feature of the Old Norse verbal system, the use of the historical present, is also linked to this process. The early development of a future periphrastic construction is considered an important syntactic change, setting apart the North Germanic tense system from the West and East Germanic ones.