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Craigie: Skaldic Metre.
349
The testimony of HSfuftlausn is all the more valuable,
because in a riming poem there would be the very strongest
reasons for using a long full-stressed syllable to end the
line. But Egill never once falls into this, and it was pro*
bably also avoided by Gunnlaug in his dr&pa on Earl Sig~
trygg, as the fourteen lines which remain of this give only
the forms brag, lag) kon, son) skil and hrce, ska. These
facts cast some suspicion on the genuineness of .Skallagrim’s
verse with the riming words htfnd: tfnd, 6m : b6rn\ and
perhaps Ordmqgqfiim is not quite so old as the days of
Bj6rn. Not before J>j6d61fs lines on King Harald hardr&di
(CPB. II. 211) do we have certain evidence that even in
riming poems such an ending as krok or rettr was
per-missible.
Even under the difficulties of toglag neither Sigvat
nor |>6rarinn abandon the universal rule. In Sigvat’s
Knfits-dr&pa (76 lines) there are 15 examples of nouns in the
fourth place of the line, and they are all of the usual types
(gram, byr, gnod’) etc. Id, rd) with the exception of Knutr,
but the fact is that proper names often form an exception
to ordinary rules in all skaldic verse (see specially § 17
below). In j*6rarin’s 40 lines the cases in point are 7, and
the nouns are f6r (2), hqf, lib\ Staff, Stim, Nifr.
§ 10. Though the foregoing is sufficient in itself to show
that correct fornyrdislag was subject to the same rules as
dr6ttkveett on this point, it would be unwise to overlook the
evidence of the poems by Gisl Illugason and Ivarr
Ingimund-arson, since these are. our first dated examples of long
compositions in this metre. There is no need to go into statistics;
any one who glances over the 160 lines of the one poem or
the 320 of the other will see that they never deviate from the
rule, with the single exception of tvarr’s Uk skjtildr vifr skj6ld.
’) Not gn6d as often printed. WiseVs alteration of the corrupt line
fmndr of fundr to fundar umb Ondr is plainly wrong.
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