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372
Craigie: Skaldic Metre.
drifgftij at Harald fallinn, i huga stnum. It has, of course,
been customary to interpret these as X £ X | ~ X, taking the
ZX to represent the J- of the C-type; but as strict skaldic
verse recognizes no C-line, this explanation is scarcely
satisfactory. From what we have seen in §§ 15, 16 it seems
fairly certain that all lines began with a stress, reduced in
certain cases to a ^, and if we suppose this to be the case
here, and give the dissyllable the same value that we have
assigned to it in such lines as jarlmanns bant snarla, we
can quite well understand why i huga stnum is admissible
in strict metre, while seift hug leikinn is not.
§ 24. In the forms of lines exemplified in § 2 and
discussed in the earlier part of this article, the substantive
in the fourth place is always preceded by an unstressed
syllable. With comparatively few exceptions this is always the
case in dr6ttkvaett, but these exceptions are worth
investigating. In Skjaldekvad I have found only one example,
Einar’s line (6) eru til mins fjors margir, and it is doubtful
how much reliance can be placed on the text of so old a
verse *): in any case one line out of 2000 is not much
evidence for the correctness of the type. In the verses of the
sagas examples are equally scanty or indecisive. In Egils
Saga (c. 400 lines) there are two, lei/cum s&rt hal bleikan,
and jafn vas m6r gnyr geira (c. 64); both verses are
spurious. In Korm&ks Saga (c. 650 lines) there are no
instances, and the same remark applies to Gisla S. (272
lines), F6stbrsedra S. (264 lines), Bjarnar S. (240 lines)
and so on 2).
All the early dr&pur avoid the type, and the first clear
example in Heimskringla is on p. 446 (after 1050) Kdlfr
*) The verse, however, is not among the three cited in Fagrskinna.
If it is worth while to make a conjecture, we might read Mins fj&rs eru
margir, supposing that mins fjors gjarnir could mean ’eager for my life’.
a) The first verse in Flj6tsdoela S. has minna fair’s styr vinna.
Hallfrect’s ver munum dag hvern dyrra ought also to be mentioned here.
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