Dating the Old Norse Poetic Edda : a multifactorial analysis of linguistic features /
Christopher D. Sapp.
- Amsterdam ; Philadelphia : John Benjamins Publishing Company, (c)2022.
- 1 online resource.
- Studies in Germanic linguistics, volume 5 .
Includes bibliographies and index.
Previous scholarship and methodological considerations -- The particle of/um -- Change in negation markers -- Verb placement in subordinate clauses -- Relative clause types -- Metrical criteria for dating -- A multivariate system of dating Eddic poetry.
"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"--
902725771X 9789027257710
2022012138
Edda Sæmundar--Criticism, Textual.
Eddas--History and criticism. Old Norse poetry--History and criticism. Manuscripts, Old Norse. Manuscript dating.