Scribal Understandings of Norse Eddic Metres

Old Norse poetry, particularly the corpus of narrative and gnomic verse known as Eddic poetry, forms one of the richest contributions from Scandinavia to the literary heritage of Europe.

This poetic corpus survives only through a chain of manuscript copies which separate our extant texts from the original compositions.

The aim of SUNEM is to investigate the changing understandings of metrical forms possessed by the scribes who copied and recopied Eddic poetry.

Specifically, the project will create digital texts and metrical annotations of the poems in one particular source, Hervarar saga, and use the various surviving manuscripts of this work (14th-17th centuries) as a test-case to evaluate scribal engagement with metrical norms during the Late Norse and Early Modern periods.

These poems are in three different alliterative metres, each of which shows specific rules concerning features such as syllable weight or the placement of unstressed syllables.

As scribes make changes to the texts they copy, they are sometimes careful to continue to adhere to these rules, and sometimes disregard them.

SUNEM will investigate these patterns of change with respect to these rules in order to assess copyists' varied understandings of and commtiments to older rules of Eddic metres.

These models of how scribes copied Eddic texts and conceived of the poetic forms they reproduced will be of practical use to future editors of Norse poetry, extend our understandings of traditional Norse metres beyond the Classical Norse period, and provide new perspectives on the transmission of verse.