POETRY IN THE INSCRIPTIONS IN YOUNGER RUNES

Abstract

Although the corpus of poetic inscriptions in younger runes has in the main been established in early Scandinavian scholarship, the structure and formulaic character of inscriptions have not yet been subjected to detailed research. In the paper, the structure of poetic runic texts has been described in the light of the hypothesis of the isochrony of bars, admitting an occasional lengthening of short syllables and shortening of long syllables. The formulaic structure is most clearly seen in the younger runic inscriptions on memorial stones. The formula is based on a constant alliterating pair (cf., for example, standa ‘to stand’ — steinn ‘stone’), whose elements occupy different short lines, cf. Hēr mun standa / steinn nær brautu ‘Here will stand a stone by the road.’ The varyable parts of the formula occupy the beginning of the first short line and the end of the second short one. Hēr mun can be replaced by prosodically equivalent and semantically similar combinations Nū skal, Hēr skal, Æ mun, and nær brautu ‘by the road’ can be replaced by the prosodically equivalent and semantically similar viðr bryggju ‘by the bridge’, ą bjargi ‘on the mountain’, miþli byja ’between villages’, at merki ‘as a monument’, at Ingjald ‘after Ingvald’. The paper also addreses some other most common formulas based on alliterating pairs. Refs 24.