Get fulltext from our e-platform
Dating the Old Norse Poetic Edda
A multifactorial analysis of linguistic features
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.
[Studies in Germanic Linguistics, 5] 2022. xii, 246 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 2 June 2022
Published online on 2 June 2022
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments | pp. xi–xii
- Chapter 1. Introduction | pp. 1–14
- Chapter 2. Previous scholarship and methodological considerations | pp. 15–56
- Chapter 3. The particle of/um | pp. 57–82
- Chapter 4. Change in negation markers | pp. 83–102
- Chapter 5. Verb placement in subordinate clauses | pp. 103–132
- Chapter 6. Relative clause types | pp. 133–148
- Chapter 7. Metrical criteria for dating | pp. 149–176
- Chapter 8. A multivariate system of dating Eddic poetry | pp. 177–204
- References | pp. 205–214
- Appendix 1. The meters of Eddic and skaldic poetry | pp. 215–218
- Appendix 2. Summaries of the Eddic poems | pp. 219–222
- Appendix 3. Instances of the particle of/um in the corpora | pp. 223–226
- Appendix 4. Instances of negation in the corpora | pp. 227–232
- Appendix 5. Verb order in subordinate clauses in the Eddic corpus | pp. 233–238
- Appendix 6. Relative markers in the corpora | pp. 239–244
- Index | pp. 245–246
“More variables, including metrical, lexical, semantic, and textual ones, could help to build a more nuancedmodel that might ultimately explain how these poems evolved after their initial composition. [...] Sapp’s methodology is nevertheless the logical extension of previous research using linguistic methods to date Eddic poetry. It extends statistical methods to a multivariate approach and is thus a major step forward in dating this important corpus.”
Tarrin Wills, Københavns Universitet, Speculum 100/3 (July 2025).
“Sapp is methodologically consistent and thorough, and his book contributes much to a field that is quite dynamic at present.”
Mikael Males, University of Oslo, in Saga-Book XLIX, 2025
Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Males, Mikael
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.