Acknowledgments

This work began as a study of relative clauses in the history of Icelandic. When I realized that sá must have reanalyzed from a demonstrative to a relative marker before the 12th century, I was inspired to look for evidence of this change in purportedly earlier Eddic and skaldic poetry. The audiences of the 22nd and 23rd Germanic Linguistics Annual conferences at the University of Iceland and the University of Texas offered lively discussion and valuable early feedback on this idea. The editors and reviewers of Language (Historical Syntax) and Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax prompted me to tighten up the methodology and think more deeply about the theoretical underpinnings of this work. I am especially grateful to Ida Larsson and Johan Brandtler for encouraging me to expand that study into a book-length project.

This project was made possible by the resources of three institutions. The University of Mississippi Department of Modern Languages was a supportive professional home for fourteen years, and UM’s College of Liberal Arts provided me with a generous Senior Faculty Grant and a sabbatical leave, giving me the time that I needed to re-enter a subject that I had not explored since graduate school. During that sabbatical, Blake Shedd and the faculty of the Department of English and American Studies at the Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt set me up with library access and Alpine views to give my eyes a break from the computer screen. Finally, the Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences and Department of Germanic Studies have given me all the resources that I have needed to see this project to completion, from a course release to funding for research assistants.

A few individuals deserve special credit for helping me with technical matters that pushed the boundaries of my expertise. Richard Zimmermann shared his R code for the Naïve Bayes Classifier, and the Indiana Statistical Consulting Center helped me further refine my use of this technique. Kari Ellen Gade inspired my initial interest in dating Old Norse poetry over twenty years ago, and I continued to benefit from her encyclopedic knowledge and her famous proofreading skills right up until her recent passing. She will be sorely missed not only by her students but by the entire community of Old Norse philologists. Tyler Kniess and Elliot Evans helped me with editing and formatting, especially the tables and appendices. Haukur Þorgeirsson shared some unpublished data on negation in the Eddic poems, leading to a much improved empirical basis in that chapter. The editors and a reviewer for the Studies in Germanic Linguistics series provided incisive and detailed feedback on the original, and the work is much stronger than it was a few months ago.

Finally, during the course of this research, Dinorah and Olivia have been with me on multiple trips around the world, changing schools and houses four times, and more AirBnB stays than I can count. They have patiently listened to my retellings of Eddic poetry and Icelandic sagas, and their constant love has kept me grounded and sane. Gracias por todo.