ICELANDIC MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS A practical guide PDF

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1ST DRAFT (2020) Draft of a collection of guided exercises for the acquisition of practical competence in reading Icelandic Medieval manuscripts. Roberto Luigi Pagani ICELANDIC MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS MIS204F ICELANDIC MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS A practical guide 1 Index 1. An overview of the main phonologic...

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1ST DRAFT (2020) Draft of a collection of guided exercises for the acquisition of practical competence in reading Icelandic Medieval manuscripts.

Roberto Luigi Pagani ICELANDIC MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS MIS204F

ICELANDIC MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS A practical guide

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Index 1. An overview of the main phonological changes from 1100 to 1500 ................................................... 3 End of the 12th century ........................................................................................................................................5 13th century ...........................................................................................................................................................5 14th century ...........................................................................................................................................................5 15th century .......................................................................................................................................................... 7 16th century .......................................................................................................................................................... 8 The middle voice through the centuries ............................................................................................................. 9

2. An overview of the main script types ................................................................................................... 10 1. Carolingian minuscule: 1100-1200.............................................................................................................. 10 2. Praegothica: 1200-1300 ................................................................................................................................. 11 3. Gothica/Textualis: 1250-c1400 .................................................................................................................... 12 4. Cursiva antiquor: 1400-1500 ........................................................................................................................ 12 5. Cursiva recentior: 1450-1650 ........................................................................................................................ 13

3. An overview of the main (purely) orthographic changes .................................................................... 15 XII Century ........................................................................................................................................................ 15 XIII Century ...................................................................................................................................................... 15 1225 ..................................................................................................................................................................... 16 1250 ..................................................................................................................................................................... 16 XIV Century ..................................................................................................................................................... 16 1350..................................................................................................................................................................... 16 XV Century ....................................................................................................................................................... 16 XVI Century ..................................................................................................................................................... 16

4. Abbreviations ....................................................................................................................................... 18 5. A checklist for the method: ................................................................................................................... 22 6. Transcribing......................................................................................................................................... 23 6.1 Conventions for the transcription .............................................................................................................23 6.2 Conventional symbols................................................................................................................................ 24 6.3 Example of transcription ........................................................................................................................... 24

The 12th Century ...................................................................................................................................... 29 The 13th century (TO BE COMPLETED) ............................................................................................ 37 The early 14th century ..............................................................................................................................44 The late 14th century ................................................................................................................................49 The 15th century ........................................................................................................................................60 The first half of the 16th century .............................................................................................................. 66 Further readings ...................................................................................................................................... 72 General works on manuscript studies: ............................................................................................................72

2 General works on palaeography: .....................................................................................................................72 General works on the Icelandic language: ......................................................................................................72

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1. An overview of the main phonological changes from 1100 to 1500 The following survey is by no means going to be complete; providing an exhaustive overview of the changes affecting the Icelandic language in the first five centuries after it began to be written with the Latin alphabet, is definitely beyond the scope of this work. The changes in the language have affected the phonology, that is, the sound inventory and the quality, the morphology, or the system of roots and affixes with which the words of Icelandic inflect, and the syntax, which is the system of rules according to which different constituents of a sentence interact with one another to convey meaning. The changes in these scenarios are all to a large degree relevant, but we are going to focus only on (some of) the phonological ones, as they are usually the most promptly identifiable. Even if you are not familiar with language change, you will certainly be familiar with variation within the language(s) you speak; living languages are unstable because the muscle movements we need to make in order to produce sounds in our mouths, throats, noses etc. eventually end up influencing each other, causing sounds to change. Some sounds may end up being pronounced more “lazily”, until they disappeared altogether (think of an “innit?” going back to an “is not it?” through an “isn’t it” phase), yet some other sounds may appear seemingly out of nowhere to make it simpler to pronounce other sounds which are already there. Understanding how language changes spread is a struggle: a great part seems to be played by children, who somehow fail to learn all the exact nuances of their parents’ language, and these little differences would pile up over the generations. The matter is not that simple however, since we have evidence of children correcting their early failures and learning to imitate adults effectively in some instances but not others, and of adults showing change later in their life. Language changes may also spread in social groups, in geographical areas, or through the media, because of prestige, fashion and for many other reasons. The study of these changes through history, before voice recording was available, is done consulting a number of different sources, but the one which is most relevant for our study, is that of spelling change (or lack thereof). We assume that when people began to write down their native languages for the first time, they operated mostly with a phonological principle: to a sound unit in the language always corresponded, more or less unequivocally, a written unit in the alphabet. However, languages change, usually at a faster rate than spelling practices, with the result that some languages spell their words in an apparently very illogical way, which is reflective of how words in that language were pronounced many centuries before. Maintaining a conservative spelling is, however, a tough business: you start finding the occasional slip – think of a spelling like “lite” for “light” – in an overwhelmingly conservative context where all the “-ight” words are spelled as such. Slowly but surely, through many decades or centuries, we may expect the “-ite” spellings to spread, maybe at some point being confused with etymological “-ite”, like “Marmight” instead of the correct “Marmite” and eventually take over, until no one bothers writhing this “gh”, which disappeared from spoken English several centuries before. To have a “real” example of this, we shall take the word night. Its spelling represents accurately the sounds this word must have had in the early Middle English period, so not long after the beginning of the first millennium, something like /niht/, where the “gh” was a conventional digraph representing some kind of aspirated h sound. During the later Middle English period, this h sound was lost, but its space got occupied by the i which used to be short, but “stretched”, so the result became /niːt/ (pronounced similarly to today’s neat). In the Early Modern English period, this long vowel became a diphthong /nəit/ (if you have access to a Scottish speaker, he is likely to still pronounce it this way). Eventually, in Standard British English, the diphthong opened further and became /nait/, which is the pronunciation most of us are familiar with. To summarise: /niht/ → /niːt/→ /nəit/→/nait/. This notion, that language changes over time faster than people "update" spelling rules, is very important and needs to be grasped fully before one can proceed further. Today’s Icelandic is in no way as distant from its orthography as English is from its own, but a great deal has changed from Classical Old Icelandic times (the period around the 13th century). However, relatively recent archaising efforts have obscured the evolution of the language in its spoken form, giving the impression that it almost did not change at all from the medieval Period. In medieval

4 texts, however, several of the changes that led to modern Icelandic can be promptly identified. They are evident because of changes in the spelling, which may be unusual to someone who is accustomed to normalised Old Norse, but which are very logical for someone who is familiar with modern Icelandic, since they represent the actual sounds of today’s Icelandic better than the spelling we now use. For example, in Modern Icelandic one must insert a dental sound (t/d according to individual perception) between an r and an n or an r and l. When learning Icelandic as a second language, we are thus taught to see forn and say fordn, which means that it makes all the sense in the world when we find “fordn” written as such in late Medieval manuscripts: that’s how the word sounds to us! In this perspective, using the modern Icelandic pronunciation instead of a reconstructed one is in fact an advantage. Changes, however, do not happen overnight, and the influences of the old generations on the education of new ones are hard to overcome. Often it takes decades or even centuries before people finally give up writing in a way that is no longer representative of how they speak – if they ever do so: look at the example we just saw regarding the English word night! This means you may come across one single instance of language change in the form of a spelling change through an entire manuscript, particularly if the text was written during the early phases in which the change was still spreading but had not become universal. Some scribes may have also been keener on abandoning older etymological spellings in favour of others that were more representative of the way they spoke. They may have also come from different geographical areas, where linguistic developments were proceeding at different paces. In the following pages, changes which are typical of a given century are presented in bold, those which appear only sporadically in the century in question will appear in regular font, and are not explained immediately, but will be discussed under the section pertaining the century in which they are typical.

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End of the 12th century By the end of this century, we start noticing a confusion between the sounds  and á. The two were slowly becoming mostly identical, so that speakers no longer needed to (nor could) retain an orthographic (“spelling”) distinction. The result was that in words which had an etymological ǫ́ (which was written, in the earliest texts, with “o” or similar), we see the sound spelled “a”. // + /á/ → /á/; hǫ́tíð → hátið, spelt “hatíþ”. Confusingly, the resulting sound from the fusion of /,/ + /á/ was probably an o-sound, phonetically [ɔː]. It was not written using “o” symbols because those were already used to represent the higher o-sound [oː]. Later in the history of Icelandic this became [ɔu] (similarly to contemporary Icelandic ó) and then eventually [au], thus going through at least four stages of change, while retaining the same spelling for about a millennium. Normalised Classical Old Icelandic orthography does not distinguish between these two sounds, from which it can be deduced that its reference period is after this change has taken place.

13th century Two important vowel mergers happen in the course of this century: to find instances of the first one, it is necessary to know the spelling of standardised, classical Old Icelandic very well, as what you need to do is look for instances of etymological ø and ǫ (like øx and sǫgur) and check whether the scribe tends to represent the two sounds with different spellings (for example “eo; ø; o” for ø but “ꜵ; ꜹ” for ǫ). If the scribe mixes the same spelling for both sounds, you can presume this merger to have happened. /ø/+/ǫ/ > /ö/. The following change is not particularly problematic as it normally manifests itself through the substitution of the spelling “œ” eith “æ”. Occasionally, we may find also “œ” for etymological æ. An inverse spelling that shows how etymological ǿ and ǽ were no longer distinguished. /ǿ/+/ǽ/ > /æ/; “bær” for bœr.1

/-k/→/-g/ (sporadic); “eg, mig, þig, sig, og, miog” for ek, mik, þik, sik, ok, mjǫk. /-t/⟩→/-ð/ (sporadic); “landid” for landit, “vid” for vit, “ad” for at, “ad”, “talad” for talat.

14th century This is a century which sees a lot of important changes in the direction of Modern Icelandic. In particular, we have the fricativisation of unstressed word-final k, which turns from a stop to a fricative g, and of word-final t, which also turns into a fricative and is represented by the same symbols as ð (usually a “ꝺ”): the letter “d” represents also the sound ð after the letter “ð” disappears from Icelandic (in the course of the 14th century) /-k/→/-g/; “eg, mig, þig, sig, og, miog” for ek, mik, þik, sik, ok, mjǫk.

“ǿ” and “œ” are two different conventional orthographic symbols for the same phoneme, which must have been [œː], a long low-mid front rounded vowel. 1

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/-t/→/-ð/; “landid” for landit, “vid” for vit, “ad” for at. The next change involves the evolution of a monophthong e into a diphthong ei when preceding the consonant cluster ng. This is promptly identifiable through an updated spelling which includes “i” to represent the second element of the diphthong. /eng/→/eing/; “eingi, eingan, eingum etc., eingland, feingi, leingi, eingill etc.” for engi, engan, engum etc., England, fengi, lengi, engill etc. This is considered by most a purely orthographic change. We saw how á changed into a diphthong, first [ɔu] and then [au]. However, this change was blocked by an immediately preceding v, which means that the sequence “vá” /vɔː/ never turned into */vau/. Later on, the lower [ɔː] sound merged with [oː]. Scribes were now faced with a multitude of cases in which they pronounced a diphthong au but found it spelled as a long vowel, and considerably fewer instances where they pronounced something like vo, but found the vowel written as an “á”. It would have been very uneconomical to keep the spelling “vá” and update all the instances of older á with a graphic diphthong, not to mention that the vowel of vá had become much more similar to o anyway. The best solution was to keep “á” to indicate the new diphthong, and change “vá” to “vo”. Thus, to find evidence of the change from we look at the change in spelling of words containing the spelling “vo” for older “vá”. If a scribe written “ár/aar” for river, and “svo” for older svá, you can presume that the á sound in “ár” must have already evolved into a diphthong, otherwise the scribe would not need to change the spelling of svá. /vá/→/vo/;“svo” for svá, “vogr” for vágur. Next we have a change which makes its way in the orthography extremely slowly. It consists of the insertion of a svarabhakti vowel u in unstressed consonant clusters whose second element is -r. One can still find a profusion of “-r” spellings all the way down to the 16th century and even later. The most common way in which this change manifests itself is through the confusion of etymological spelling in which the u was already present, with unetymological ones where the u is arbitrarily removed by a scribe: the u in certain words had always been there since the older period, but the rise of u-epenthesis made it impossible for speakers of the time to disambiguate between words containing -ur which originally had a simple -r, and those who had -ur to begin with. The older “r” spelling they found in books for what they likely pronounced as ur led them to believe there was some kind of spelling rule for which ur should be (at least in some cases) written “r”. The results were unetymological spellings like “bróðr” (which had always been bróður in the oblique cases), or “sǫgr” (pl. of saga, which has always been sǫgur). These “inverse spellings” tell us that the u-epenthesis had taken (or was taking) place, showing the inability of the scribe to distinguish correctly between etymological -r and etymological -ur. Pay attention to the oblique cases of faðir, as you can find either fǫður (etymologically with u) or feðr (etymologically without u). In the first case the epenthesis would be signaled by an inverse spelling like “fǫðr” or similar, while in the second case it would be manifest through a spelling like “feður”. Care should be taken with words like okkr, ykkr, yðr (personal pronouns: etymologically without u in the accusative and dative) and okkur, ykkur, yður (possessives: etymologically with u in the nominative singular feminine and nominative and accusative plural neuter): “han var með ykkr” (he was with you) is not sign of inversed spelling, since ykkr is an accusative dual pronoun here. Similarly, “ek sá ykkur bǫrn” (I saw your children) does not indicate u-epenthesis, because the u has always been there in this possessive.

7 u-epenthesis; “maður, armur, okkur, *okkr, *broðr, feður, *sögr” for maðr, armr, okkr, okkur, bróður, feðr, sögur.2 (!)

/é/→/je/ (sporadic); “mier, þier, vier, liet, fie, brief” for mér, þér, vér, lét, fé, bréf. /i; í/ = /y; ý/ (sporadic); “firer” for fyrir. /ll/→/tl/; “padl” for ...