Ebook: Clavis Metrica: Háttatal, Háttalykill and the Irish Metrical Tracts

This book intends to compare prescriptive metrics at its inception in Ireland and Scandinavia, concentrating on stanzaic-syllabic verse.

It is no new idea to compare the metrical systems of the two countries. In this work I shall not attempt to compare the two systems empirically and in toto. Both systems produced verse for well over half a millennium, during which modification was inevitable. Where one of this century's most distinguished philologists has required a lifetime to produce an adequate study of this process of development in one culture alone, only someone of extreme rashness or guaranteed longevity would undertake to perform the same task for two at once. The question facing any comparative study is how to obtain a manageable but yet representative corpus from each system, when many questions as to dating of texts as transmitted and of the general development of the metrical art remain unanswered.

Prescriptive texts delineate metrical requirements at the time of writing; they record the contemporary state of the art, rather than the full scope of its development. We are fortunate in possessing such texts for both Icelandic and Irish. From these texts we can abstract a system of regulation that was doubtless relevant for metrical practitioners at the time the texts were written. By using these abstracted systems one can reduce the risk of comparing the inappropriate.

My examination focuses on two specific texts in either language. In Icelandic, these are the 12th century clavis metrica 'Háttalykill' of Rögnvaldr Earl of Orkney and his Icelandic skald-visitor Hallr Þórarinsson, and Snorri Sturluson's poem-cum-treatise 'Háttatal', dated approximately one century later. In Irish I concentrate on a short poem in 'clavis' form attributed to the eleventh century poet Cellach Hua Ruanada and the First Metrical Tract, dated around the turn of the tenth century. These are respectively the first 'claves metricae' and the first metrical treatises in each language.