SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

312 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
only sporadically, almost unintentionally. As Guntert
has shown, the explanation is simple when we realize that
we are dealing with a poem in lj60ahdttr and that as far as
possible the poet has used a definite sequence for the
different beings. Of the six lines of the lj60ahdttr stanza
the two half-lines alliterate in pairs, while the third and
sixth lines, the so-called full lines, alliterate internally.
The fact that the Vanir words all begin with v and that the
dwarves' words begin in five cases with d depends entirely
on the fact that the Vanir always and the dwarves five
times are mentioned in the third and sixth lines
respectively. In the full lines word and name alliterate
without exception, no matter what the latter may be,
thus not only Vanir and dwarves, but also the more
occasional ginnregin, uppregin, halir, i heliu, etc. So
we find kalla gneggjuo ginnregin (20 :3), kalla grimu
ginnregin (30:3), kalla aur uppregin (10:6), kalla hUopang
halir (28:3), alskir dsa synir (16:6), kalla sumbl Suttungs
synir (34:6), kalla huerfanda hvel heliu i (14:3)15, kalla
i heliu hidlm huMs (18:6), kalla i heliu hviouo (20 :6), etc.
Of the eleven words attributed to the elves only one begins
with a vowel, drtali (14); as we might expect, it is in the
sixth line - the elves otherwise always appear in the fifth.
Outside the two full lines the different terms do not
alliterate with the names of the beings who use them,
(those of the giants do, but this is only a superficial
impression, see below). This is entirely due to the fact that
the short lines in lj60ahdttr do not as a rule have more than
one alliterating word. The result is therefore that name
and word that appear in one line do not alliterate with each
other but rather with name or word in the other line of
the pair, word with word as here:
Himinn heitir men monnum
en hlyrnir mel'5 gooum (12);
,. This line with its abnormal four lifts should doubtless be emended on the
lines suggested by E. Noreen in Studier i nordiskfilologi 4:5 (1913), to kalla i
heliu hverfanda hvil.