SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

348 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
low rate of mcela. But far more striking is the exceedingly
high proportion of tala, very rare outside my "Bergrtexts".
One can compare this table with the corresponding
figures for another part of Sijorn, pp. 349-6S4, an older
section of the compilation, according to Unger (p. VII)
dating back to the first half of the thirteenth century.
Counting rooo cases (pp. 349-634) we get the following
figures, with a distribution completely different from the
one above:
mala (423) 42 per cent
segja (307) 31 per cent
svara (241) 24 per cent
tala (29) 2'9 per cent
The rest of Stjorn, the section pp. 300-349, reveals at
this point a profile still more remote from that of Bergr:
mcela IS3, segja 3, svara 29, tala 0, i.e. 83, 1·6, IS'S and 0 per
cent respectively.
Of the original word series, the first one has the
following frequencies: ddsama 0, dragsa 0, eptir megni 0,
eptir svd talat 0, forsjdlforsjo 12, [rdbcerr 0, geysi 0, greindr
2, mekt 8, punktr 8, storliga 3S, umbergis 0 = 6S, i.e. S'2
per 10000 words. This might seem to be a rather meagre
harvest, especially when 7 out of 12 items are completely
lacking in such a voluminous text.
The second word series rises to a considerably higher
frequency, showing 8 of the 9 items: einkanliga 78,
fijotr 2, fullting 9, hceverska I, kumpdnn 10, lypta sinni
fero 0, optliga 4, profa 24, senniliga 7 = I3S, i.e. IO'S per
10000 words.
The frequency of these words - on the same level as in
] on B (p. 333 above) - cannot be said to be within the
typical "Bergr-range". But it certainly points in that
direction, when we compare our text with the rest of Stjorn
or with my control material outside the "Bergr-texts",
If we examine the variant readings in the footnotes of
Unger's edition, we find there some more cases: mekt
221, umbergis 87, 89, lIS; einkanliga 219, 237, 279 (bis),