Alliteration in Iceland: From the Edda to Modern Verse and Pop Lyrics

Abstract

The chapter shows that alliteration has played an important role in Icelandic culture from the very beginning down to modern times. Already in the Middle Ages the use of alliteration was to some extent symbolic, as reflected in the reverence with which the staves are treated by the medieval scholars, but it still had a formal function of signalling constituent structure in poetic texts and it had a connection to rhythm in eddic poetry, and to some extent in skaldic verse as well. When new poetic genres developed, borrowing foreign metrical forms, alliteration was applied as a matter of course, but the connection to rhythm, as expressed in an alternation between strong and weak positions, became looser as time passed on.