Dating the Old Norse Poetic Edda

This book offers new dating of the poems of the Old Norse Poetic Edda , perhaps our best sources about the mythology and legends of the Viking Age. This study compares the anonymous Eddic poems to dated skaldic poems with respect to five phenomena that develop diachronically in early Old Norse: the expletive particle of , types of negation, word order, types of relative clause, and metrical criteria. After examining these dating features individually, the three most reliable criteria—the particl