Alliteration Involving /s/ in the History of Icelandic Poetry

Abstract

Alliteration has been practised in Icelandic poetry from the country’s settlement to the present. The practice is based on rules from old Nordic poetry, but only in Iceland have these rules been retained largely unchanged. All the changes that did take place are related to changes in pronunciation: when initial sounds change, equivalence classes change as well. The most marked changes are related to the sound [s]. During the first centuries of Icelandic settlement the initial sounds sl and sn (and perhaps sm) alliterated with s+vowel, sj and sv. This is called s-alliteration. From around 1400, sl has only alliterated with sl, sm only with sm, and sn only with sn. Around the same time sl and sn occasionally began to alliterate with st, as an epenthetic sound, [t], sneaked in between s and l and between s and n, causing these sounds to be pronounced as [stl]/[stn] (‘epenthetic alliteration’). The emergence of this epenthetic sound is supposedly the reason why s-alliteration was abolished around 1400. During the eighteenth, nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, a few poets revived the s-alliteration, probably looking to the old alliteration as a model. This later s-alliteration never became popular and has completely disappeared. Epenthetical alliteration was popular during the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, but has declined since. Other changes in alliteration are the following: j alliterated with vowels until 1600 but not after that; in the eighteenth century hv as an initial sound began to alliterate with k as it then was, and still is, pronounced as kv, which is why this alliteration is still used. During the fourteenth century until the seventeenth, ‘over-alliteration’ became much more common than before, and ‘extra-alliteration’ also became more common during this period, but in the eighteenth century these practices declined.