Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/217

 delivered vivâ voce in recitative, so that the voice, adroitly managed, would form a measure. Icelandic poetry does not, like the Greek or Latin, differ from prose by certain measures or feet in a verse, but has a formation peculiar to itself. All Icelandic poems, or almost all, are divided into strophes consisting of eight lines. The strophe is further subdivided into two half-strophes, and each of these again into two parts. Each part is a fourth of the whole strophe, and contains two verses or lines. The first of these lines is called the fore line, and the second the back line; and the two are connected together, as verses, by rhyme-letters, or rhyme-syllables. This rhyme-letter, or alliteration, consists in having two words in the fore line beginning with the same initial letter; and a third word, that which is the most important in the meaning, in the second or back line, and beginning with the same letter. For example:—

The letter F in the word Fold is the head letter of the alliteration, and the same letter in Farvel and fagnadar are the two subsidiary alliterative sounds in the first line. In the use of this alliteration there are several subdivisions, from exceptions or limitations to the general principle. Besides this alliteration or letter-rhyme, there are syllable-rhymes, in which the first syllables of words, instead of the first letters only, form, by their collocation in the fore and back lines, the versification; and if the first syllables rhyme together, the last may be different sounds. Thus, merki and sterka, or gumar and sumir, are perfect syllable-rhymes in a line. End-rhymes, as in the other Gothic languages, are also used in Icelandic