Verbal hyperbaton in the Viking Age runic inscriptions

Abstract

Verbal hyperbaton is a kind of word order discontinuity where a verb intervenes between a nominal modifier – e.g. an adjective or a demonstrative determiner – and its head noun, e.g. ‘they this raised stone’ or ‘this raised they stone’. This phenom­enon is found in a handful of East Nordic runic inscriptions (Vg 32, Sö 61, U 512, U 735, Sö 46, Öl 10, Vs 15) representing both poetry and prose. I argue that verbal hyperbaton was a device probably belonging to higher registers or styles, and that the phenomenon should be analyzed in terms of movement of a prosodic – not syntactic – constituent (Agbayani & Golston 2010, 2016). This post-syntactic move­ment can be triggered for different purposes: to achieve alliteration, to mark topic/focus, or a combination of these two. Relevant comparisons can also be made with cases of verbal hyperbaton in the West Nordic material, specifically the Poetic Edda and the sagas.