B. Evidence for authorship
This is not currently part of the peer-reviewed material of the project. Do not cite as a research publication.
1. Attributions in prose works, by name or implicitly, will normally be taken on trust. Where editors doubt the ms. attributions, this should be explained in a note. There is a small but significant amount of disagreement between prose authors about attribution of verses, but often one tradition has much greater ms. support than another, or there are clear reasons for assuming one attribution to be erroneous.
2. Skáldatal is a guide to which poets composed for whom; but the two extant versions of Skáldatal do not wholly agree, and are limited to court poets.
3. The internal evidence of content, style or metre will not normally overturn the evidence of ms. attributions, and it should only be used with extreme caution in formulating theories about the authorship of otherwise anonymous verses. Given the conservatism of skaldic poetry and the difficulty of dating much of it, internal evidence may not even be reliable as an indicator of approximate date.