This article aims at an objective solution to the methodological question of effective text choice – for purposes of research and scholarly editing – for certain genres of folk poetry where texts are relatively short, but highly variable and at times have no clear boundaries. My focus is on Icelandic post-medieval þulur: versified, but not stanzaic, lists of names, short motifs and/or longer narrative episodes in very free poetic form. My hypothesis is that the selection which most adequately represents a useful overview of such texts, while also reflecting their specificity, should be based on the most typically encountered variant(s) of most common structural units of þulur, which are identified using quantitative methods. The article offers an algorithm for the text selection and discusses its advantages and shortcomings.
