4. Manuscripts

Margaret Clunies Ross 2017, ‘Manuscripts’ in Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), Poetry in fornaldarsögur. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8. Turnhout: Brepols [check printed volume for citation].

The vast majority of extant manuscripts containing Icelandic fornaldarsögur are post-medieval and date predominantly from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. They thus bear witness to the continuing popularity of these stories and indigenous romances (riddarasögur) among the Icelandic population and to the vitality of scribal traditions of hand-copying in Iceland (Driscoll 1997, 4-6). The database Stories for All Time provides the most up-to-date details of currently known manuscripts of each fornaldarsaga, with information on the manuscripts’ contents, material condition, provenance and ownership (if known).

The Introductions to individual editions of each fornaldarsaga in this volume provide information about known manuscripts of each text and the current and previous editors’ discussions of the likely relationships between them, where possible providing a stemma of the extant manuscripts. The reader is referred to these discussions. Unlike the situation with other kinds of Old Icelandic vernacular texts containing poetry, it is often not possible to establish a definitive stemma for individual fornaldarsögur, because in many cases there is either only one or no parchment or vellum manuscript extant from earlier than the fifteenth century. Instead, there are many post-medieval paper manuscripts that are often likely to descend from a common original, either the one extant medieval manuscript or another medieval exemplar, now lost.

Rather than discuss the manuscript witnesses for each text in this volume one by one, it has seemed more useful to describe here some general characteristics of fornaldarsaga manuscripts and then to discuss some of the principal early witnesses in some detail. Most fornaldarsögur have been preserved in compilations rather than as single items, often together with the same group of companion texts. There are two obvious reasons for such repeated groupings, the first being that one compiler has copied from an earlier exemplar which contained a similar set of sagas, while the second is based on contemporary assumptions that the subject-matter and – particularly – the protagonists of two or more sagas were members of the same extended legendary family, with which the sponsors of such compilations may have felt a connection. This explains, for example, the consistent co-presence of sagas of the Hrafnistumenn in several major compilations of the fifteenth century (e.g. AM 343 a 4° (343a), AM 471 4° (471)) as well as the co-presence of Gautr with Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar ‘The Saga of Hrólfr Gautreksson’ (HG) (in, for example, AM 152 fol (152) and Holm papp 11 8°ˣ (papp11ˣ)) and StSt with the saga of his supposed son, Gǫngu-Hrólfr, in Gǫngu-Hrólfs saga ‘The Saga of Walker-Hrólfr’ (GHr) (AM 589 f 4° (589f)). The genealogical basis for the arrangement of sagas within compilations can be deduced from many manuscripts.

Most of the fornaldarsögur in Volume VIII are extant in at least one parchment or vellum manuscript from either the fourteenth or the fifteenth century. However, there are a small number that do not appear in any manuscript from before 1500, including HjǪ, Hrólf and the independent poem Svart Skauf. In some cases, sagas exist in two versions, one probably later than the other, with one of these versions extant only in paper manuscripts. This is the case with the B version of Frið, for example. The possible connection of alternative versions of fornaldarsögur with the evolution of the ríma form is discussed below in Section 7.3.

References

3. The poetry in this volume

5. Editions

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4. Manuscripts

References

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