5. Editions

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

Individual editions of the sagas included in this volume are discussed in the pages below. It is the purpose of this section to provide an overview of the state of scholarship with regard to editions of Icelandic fornaldarsögur, with special reference to the poetry transmitted in them. The reception history of Icelandic fornaldarsögur is unlike that of other saga types, in that they were studied and became popular very early in the European Enlightenment, mainly in Sweden and Denmark. They were considered by many people to be historically respectable sources that could be drawn on to confirm the status of Sweden (or Denmark) as the true foundation of early Scandinavian culture. Thus there was a push among Swedish and Danish scholars to obtain manuscripts of these sagas, and, with the invaluable help of Icelandic assistants, to produce editions of them, often accompanied by a Scandinavian vernacular or Latin translation. Many of these editions were among the first examples of medieval Icelandic writings to become known to the European world outside Scandinavia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The very first edition of any Icelandic saga was Olaus Verelius’ edition of Gautr (Gautr 1664), which he followed up with an edition of Bós in 1666 (Bós 1666), and with an edition of Heiðr (Heiðr 1672) in 1672. Other seventeenth-century editions included texts of Anon Krm (Worm 1636), of OStór and Sǫrla in the 1689 Skálholt edition of ÓT (ÓT 1689) and Olof Rudbeck’s 1697 edition of Ket and GrL (Rudbeck 1697). Many a fornaldarsaga saw its editio princeps in the eighteenth century: HjǪ (Johan Fredrich Peringskiöld, HjǪ 1720), Ásm (Peringskiöld 1722), Hálf, Ragn and Vǫls in Erik J. Björner’s Nordiske Kämpa Dater (Björner 1737) and RagnSon (RagnSon 1773 in Langebek et al. 1772-1878). These editions were pioneer works, but they were often based on manuscripts that are not regarded today as suitable foundations for editions.

The nineteenth century was distinguished both by the first publication of saga series, in which editions of the fornaldarsögur as a genre made their appearance, and, as the century progressed, by the first scholarly editions of these texts that began to evaluate the merits of the various versions of each saga to the extent that they were then known. C. C. Rafn’s FSN, published in three volumes between 1829-30, defined the genre, gave it a name and published texts of thirty-five works, a few of which were not sagas strictly speaking. Later in the century and into the twentieth century, other collected editions of fornaldarsögur appeared, many (e.g. Valdimar Ásmundarson 1885-9, FSGJ) aimed at the Icelandic reading public, others (e.g. SUGNL) for a wider Scandinavian readership.

The heyday of scholarly editing of fornaldarsögur was the period from c. 1885-1914. A number of these sagas were edited for the first time during these years in either diplomatic or critical editions (mostly the former), taking account of manuscript variants and producing either parallel text editions from the most significant manuscripts (e.g. Ǫrv 1888, Gautr 1900) or separate editions of a particular branch of the text (e.g. Ludvig Larsson’s edition of Frið 1901). It is no coincidence that it was in this period (1903) that Andreas Heusler and Wilhelm Ranisch produced their anthology of fornaldarsaga poetry, Eddica Minora ‘The Lesser Eddic Poetry’ (Edd. Min.).

After the early twentieth century new editions of fornaldarsögur declined in number, consequent upon a flagging of general scholarly interest in the fornaldarsögur as a genre and a parallel increase of interest in sagas of Icelanders and kings’ sagas. Very few new scholarly editions of fornaldarsögur appeared after 1914, with the exception of Hálf 1981 (Seelow), Heiðr 1924 (Jón Helgason) and Heiðr 1960 (Christopher Tolkien), Hrólf 1960 (Slay), StSt 1969 (Zitzelsberger), Glazyrina 1996 (StSt) and Vǫls 1965 (Finch). In addition a small number of editions appeared as unpublished doctoral theses: Ket and GrL (Anderson 1990), HjǪ 1970 (by R. Harris), Mág 1963 (by Dodsworth) and Sǫrla (Barwell 1976). There were also two editions of these texts in Modern Icelandic (Bós 1996 (Sverrir Tómasson) and Ragn 1985 (Örnólfur Thorsson)).

During recent decades (c.1990 to the present) there has been a distinct revival of interest in fornaldarsögur, along with riddarasögur (romances), as works of literature, together with the study of the material evidence for their reception and transmission in the late Middle Ages and beyond. The Stories for All Time project has assembled a great deal of valuable information about manuscripts, editions, studies and other sources for these sagas, and has so far inspired a small number of new editions, mostly of sagas that do not contain poetry, like Illuga saga Gríðarfóstra ‘The Saga of Illugi, Gríður’s Foster-Son’ (Lavender 2015a) and a collaborative electronic edition of Hrólf (Driscoll et al. 2013), available on the Stories for All Time database. Although a number of very interesting studies of fornaldarsögur have appeared in the last twenty years, almost no work has been undertaken on the poetry (an exception is Love 2012). It is to be hoped that the present volume will lead to a revival of interest in the verse as well as the prose of these sagas.

It is important that new editions of these texts be undertaken now that scholars have a greater sympathy for late medieval and post-medieval Icelandic manuscripts and a greater understanding of the processes of oral transmission and the many reasons, social, intellectual and material, for why manuscript versions of fornaldarsögur may vary. Many of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century editions, excellent though they are in many respects, are based on assumptions about textual transmission that have been called into question in recent decades.

Processes of amplification and retraction of both poetry and prose components such as we find in the extant versions of many fornaldarsögur were treated by earlier editors as instances of interpolation (or less commonly excision) from an existing, static original text. This approach is reflected in the way in which many earlier editors divided and reordered the poetry from these sagas as it appears in manuscripts in order to express their own views of what in the poetry was authentic and what was later interpolation (cf. Clunies Ross 2013, 184-7). The editions of Finnur Jónsson (Skj) and E. A. Kock (Skald) are cases in point. Because of the divisions and rearrangements of the fornaldarsaga poetry in their editions, it is often very difficult for readers to understand the ways in which the poetry is presented in the various manuscript witnesses.

In Edd. Min., their influential anthology of poetry from certain fornaldarsögur, Heusler and Ranisch likewise had no compunction in separating poetry transmitted in the same saga into different categories, depending on their ideas of what constituted ancient poetry and their ideas of its age (see further Section 7.1 below). Their conviction that only certain genres of poetry were authentic and old led them to omit a certain proportion of the poetry in fornaldarsögur, on the ground that eine merklich Kluft trennt diese Schreiberversuche selbst von Dichtungen wie dem Hróksliede und Útsteins Kampfstrophen ‘a marked gap separates these authorial attempts [the poetry they omitted] from poems like the lay of Hrókr and Útsteinn’s battle stanzas’ (Edd. Min. iii). While the present edition recognises the rationale for invoking such a distinction, as can be seen from the normalisation practices described below in Section 8, it also recognises that many fornaldarsögur show evidence of continuing reworking, expansion and occasionally retraction of older material, which makes it difficult to use a fixed chronology as the most important criterion for inclusion in such a volume.

References

4. Manuscripts

6. Metre

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5. Editions

References

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