2. Volume Editor’s Preface and Acknowledgements

My first acknowledgement, as editor of the present volume, is to Rory McTurk for saving me and the other General Editors of the series Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages from the serious mistake of omitting the contents of this volume from our new edition. It surprises and slightly shames me now, in retrospect, given all I have learned about fornaldarsaga poetry over the years that Volume VIII has been in active preparation, that we had originally planned to omit this large, important and somewhat under-researched corpus of verse. When we announced the format of the new edition to participants at the Eleventh International Saga Conference at the University of Sydney in July 2000, Rory stood up and persuaded us to reconsider our decision. I am very pleased that we heeded his advice, as I have come to realise how much we still have to learn about this body of poetry, which, along with the prose texts in which it has been transmitted, has been somewhat neglected until recently and treated as a lesser type of eddic verse, an Eddica minora, to use the title of a well-known early twentieth-century anthology of poems and extracts from fornaldarsögur.

Much of what is new in this volume is attributable to the expertise and dedication of the editors of the individual texts within it, and I am grateful to them all for the exacting work of editing and the background knowledge that they have brought to the task. In many cases new research has underpinned their work, whether in terms of a fresh examination of the manuscript sources, new knowledge about the textual and literary background of the poetry, and/or the preparation of a new English translation of the poems or stanzas.

The quality of the editions in Volume VIII depends in the first instance on the work of the eleven Contributing Editors, but is also very much dependent on the contributions made by the General Editors in the process of Quality Control for each edition. Without their knowledge and expertise I could not have produced this volume and I am deeply grateful to them for the time and effort they have spent on it. I would like to thank especially Kari Ellen Gade, Edith Marold and Diana Whaley for saving me from many an egregious error.

Thanks are also due to Hannah Burrows, the Bibliography editor, for all her painstaking checking of the references in this edition and for her advice on how to present some of them, and to Tarrin Wills for assistance and advice about everything related to the database and for producing the final versions of Volume VIII for export to Brepols. I would also like to thank Guy Carney, our consultant editor at Brepols, for his patience and sound advice at all stages of preparation of this and other volumes in the SkP series.

Helen Appleton, currently of Balliol College Oxford, is someone without whose assistance this volume could not have been produced. I employed Helen with funds provided from a Discovery Research Grant awarded to me by the Australian Research Council between 2013-16 to enter all the editions in this volume into the skaldic database. She has done so with great skill and accuracy and put up with my many interventions and alterations to the editions. Her expertise and intuitive understanding of how the database works have been remarkable and I thank her very much. I must also express my gratitude to the Australian Research Council for awarding me the grant that allowed me to employ Helen.

Thanks are also due to other bodies or to individuals: Russell Poole is grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) and Western University Canada for research funding enabling him to prepare his editions of Merlínusspá I and II; the volume editor would also like to thank Anders Andrén for advice and information on archaeological questions and the Kungliga bibliotek, Stockholm, for permission to reproduce in the edition of Þjalar-Jóns saga an image of a wolf-like creature biting a man’s arm from the lower margin of fol. 121v of Holm perg 6 4°.

The Introduction to Volume VIII sketches a new approach to fornaldarsaga poetry in terms of subject-matter, structure, style, and diction, but, being a general work of a defined length, it can only be suggestive of ways in which the observations within it can be taken further. An exception to this observation concerns Section 6 on metres, which has been specially written by Kari Ellen Gade. This uses the editions in the volume as the basis for a series of analyses of the metres of fornaldarsaga poetry, something not previously attempted in any detail, and then applies the results of that analysis to three test cases within the corpus. I am most grateful to Kari for undertaking this work and thank her also for her many other acts of assistance to me in the preparation of this volume for publication.

Margaret Clunies Ross,
Adelaide, South Australia and Wivenhoe, Essex,

June 2017

References

1. Bibliography
2. SkP = Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols.
3. Internal references
4. Not published: do not cite (Run^VI)
5. 2017, ‘ Anonymous, Þjalar-Jóns saga’ in Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), Poetry in fornaldarsögur. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 8. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 798. <https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=text&i=10892> (accessed 6 May 2024)