Anon Heil 5^VII

Kirsten Wolf (ed.) 2007, ‘Anonymous Poems, Heilagra manna drápa 5’ in Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), Poetry on Christian Subjects. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 7. Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 876-7.

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Sts 5-8 celebrate S. Edmund, King of the East Angles (d. 869, given as 870 by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and by Ari Þorgilsson in Íslendingabók, written c. 1130). For his life, see Gransden 2004. Edmund was venerated as a martyr because he died fighting heathen Danish Vikings, his killer being identified by Ari as Ívarr, son of Ragnarr loðbrók. Ari records that Edmund’s martyrdom is ritit … í sǫgu hans ‘written in his saga’ (ÍF 1, 1.4), but no other evidence of an Icel. saga about Edmund exists, so Ari may be referring to the earliest Lat. life of Edmund, by Abbo of Fleury, written c. 985-7 (Winterbottom 1972) or possibly to Abbot Ælfric’s vernacular life, c. 1000, based on Abbo’s (Needham 1966, 43-59). Ari used Edmund’s death date as the basis for his reckoning of the beginning of the settlement of Iceland. Evidence for his cult seems to be confined to the church at Lögmannshlíð in the north of Iceland, where there was an image of him in C14th; Cormack (1994, 94) hypothesises that this may have been because people in this area would have considered they could trace their ancestry back to Edmund via Guðmundr the powerful (cf. Stu 1906-11, I, 53). Fell (1981a, 101) indicates that Edmund’s cult may have been first established in Norway, and passed from there to Iceland. — [5-8]: There does not appear to be any parallel for either Edmund’s repression of lust or his mortification of the flesh (see st. 6) in the English, Lat. and French lives (McKeehan 1972). What is claimed in st. 6 about Edmund’s secret mortification of the flesh while outwardly indulging in expensive showy clothes is a feature of the life of Thomas Becket and may possibly have been attracted from there to the sts about Edmund.