An Old Norse Adaptation of a Christmas Sermon by Honorius Augustodunensis

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article contains a study, edition, and translation of a fragment of an Old Norse Christmas sermon, which survives in the fourteenth-century manuscript AM 655 XX 4to at the University of Copenhagen. The extant part of this text is based on a sermon from the Speculum ecclesiae collection, written by Honorius Augustodunensis around the beginning of the twelfth century. The Old Norse sermon is an important witness to Honorius’s influence on medieval Icelandic and Norwegian religious literature. Another sermon in the same manuscript deals with the subject of confession. Two exempla from this second sermon are transcribed and translated in an appendix.