An Icelandic Literary Florilegium: A Festschrift in Honor of Úlfar Bragason

This worthy celebration of the scholarship and career of Úlfar Bragason consists of twelve essays of varying length treating a number of occasionally eclectic topics within the general fields of medieval and postmedieval Icelandic literature. In a brief introduction, the editors present the recipient's scholarly achievements and describe his untiring work, as director of the Sigurður Nordal Institute, to promote Icelandic Studies internationally. These outward-facing activities, the editors argue, explain the dominance of contributions from non-Icelandic scholars and the almost total absence of Icelandic contributors to the volume. Another Festschrift, Dansað við Úlfar: Nokkur spor stigin til heiðurs Úlfari Bragasyni sjötugum, with predominantly Icelandic contributors, was published in 2019.As the title indicates, there is no overarching theme to the collection. The editors have therefore arranged the essays alphabetically according to the names of the contributors. In the following, I have divided them into three broad categories: contributions focusing/drawing on medieval prose, contributions treating/discussing medieval poetry, and finally contributions that present postmedieval materials.In the first five essays drawing mainly on medieval prose sources, Theodore M. Andersson observes that the Icelandic sagas (and here he means the “Sagas of Icelanders”) are more apt to begin with a marriage or betrothal than to end with one and argues that there was a pre-Christian tradition of requiring consent of the woman entering a marital union. The occasionally disastrous consequences of ignoring the wishes of the bride were, Andersson argues, an important catalyst for storytelling already at an oral stage of the saga tradition.Annette Lassen turns to a discussion of the depiction of Vínland in the two Vínland sagas and argues that Vínland is represented as an area untouched by Christianity and as such is “a place of strife, conflict and fear” (p. 182). The only benefits that can be gained there, she states, are of a material nature (which might not have been so bad for the Greenlanders who, after all, were at the mercy of the elements and frequently would have had to cope with scarcity). While some earlier scholarship has sought to understand Vínland in terms of an earthly Paradise, Lassen finds that the most obvious parallel to Biblical materials is to be found in the Stjórn's description of Canaan (cf. Num 13). “But,” she continues, “while Canaan is conquered by the Israelites, the Greenlanders give up when they face attacks by the natives” (p. 175).Kirsten Wolf and Sune Wolf Pulsiano, assisted by Jón Atli Árnason, provide a richly documented encyclopedic overview of references to diseases and discomforts in the Sagas of Icelanders, contemporary sagas, and related materials. References to diseases from ámusótt “erysipelas” to útsótt “ diarrhea” are listed, less specific references are discussed, and diagnoses are proposed. An interesting point to emerge is that there was no specific term for arthritis, although archaeological evidence suggests that this was a common ailment (p. 365). Moving to the kings’ sagas, Else Mundal discusses the date and style of Sturla Þórðarson's fragmentarily preserved Magnúss saga lagabœtis and argues persuasively that the saga was composed and concluded over four months in the summer of 1278 before Sturla returned to Iceland. This brief period of composition, Mundal argues, would explain the absence of dramatized dialogues, speeches, and poetic stanzas from the saga. When King Magnús died in 1280, Sturla would then have updated the saga with information about the final years of his reign.Marianne Kalinke offers a close reading of the dragon slaying episode in Reykjahólabók's Georgíuss saga, a text which ultimately derives from Legenda Aurea. Kalinke argues that the saga presents a narrative with drama and suspense that is superior to its antecedents. She also suggests that the relative freedom with which the translator treated his source material is to be explained by the fact that the story was understood to be fictitious, and that it therefore could be embellished and modified. Georgíus's dragon-slaying is also compared to that of Tristram in Tristrams saga and again found to be superior. Following upon the detailed and illuminating discussion of Georgíuss saga, the section on Tristrams saga gives the impression of being less developed, and the question of how the fictitious character of Tristrams saga might have influenced the Old Norse reworking is not addressed.The most interesting points to emerge from Jon Gunnar Jørgensen's survey of medieval terms and phrases for roles associated with the creation of sagas is the apparent alignment of Old Norse hǫfundr and Latin auctor, both referring to the one who imbues a text with authority. In a final section, Jørgensen claims, with reference to Peter Hallberg's studies from the 1960s, that attempts to identify saga authors on the basis of stylistics are essentially misguided because anonymity is a basic characteristic of the saga genre (p. 131–32). To this one might argue that even if medieval Icelanders were not preoccupied with this matter, it is perfectly legitimate for us to be, and that it is first and foremost a question of whether one takes an insider or an outsider perspective to the material at hand. But since Jørgensen makes this etic turn, one might have wished that he engaged more with recent scholarship on medieval authorship (e.g., Ranković’s notion of distributed authorship, see, e.g., “Who is Speaking in Traditional Texts,” New Literary History 38 [2007]). Advances in stylometry since Hallberg have also led to interesting results that would have been worthwhile to consider–examples of such studies are Haukur Þorgeirsson's “How Similar are Heimskringla and Egils saga?,” European Journal of Scandinavian Studies 48 (2018), and Jón Karl Helgason et al.’s “Fingraför fornsagnahöfunda,” Skírnir 191 (2017).Among the three contributions centering on medieval poetry, Margaret Clunies Ross discusses allusions to the longer poems of Egill Skallagrímsson in the poetry of Snorri Sturluson and Sturla Þórðarson. She also questions Kevin Wanner's argument that Snorri's Edda was a “last desperate attempt to restore the ‘cultural capital’ represented by the Skaldic art” (p. 19). To make the point that the skaldic court encomium was a thriving art form in the Norse world in the mid-thirteenth century a broader approach would seem to be required. However, the discussion of the allusions to Egill's poetry in the compositions of Snorri and Sturla, which is the main point of the article, is both revealing and illuminating.John Lindow offers an insightful discussion of two prophetic saga episodes (the versifying floating head in Eyrbyggja saga and Þorgils's versifying cloak in Laxdœla saga). The first example reveals a mythological overlay while the second leads to a thought-provoking discussion of the agency of objects and their status as agents of fate.Kate Heslop's discussion of carnal and spiritual kinship in encomia breaks significant new ground by downplaying the importance of bloodlines in Viking Age sources and suggesting that the preoccupation with genealogy that is evident in the medieval sources postdates the conversion to Christianity. While this point is likely to be controversial, the Viking Age evidence presented by Heslop to argue her case is comprehensive and shows unambiguously that poets and runecarvers did not obsess over genealogy to the same extent that later prose sources do.Three contributions, finally, focus on postmedieval materials and reception. Andrew Wawn's essay on the copying, reading, and general engagement with Njáls saga in Eyjafjörður in the second half of the eighteenth century is an incredibly rich and rewarding text. Running fifty-five pages, it is also among the longest in the volume. The essay focuses on séra Magnús Einarsson at Tjörn, whom Wawn identifies as the scribe of the manuscript Reykjavík, ÍB 270 4to (also known as Urðabók), but the text ranges widely, and Wawn also discusses other manuscripts from the same region, poetry inspired by the saga, and the kvöldvaka tradition. Wawn sums up the essay as follows: “[It] will present images of an informal but active north Icelandic textual community in which earnest pietism, dogged superstition, and enlightenment rationalism jostled for supremacy. Séra Magnús Einarsson was the embodiment of this cultural pluralism” (p. 249).Natalie M. Van Deusen provides an edition of Kvennaríma, a hitherto unpublished poem from the second half of the eighteenth century. The sixty preserved stanzas of the poem list some twenty wicked women from Biblical, historical, or Icelandic saga tradition who were notorious for their deceitfulness, vindictiveness, lustfulness etc. The edition is preceded by an introduction that presents the poet (Þorsteinn Hallgrímsson í Stærra-Árskógi), identifies the women referred to in the poem, and situates the text among related Icelandic poems and more widespread European texts listing virtuous and wicked women, such as Boccaccio's De mulieribus claribus. Evidence suggests that Þorsteinn had intended to balance Kvennaríma with a comparable poem on virtuous women, but that he had not yet had time to complete this companion poem when his life was cut short at 39.Shaun F. D. Hughes discusses the background of Sagan af Philippusi næturverði, a saga that was first published in Reykjavík in 1928 and probably composed not long before that. Hughes shows that the saga is based on “Das Abenteuer der Neujahrsnacht” (1818) by Heinrich Zschokke and argues that the Icelandic text was based on an English translation of Zschokke's tale by a Sigmundur Matthíasson Long (d. 1924), an Icelandic emigrant based in Winnipeg. Sigmundur deeded his manuscripts to the Icelandic National Library and his translation thus made it to Iceland where an entrepreneurial editor, only known as JÞ, became aware of it and prepared it for print. A more general point to emerge from the article is that the textual transformations usually associated with scribal traditions survived the shift to print media and that printed texts could be treated in ways that are very similar to texts transmitted in manuscripts.There may be no unifying theme to the volume and few contributors address the honoree's contributions to scholarship and Icelandic Studies directly. It is nevertheless a highly rewarding and thought-provoking collection of essays of an unusually high quality, and one that is likely to be cited and referred to frequently in future publications on the topics of the individual essays. The standout contributions in terms of the questions raised, the worlds unfolded, and/or the sheer wealth of documentation are those of Heslop, Wawn, and Wolf/Wolf Pulsiano.