Introduction

This edition provides TEI(P5)-conformant, diplomatic transcriptions of two Icelandic saga manuscripts: Hafgeirs saga Flateyings (KB Add 6, folio) and Þjóstólfs saga Hamramma (KB Add 376, quarto).

Hafgeirs saga Flateyings is preserved in a single paper manuscript, Add. 6, fol., and is housed in the collection of the Arni Magnusson Institute for Icelandic Studies. The manuscript is unsigned, but according to the flyleaf:

Saga af Hafgeyre flateying udskreven af en Membran der kommen er fra Island 1774 in 4to exarata Seculo xij

(The Saga of Hafgeir Flateying was copied from a manuscript written in the twelfth century which had come from Iceland [to Copenhagen] in 1774)

Þjóstólfs saga hamramma is preserved in three paper manuscripts:

  • Add. 376, 4to, housed in the collection of the Arni Magnusson Institute for Icelandic Studies
  • JS. 225, 4to, a nineteenth-century copy of Add. 376, 4to, housed in the Manuscript Collection of the National Library of Iceland
  • Lbs. 1935 4to, copied in 1890 by Bjarnhéðinn Jónsson and held in the Manuscript Collection of the National Library of Iceland

The text is also extant in Guðni Jónsson’s twentieth-century normalized edition of the saga which is included in Íslendinga sögur: 20th c. (1946). Add. 376, 4to is unsigned and undated.

Although the flyleaf found in the Hafgeirs manuscript claims the work to be a copy of a twelfth-century manuscript, no source manuscript has ever been located and no catalog entry exists to record such an exemplar. The scribe responsible for the Hafgeirs manuscript has been identified as Þorlákur Magnusson (Ísfiord), and Peter Jorgensen (1977) argues that Þorlákur is the author of the saga and that the work is a forgery.

The scribe responsible for the Þjóstólfs manuscript has been identified as Þorleifur Arason (Adaldahl), and Jorgensen (1979) argues that Þorleifur is the author of Þjóstólfs saga and that the saga is a forgery.

It is very difficult to date sagas, and perhaps even more difficult to date sagas found in paper manuscripts when no exemplar exists and there is little information to trace either the manuscript or the saga’s history. Jorgensen’s forgery claims are based largely on literary analyses, which though compelling, cannot be considered failsafe. For this reason, I identify and date Danish and Middle Low German borrowings wherever possible, as these can often be used to more closely identify a work’s composition date. The presence of a number of seventeenth-century loan words, for example, in a text claiming a twelfth-century origin, would be suggestive of a much later composition date.