Gripla - 20.12.2004, Page 259

A NEW EDITION OF BISKUPA S¯GUR 257
duction values are also evident in the accuracy of the text (two tiny typo-
graphic slips I noticed are highly uncharacteristic: ‘Vauches’ for ‘Vauchez’ on
ÍF XV:cccliii, and the spelling ‘Gurevitsj’ in ÍF XV: xiii n. 3 and in the biblio-
graphy to that volume: the work referred to was published with the author’s
name spelled Gurevich (as it is in ÍF XVI)).
Although considerable scholarly interest was shown in these texts in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the biskupa sögur, with other
‘religious’ literature, have received relatively little attention in recent decades,
especially outside Iceland. There is, for example, no chapter on, indeed little
mention of, these texts in Clover and Lindow’s Old Norse-Icelandic Litera-
ture: A Critical Guide, and although some of these texts receive attention in
the more recent book Old Icelandic Literature and Society, edited by Margaret
Clunies Ross, it is not as a group, but rather insofar as they relate to the con-
tents of chapters on historical writing or saints’ sagas. Icelandic scholars have
not neglected the biskupa sögur to the same extent (see, for example, the
coverage given to the genre in Íslensk bókmenntasaga I), and these volumes
should draw attention to recent work that has perhaps not had the readership it
might have had outside Iceland. One hopes very much that this new edition
will whet the appetite of scholars — and translators — for further work on the
biskupa sögur so that they will figure more prominently in Old Norse-Ice-
landic studies in the future.
There are many reasons why these texts deserve more attention. Firstly, of
course, because of the importance of Christianity and of Christian bishops in
medieval Iceland. Old Icelandic prose literature begins with a text, Ari fior-
gilsson’s Íslendingabók, that devotes a high proportion of its content to the
conversion and the first bishops and was submitted by its author for episcopal
approval. In the 1070s Adam of Bremen wrote of the Icelanders that ‘epi-
scopum suum habent pro rege’ (Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum
IV:xxxvi (35); ‘they have their bishop for king’) and Hungrvaka says of
Bishop Gizurr Ísleifsson that ‘var rétt at segja at hann var bæ›i konungr ok
byskup yfir landinu me›an hann lif›i’ (ÍF XVI:16).
Related to this is the importance of the biskupa sögur as sources for po-
litical, legal and ecclesiastical history. Many of these texts chronicle conflict
between the clergy and those with secular power, Iceland’s own version of a
quarrel taking place across Europe in the central Middle Ages. Hungrvaka
records that the third bishop of Skálholt, fiorlákr Runólfsson, had difficulties
with the chieftains (ÍF XVI:27–28). In the Oddaverja fláttr in fiorláks saga