Gripla - 01.01.1990, Side 191

PETER A. JORGENSEN
THE NEGLECTED GENRE
OF RÍMUR-DERIVED PROSE AND
POST-REFORMATION JÓNATAS SAGA
Just as it became fashionable in the fourteenth century to render the
sagas of preceding centuries into poetic form, the dictates of taste at a
later time reversed this trend and encouraged the production of prose
narratives derived from the poems of earlier ages. To date, such post-
Reformation “sagas” have received little attention, although it appears
that enough such reworkings exist so that one can justifiably speak of
an entire genre. To name just a few tales which are usually just briefly
noted in other editions, there are Hrings saga ok Tryggva, derived
from Geðraunir and found in paper manuscripts from the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries,1 a prose version of Krossrímur in the late-
eighteenth-century Lbs. 714, 8vo,2 and Hemings þáttr, extant in three
paper manuscripts and stemming from Benedikt Sigurðsson’s Hemings
rímur, a poem which he composed in 1729.3 There is also a prose
redaction of a saga derived from Skikkju rímur and extant in two man-
uscripts, Lbs. 1509, 4to and Lbs. 2081, 8vo,4 a short prose recension of
Núma rímur in the nineteenth-century manuscript Lbs. 254, 8vo,5 as
1 Agnete Loth, Late Medieval Icelandic Romances, 5 vols. in Editiones Arnamag-
næanæ, Series B, vol. 24 (Copenhagen, 1965), V, pp. ix-x. (Although in Icelandic a
single canto is a ríma and a poem is normally composed of several cantos (pl. rímur),
this latter term will be treated as a singular noun in Enghsh when used to refer to a sin-
gle poem).
2 Mariane Overgaard, The History of the Cross-Tree Down to Christ’s Passion. Ice-
landic Legend Versions, in Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, Series B, vol. 26 (Copenhagen,
1968), pp. cxc-cxcii.
3 Gihian Fellows Jensen, Hemings þáttr Áslákssonar, in Editiones Arnamagnæanæ,
Series B, vol. 3 (Copenhagen, 1962), pp. Ixxxi-lxxxv.
4 Marianne Kalinke, Mgttuls saga, in Editiones Amamagnæanæ, Series B, vol. 30
(Copenhagen, 1987), p. cxlv.
5 Sigurður Breiðfjörð, Núma rímur, 3rd edn. (Reykjavík, 1937), p. xxiii.