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that some reminder was needed of the saint’s close relationship with eccle-
siastical Latin. While he chose the vernacular as an appropriate medium to
convey Þorlákr’s vita and miracles to an unschooled audience, he clearly
felt the need to apologize for the inferiority of the vernacular and to
emphasize his education and thereby the scholarly status of his edition by
preceding the saga with a poem in Latin, which acknowledges the inferior
state of Old Norse-Icelandic as a medium of eloquence (elinguis) and its
implicit unschooled character (nullo dogmate pinguis). In his essay, De vul-
gari eloquentia (ca. 1304), Dante Alighieri shows a similar attitude towards
the vernacular. He compares Latin (gramatica) to the vernacular by saying
that the former is an exclusive language, acquired by the elite through
assiduous and time consuming study, a language of rules and learning, the
latter a spoken language without rules, picked up by everyone, even chil-
dren from their nurses.103 Comparably, many Medieval English authors,
such as Chaucer, Walton, or Ashby, exhibit “linguistic and authorial mod-
esty” as topoi in the prologues to their works, apologizing for the default
and inadequate English language.104 And an Old Norse-Icelandic example
is the aforementioned prologue of Hungrvaka, which in 17th-century
manuscripts seems to form an introduction to Þorláks saga. 105
7. Provenance and Authorship of AM 382 4to
Árni Magnússon received AM 382 4to at Hlíðarendi in the south of
Iceland from Guðríður Gísladóttir in 1702. From Árni Magnússon’s notes
we can derive that the manuscript was in the personal possession of
Guðríður Gísladóttir and her husband Þórður Þorláksson (1637–1696), who
was consecrated bishop at Skálholt in 1672. The manuscript either be longed
103 See Dante Alighieri, “De vulgari eloquentia.” Testo critico della Società Dantesca Italiana,
ed. Pio Rajna (Florence: Società Dantesca Italiana, 1960), Vol. 1, 2–3: vulgarem locutionem
asserimus quam sine omni regola nutricem imitantes accipimus. Est et inde alia locutio secondaria
nobis, quam Romani gramaticam vocaverunt ... ad habitum vero huius pauci perveniunt, quia
non nisi per spatium temporis et studii assiduitatem regulamur et doctrinamur in illa.
104 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and others, eds., The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle
English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1999), 10. – For specific examples, see Ibid., 8–10 “A Late Medieval Idea of the
Vernacular: ‘Rude Words and Boystous.’”
105 See page 26.
THE FORGOTTEN POEM