Gripla - 20.12.2010, Síða 62

GRIPLA62
honor her memory and invoke her, adding a prayer that any woman who
invoked her while in labor would give birth to a healthy baby. A voice from
heaven announced that her petition had been granted, and Saint Margaret
subsequently rose from her prayer and asked the headman to execute her.
He took off her head with a single stroke, and so she received the crown of
martyrdom.
Judging by the number of manuscripts in which it is preserved, the
legend of Saint Margaret of Antioch seems to have been among the most
popular saints’ lives in Iceland. The legend is extant in far more late medi-
eval and post-Reformation manuscripts than any other legend, and often
in very small exemplars and contexts associated with childbirth.1 The place
or time of origin of the cult of Saint Margaret in Iceland remains
unknown.2 Similary, it cannot be ascertained when the legend was first
translated into Icelandic, but, based on the dates of the earliest manuscripts
of the legend, it must have taken place sometime before 1300.
Three different versions of the legend of Saint Margaret, derived from
at least two translations, have been preserved. The version which Widding,
Bekker-Nielsen, and Shook call Margrétar saga I is preserved in full or in
part in AM 235 fol., fols. 17va–19rb21 (ca. 1400), AM 233a fol., fols.
27rb17–27v (ca. 1350–1375), AM 433c 12mo, fols. 1v–24r4 (ca. 1525–1550),
AM 428b 12mo, fols. 1r–2v (ca. 1400), and NKS 1265 II fol. fragm. 1, fols.
1r–2v (ca. 1500–1550), and in several younger manuscripts from the eight-
eenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.3 This version of the legend has
been edited by Unger, who based the text on AM 235 fol. (called A) and
noted variants from AM 233a fol. (called B) as far as it goes (474–477),
though the latter part (chapter 5), which differs considerably from AM 235
1 The small size of the manuscripts is obviously due to the fact that the manuscripts were
placed on the pregnant woman’s stomach during labor. See Jón Steffensen, “Margrétar saga
and Its History in Iceland,” Saga-Book of the Viking Society 16 (1965): 273–282, and Kirsten
Wolf, Heilagra meyja sögur (Reykjavík: Bókmenntafræðistofnun Háskóla Íslands, 2003),
liii.
2 Margaret Cormack, The Saints in Iceland: Their Veneration from the Conversion to 1400,
Subsidia hagiographica 78 (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1994), 122.
3 Ole Widding, Hans Bekker-Nielsen, and L. K. Shook, “The Lives of the Saints in Old
Norse Prose: A Handlist,” Mediaeval Studies 25 (1963): 294–337, esp. 320, and Peter
Rasmussen, “Tekstforholdene i Margrétar saga,” 3 vols., Specialeafhandling til magister-
konferens i nordisk filologi, University of Copenhagen, 1977, vol. 1, 14.