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well to question the assumption that antiquarianism was the guiding prin-
ciple behind the composition of all old norse homilies, regardless of the
dates of the manuscripts in which they survive. We know, for example,
that those who worked in other genres of old norse religious literature
in the high and late Middle Ages drew heavily on contemporary european
sources, and it would be surprising if Icelandic and norwegian homilists
refrained from using newer works while Biblical commentators10 and writ-
ers of penitential literature11 embraced them.
the commonly-held opinion that the old norse homiletic corpus was
chronologically homogeneous, fundamentally unchanged from the twelfth
century to the mid-sixteenth, is partly based on the aforementioned pres-
ence of copies of very early texts in very late manuscripts. for instance,
the so-called stave Church Homily, the most thoroughly-studied of the
old norse homilies, survives in four manuscripts, including the earliest
extant old norse homily manuscript (AM 237 a fol.; ca. 1150) and one
of the latest (AM 624 4to; ca. 1500).12 the sustained interest in such texts
10 Stjórn explicitly cites the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais and the Historia scho-
lastica of Peter Comestor, as C.R. unger recognized and discussed in the introduction to
his edition (Stjorn: Gammelnorsk bibelhistorie fra verdens skabelse til det babyloniske fangen-
skap [oslo: feilberg og Landmark, 1862], iii–xv). for a summary and discussion of the
sources of Stjórn, see Ian j. kirby, Bible Translation in Old Norse, université de Lausanne,
Publications de la faculté des lettres, vol. 27 (Geneva: droz, 1986), 53–54, 61–64. for a
more extensive treatment of the work’s sources, see Reidar Astås, An Old Norse Biblical
Compilation: Studies in Stjórn, American university studies, series 7, theology and Religion,
vol. 109 (new york: Peter Lang, 1991), 18 –27, 69–97. this monograph is based on the same
author’s Et bibelverk fra middelalderen: Studier i Stjórn, 2 vols. (oslo: novus, 1987).
11 see Ian Mcdougall, “Latin sources of the old Icelandic Speculum Penitentis,” Opuscula
10 (1996): 136–85. see also Reidar Astås, “from old nordic to early Modern nordic:
the Language of the translations I: Icelandic and norwegian translations,” in The
Nor dic Languages, ed. oskar Bandle et al., vol. 2, Handbücher zur sprach- und kom-
munikationswissenschaft, vol. 22 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), 1195–1201.
12 Messuskýringar: Liturgisk symbolik frå den norsk-islandske kyrkja i millomalderen, ed. oluf
kolsrud (oslo: dybwad, 1952), 85–107. see Hall, “old norse-Icelandic sermons,” 676–77,
691, and 702–703. An important study of the homily is that of Gabriel turville-Petre,
“the old norse Homily on the dedication,” in Nine Norse Studies, Viking society for
northern Research, text series, vol. 5 (London: Viking society for northern Research,
1972), 79–101. sydney Louise sims has called the AM 624 text of the stave Church Homily
“the clearest possible demonstration of the continuity of old norse homiletic prose, despite
changing stylistic fashions in other genres” (“Relative Chronology and Homiletic style in
the old Icelandic Homily Book” [Ph.d. diss., university of California, Berkeley, 1986],
84–85). for a brief discussion of other early homilies that survive in late manuscripts, see
Hall, “old norse-Icelandic sermons,” 674–77.