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belonging to this manuscript family contain mainly ballads and collec-
tively represent the oldest known collection of Icelandic ballads. Gissur
sveinsson himself likely recorded the bulk of this ballad collection, prob-
ably transcribing the oral performances of one or more informants.18
the title page of AM 147 8vo states that the volume is a gift from Gissur
to Magnús jónsson’s father, jón Arason of Vatnsfjörður (1606–1673),19
which indicates that Gissur recopied his personal ballad collection at least
once for the benefit of others in his scribal circles.
though Gissur sveinsson describes his manuscript in general terms as
nokkur fornkvæði til gamans (AM 147 8vo, 1v), he does include a number
of more recent compositions, and there is little reason to doubt jón
Helgason’s assessment that Grýlukvæði was a comparatively young poem
at the time of its inclusion in AM 147 8vo.20 Among these younger songs
are Icelandic translations of a dozen danish ballads from Anders sørensen
Vedel’s It Hundrede vduaalde Danske Viser (1591), a book that may have
served as a model for Gissur sveinsson’s manuscript and likely inspired
early ballad collection efforts in Iceland.21
Vedel’s ballads, recent translations into Icelandic, still classify as
fornkvæði in the sense that these are danish fornkvæði. the inclusion of
Grýlukvæði in such a collection is an interesting editorial decision on the
part of Gissur sveinsson and strongly indicates an association with popular
entertainment, though it could also be that the figure of Grýla — and not
the poem per se — belonged to the realm of folk tradition. there are nev-
ertheless similarities between Grýlukvæði and Þóruljóð, another one of the
other non-ballads in Gissur sveinsson’s collection, found in both AM 147
18 Ibid., 51–52; Vésteinn ólason, The Traditional Ballads of Iceland: Historical Studies, stofnun
Árna Magnússonar á íslandi, Rit, vol. 22 (Reykjavík: stofnun Árna Magnússonar á íslandi,
1982), 21–22.
19 jón Arason and Gissur sveinsson were cousins, the great-grandchildren of jón ríki
Magnússon and Ragnheiður Pálsdóttir á rauðum sokkum. jón Arason’s daughter Ragnheiður
and her husband, torfi jónsson, who lived in flatey, inherited AM 147 8vo and sent it to
Árni Magnússon by 1710.
20 Kvæðabók séra Gissurar Sveinssonar, 8.
21 Kvæðabók séra Gissurar Sveinssonar, 53–54; olav solberg, “the scandinavian Medieval
Ballad: from oral tradition to Written texts and Back Again,” in Oral Art Forms and their
Passage into Writing, ed. else Mundal et al. (Copenhagen: Museum tusculanum Press,
2008), 121–33.
GRýLA In sLÉttuHLíÐ