Gripla - 20.12.2014, Page 88

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common with many of the other texts copied after it, its literary themes set
the tone for the content and concerns of the codex as a whole.
this article follows recent developments in old norse-Icelandic stud-
ies (and more widely) to employ insights from material philology. Sagas
have increasingly been analysed in their manuscript context, i.e. in the
material artifacts in which they have come down to us, rather than in isola-
tion, and manuscripts have come to be regarded as organic wholes, so their
codicological, palaeographical and socio-historical aspects are integrated
with textual analysis.3 According to this approach, a manuscript’s features
such as paratext, size and degree of opulence are seen as producing mean-
ing, just as its content does.4 thus my points of departure are, first, that
there are impulses behind the selection of these particular sagas during the
manuscript’s production process, and, second, that the manuscript itself
adds another layer of meaning to the sagas’ content. Not only did the sagas
individually appeal to medieval audiences and manuscript patrons, but
they were likely seen as somehow belonging together, as some of them
3 See overview and references in Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir, ‘Expanding Horizons: recent
trends in old norse-Icelandic Manuscript Studies,’ New Medieval Literatures 14 (2012):
210–212. to name but a few examples of this approach in old norse-Icelandic studies,
see Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir, ‘Arctic garden of Delights: the Purpose of the Book of
Reynistaður,’ in Romance and Love in Late Medieval and Early Modern Iceland. Essays
in Honor of Marianne Kalinke, Studia Islandica, vol. 54, eds. Kirsten Wolf and Johanna
Denzin (Ithaca: Cornell university Library, 2008), 279–301; Elizabeth Ashman rowe,
The Development of Flateyjarbók. Icelandic and the Norwegian Dynastic Crisis of 1389, the
Viking Collection: Studies in northern Civilization, vol. 15 (odense: university Press
of Southern Denmark, 2002), and ‘Literary, Codicological, and Political Perspectives
on Hauksbók,’ Gripla 19 (2008): 51–76; Emily Lethbridge, ‘the Place of Þorsteins saga
Víkingssonar in Eggertsbók, a Late Medieval Icelandic Saga-Book,’ The Legendary Sagas:
Origins and Development, eds. Annette Lassen et al. (reykjavík: university of Iceland Press,
2013), 375–403, and ‘Authors and Anonymity, texts and their Contexts: the Case of
Eggertsbók,’ in Modes of Authorship in the Middle Ages, Papers in Mediaeval Studies, vol. 22,
ed. Slavica rankovic with others (toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2012),
343–364; Hans Jacob orning, ‘the Magical reality of the Late Middle Ages: Exploring
the World of the Fornaldarsögur,’ Scandinavian Journal of History 35 (2010): 3–20, and
‘Ǫrvar-oddr og senmiddelalderens adelskultur,’ in Lassen et al., eds., The Legendary Sagas,
291–321; Stefka georgieva Eriksen, Writing and Reading in Medieval Manuscript Culture:
The Transmission of the Story of Elye in Old French and Old Norse Literary Contexts,Medieval
texts and Cultures of northern Europe, vol. 25 (turnhout: Brepols, 2013).
4 See e.g. Stephen g. nichols, ‘Why Material Philology? Some thoughts,’ Zeitschrift für
deutsche Philologie 116 (1997): 10–30.