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are found together in other manuscripts from the same period.5 What sets
AM 152 fol. apart from these, however, is its size and lavishness, and, con-
sequently, the importance ascribed to its contents by its patron(s).
By focussing on a manuscript that can be located in a specific time
and mileu, and reading the sagas in the same physical context as their late
medieval audiences, we can try to recover what the sagas in their extant
manuscript manifestations may have meant for their audiences and pa-
trons, people who considered them important or interesting enough to
spend the time, effort and cost to commit them to vellum. thus, we can
ask: what, if anything, unites sagas as disparate as, first, Grettis saga and
Þórðar saga hreðu, primarily set in northwest Iceland in the eleventh cen-
tury, second, the stories of scandinavian fornaldarsaga heroes who go on
viking expeditions, and, finally, romances about chivalric knights set in
mid- and central Europe, northern Africa and India? I adopt the view, in
line with recent old norse-Icelandic scholarship, that all preserved medi-
eval texts, including legendary sagas and romances that previous scholars
considered ‘decadent’ entertainment, foreground contemporary issues and
are thus valuable evidence through which historical attitudes can be recov-
ered.6 Many of these sagas are deftly structured narratives with carefully
focalised, intertwined episodes and richly delineated characters, themes
and plots. scholars tended to categorise and evaluate on genre-based crite-
ria, but by analysing together sagas that have traditionally been assigned to
three different genres, their common themes rise to the surface. Authors,
redactors, commissioners and audiences are likely to have responded to the
events around them through the composition and consumption of literary
texts, and consequently, manuscript production. these texts and artifacts
5 to name a few late fifteenth-century vellum manuscripts, AM 556 a–b 4to (Eggertsbók)
contains Grettis saga, Mágus saga and Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar, among others. AM 580
4to and Sth. Perg. 7 4to (ca. 1300–25), originally one manuscript, contain Mágus saga,
Flóvents saga and Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar among others. AM 579 4to contains Þorsteins
saga Víkingssonar and Ectors saga, and AM 570 4to contains Flóvents saga and Hrólfs saga
Gautrekssonar.
6 the foundational works that pioneered this approach are Stephen A. Mitchell, Heroic
Sagas and Ballads (Ithaca: Cornell university Press, 1991); torfi H. tulinius, The Matter
of the North. The Rise of Literary Fiction in Thirteenth-Century Iceland, trans. randi C.
Eldevik, the Viking Collection: Studies in northern Civilization, vol. 13 (odense:
odense university Press, 2002); and Jürg glauser, Isländische Märchensagas: studien zur
Prosa literatur im spätmittelalterlichen Island, Beiträge zur nordischen Philologie, vol. 12
(Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1983).
IDEoLogY AnD IDEntItY In LAtE MEDIEVAL WESt ICELAnD