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Material aspects such as the more labour-intensive double column
format, decorated initials, and the codex’s sheer size and weight – using
the skin of 100 animals – strongly suggest that it would have been a status
symbol at its time of production and beyond. the contents of AM 152
fol. are unusual for a manuscript of its size; such prestigious codices most
often preserve devotional literature, laws or kings’ sagas.19 I surveyed all
other medieval manuscript witnesses of these sagas, and they are typically
preserved in ordinary manuscripts in quarto single-column format with lit-
tle or no decoration, although stockholm Perg. 7 fol., containing a number
of riddarasögur, is a notable exception, and AM 556 a–b 4to, too, has a
number of embellished initials.
As guðvarður Már gunnlaugsson has noted, four of the five old-
est manuscripts of Grettis saga, including AM 152 fol., can be localised
to northwest Iceland, not surprisingly, since grettir’s family settles
in Miðfjörður and the saga is mostly set in this area.20 similarly, the
action of Þórðar saga hreðu principally takes place in Miðfjörður and
Skagafjörður (apart from the norwegian prelude) and would have been
of local interest.21 Other sagas in the manuscript also have connections to
the area: Lee Hollander argued that Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar and Hrólfs
saga Gautrekssonar (and perhaps Gautreks saga, by extension) might have
been composed in the late-thirteenth century at Þingeyrar monastery in
vatnsdalur to ‘embellish and glorify’ the ancestors of the vatnsdælir.22
grettir’s mother Ásdís is said to be descended from this family, and she
gives her son an ancestral sword, which, importantly, he uses to behead
glámr. the same names recur; for instance, Ásdís’s brother is named
19 Agnete Loth, who edited 15 riddarasögur in Late Medieval Icelandic Romances, noted
that most medieval manuscripts containing fornaldar- and riddarasögur were ‘workaday’
manuscripts; see introduction to Fornaldarsagas and Late Medieval Romances: AM586
and AM 589 a–f 4to, Early Icelandic Manuscripts in facsimile, vol. 11 (Copenhagen:
Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1977).
20 guðvarður Már gunnlaugsson, ‘“grettir vondum vættum.” grettir Ásmundarson og vin-
sældir Grettis sögu,’ Gripla 11 (2000): 67.
21 elisabeth Ida Ward, Nested Narrative. Þórðar saga hreðu and Material Engagement (PhD
diss., university of California, Berkeley, 2012), 28.
22 Lee M. Hollander, ‘the gautland Cycle of Sagas,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology
11 (1912): 212–217. See also Elizabeth Ashman rowe, ‘Absent Mothers and the Sons of
fornjótr: Late-thirteenth-Century Monarchist Ideology in Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar,’
Medieval Scandinavia 14 (2004): 133–160.
IDEoLogY AnD IDEntItY In LAtE MEDIEVAL WESt ICELAnD