Gripla - 20.12.2004, Page 261

A NEW EDITION OF BISKUPA S¯GUR 259
There is much of interest in these texts for the cultural historian, too. The
differing attitudes of the bishops to music and poetry is fascinating, for
example. While on his foreign travels in Denmark St Jón has a dream in
which he sees King David playing the harp, music he subsequently recreates
on a harp for King Sveinn (ÍF XV:186–87). When he returns to Denmark for
his consecration he impresses with the beauty of his singing, which is said to
sound more like an angel’s than a man’s (ÍF XV:197). Less endearing, but no
doubt saintly, is Jón’s refusal to listen to love poetry and his forbidding the
young Klængr fiorsteinsson to read Ovid after overhearing him doing so (ÍF
XV:211–12). Hungrvaka, however, describes Bishop Klængr as ‘it mesta
skáld’ (ÍF XVI:34) and St fiorlákr appears to have been highly appreciative of
the finer things in life: he drank strong drink without it ever being seen to take
hold of him and is said to have enjoyed stories, songs, poems, wise con-
versation, and dreams — but not plays (fiorláks saga A, chapter 16). His
nephew, Páll Jónsson, returns to Iceland from England an accomplished and
learned poet and musician (ÍF XVI:298). In Norway, on the other hand,
Laurentius is told to stop composing verse and to study canon law instead ‘e›r
veiztu ei quod versificatura nihil est nisi falsa figura?’ (ÍF XVII:240) When he
takes up his office as bishop he forbids the singing of polyphony on the
grounds that it is leikaraskap (ÍF XVII:375–76).
With the involvement of foreign missionaries and foreign archbishops in
Icelandic affairs these texts illustrate the interaction between European and
Icelandic cultural traditions in medieval Iceland. This interaction will have
been promoted by the education of so many bishops abroad: Ísleifr Gizurarson
in Herford, Germany (ÍF XVI:6), Gizurr Ísleifsson in Saxland (ÍF XVI:14), St
fiorlákr in Paris and Lincoln (ÍF XVI:52), and Páll Jónsson in England (ÍF
XVI:297–98).
A reading of these volumes also highlights the significance of what might
be called the ‘lost Latin literature’ of medieval Iceland. Four Latin fragments
witness to a Latin vita et miracula of St fiorlákr which probably pre-dates the
earliest vernacular version. These fragments are here printed at the end of ÍF
XVI with a parallel translation into modern Icelandic by Gottskálk Jensson
(pp. 341–64). The fragments hint at just how much we do not know about the
texts that failed to survive the Icelanders’ precocious preference for writing in
their vernacular language. Latin texts of which not even fragments now sur-
vive also figure prominently in the introductions to these volumes, particularly
in discussion of Björn M. Ólsen’s views on the contents of Gunnlaugr Leifs-