Gripla - 20.12.2005, Page 12

GRIPLA10
around 981 to the middle of the eleventh century), and later were collected by
Icelandic bishops during their trips abroad for consecration and/or study. They
were copied and read in Iceland’s scriptoria and monasteries, and were cer-
tainly used in the celebration of saints’ feast days: several of the lives contain
homiletic introductions, in at least one case addressed to an audience of go›ir
brø›r (in the saga of James the Less, Post.:737.32).5 Unfortunately, as is the
case with most of Iceland’s medieval literature, we have no precise informa-
tion concerning where or by whom collections of saints’ lives such as AM 645
4to and AM 652 4to were written, and even now no exact Latin manuscript
prototypes have been matched to surviving Icelandic hagiographical texts.
Concerning the literary value of the Icelandic apostles’ lives, two of the
most significant studies to date are those done by Jónas Kristjánsson and Lucy
Grace Collings. Jónas published the results of his studies in two articles, ‘Learn-
ed style or saga style?’ (1981) and ‘Sagas and Saints’ Lives’ (1985), and Col-
lings, in her doctoral dissertation, Codex Scardensis: Studies in Icelandic
Hagiography (1969), which, although still unpublished, is an essential work
for anyone doing any sort of study of Icelandic hagiography. Jónas does a
lexical study of passages from the earliest translated lives, including the lives
found in AM 645 4to and AM 652 4to, comparing them with corresponding
Latin texts in order to show how the Icelandic translators followed the Latin
originals closely but, as he suggests, reshaped the Latin according to Icelandic
grammatical rules. Collings compares versions of the lives as found in the
fourteenth-century Skar›sbók manuscript (Codex Scardensis) with earlier ver-
sions of the lives and with Latin originals, and shows that whereas the young-
er texts in the collection display an elegance of expression and a heightening
of rhetorical ornamentation, older texts pare down excessive Latin rhetoric
and other features that detract from a ‘plain and unpretentious narrative’ (such
as name etymologies, long theological passages, allegorical commentary, and
specialized details that would have been unfamiliar to an Icelandic audience).
These scholars’ findings reveal that the earliest translated saints’ lives in Ice-
land display a dramatic narrative style similar to that of the so-called ‘popular
5 The lives of Bartholomew, James the Greater, and Philip and James the Less in the AM 652/
630 4to collection contain homiletic introductions.
For an overview of the history of the Icelandic church and monastic activity in medieval
Iceland, including the production of saints’ lives, see, among others, Turville-Petre 1953:48-
142 and Sverrir Tómasson 1992:421-479. For a study of saints’ cults in Iceland, see Cormack
1994b.