Gripla - 20.12.2008, Page 53

ELIZABETH ASHMAN ROWE
LITERARY, CODICOLOGICAL,
AND POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES
ON HAUKSBÓK
1. Introduction
THE FRAGMENTARY manuscript Hauksbók (now AM 371 4to, AM 544
4to, and AM 675 4to), compiled by the Icelandic lögmaðr Haukr Erlendsson
(ca. 1265–1334) in the first decades of the fourteenth century, is an un usual
book for at least three reasons. The first is that it is the oldest Icelandic
manuscript whose writer is known with certainty. The second is that this
Icelandic writer had a most remarkable career outside of Iceland: Haukr
became Norway’s first non-Norwegian lögmaðr and was appointed to the
Nor wegian royal council.1 The third is that he assembled a truly diverse
collection of texts, ranging from theological dialogues to fornaldarsögur,
from a history of Troy to histories of Iceland, and from the prophecies of
Merlin to an explanation of how to do decimal arithmetic. Gunnar
Harðarson and Stefán Karlsson (1993, 271) contented themselves with
characterizing Hauksbók as “from its inception ... an entire private library”,
but Hauksbók’s heterogeneity has been a temptation for other scholars
who sense a deeper unity to the compilation and who seek to contain its
wild variety through a more specific explanation than “library” that would
account for its contents. Most of these scholars emphasize the non-Ice-
landic aspects of Hauksbók. For example, Rudolf Simek (1991) argued that
Haukr modelled his compilation on the Liber floridus, an encyclopedic col-
lection of extracts assembled by the Flemish monk Lambert of Saint Omer
around 1120. Gunnar Harðarson (1995, 177) concurred in seeing Haukr as
an “encyclopédiste”, but he noted that Haukr’s literary activities took place
in the milieu of the royal administrators in Bergen. Helgi Þorláksson
(2004) foregrounded the political factors, suggesting that Hauksbók was
1 The most recent detailed biography of Haukr is that by Gunnar Harðarson (1995, 168–
183).
Gripla XIX (2008): 51–76.