Gripla - 2019, Qupperneq 11

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cal demand, and copies were often commissioned for payment of some sort.
Scribes often knew each other personally, and they were sometimes close
neighbours, as in the case of Guðbrandur Sturlaugsson of Hvítidalur and
Magnús Jónsson of Tjaldanes in the late nineteenth century.9
The tradition of scribal dissemination of sagas and poetry (such as rí-
mur) remained essentially unbroken for seven centuries, despite the arrival
of print technology in the sixteenth century, and romances rank among
the most-copied prose works in nineteenth-century Iceland.10 Albert col-
lectively refers to such romances as riddarasögur, which is the term used in
this article, although they could equally be described by the term lygisögur.
Printed editions existed for only a handful of these romances, and hand-
written exemplars were the primary means of their transmission. One
consequence is considerable textual variation between extant copies and
the emergence of multiple redactions and adaptations of individual sagas.11
While many of Albert’s texts are medieval in origin, they do not thereby
descend directly from Old Norse originals. Following Hall’s study of the
transmission of the riddarasögur, no systematic distinction was made in
this paper between pre- and post-medieval redactions.12 In the absence of
scholarly editions of virtually all of the post-medieval saga and rímur ver-
sions in circulation for a given title, tracing Albert’s sources for his many
riddarasögur would be a long and complicated process, outside the scope
of a single article.
Albert’s life on both sides of the Atlantic is poorly documented, even
though he is one of the last Icelandic scribes to have engaged in the practice
of copying sagas and rímur from manuscript exemplars: Albert’s last dated
9 Matthew J. Driscoll, “Pleasure and pastime: The manuscripts of Guðbrandur Sturlaugsson
á Hvítadal,” Mirrors of Virtue: Manuscript and Print in Late Pre-modern Iceland, ed. by
Margrét Eggertsdóttir and Matthew J. Driscoll, Opuscula 15 (Copenhagen: Museum
Tusculanum Press, 2017), 225–76.
10 Matthew J. Driscoll, “Þögnin mikla: Hugleiðingar um riddarasögur og stöðu þeirra í ís-
lenskum bókmenntum,” Skáldskaparmál 1 (1990): 157–68.
11 An important source of new prose redactions was rímur poetry: verse adaptations of prose
sagas, which later writers transformed again into prose narratives. Rímur-derived prose has
received little scholarly attention, however. See Peter A. Jorgensen, “The Neglected Genre
of Rímur-Derived Prose and Post-Reformation Jónatas saga,” Gripla 7 (1990): 187–201.
12 Alaric Hall and Katelin Parsons, “Making Stemmas with Small Samples, and Digital
Approaches to Publishing Them: Testing the Stemma of Konráðs saga keisarasonar,” Digital
Medievalist 9 (2013). DOI: 10.16995/dm.51
ALBERT JóHANNESSON AND THE SCRIBES OF HECLA ISLAND