Gripla - 2020, Page 127

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the looming Turkish threat. Thus, Timur was rehabilitated as a hero for
Europeans floundering in a new geopolitical climate. As Milwright states
‘[o]f all the great warriors who swept across Central Asia and the Middle
East in the medieval period, Tamerlane [i.e. Timur] is arguably the one
who had the most enduring impact on the culture of Renaissance and early
modern Europe.2
That such a figure, in the decades and centuries after his dramatic
rise and fall, would spark interest among learned and intellectually-curi-
ous Icelanders should come as no surprise. Already in the Middle Ages,
Icelanders had written and copied works which highlighted previous am-
bitious conquerors, for example Alexanders saga, dedicated to the exploits
of Alexander the Great, and the various narratives which discuss Atli
and draw on legends of Attila the Hun. The first evidence of Timur’s
penetration into Icelandic literary culture is not to be found in a saga or
eddic poem, however, but rather in Oddverjaannáll ‘the annal of the men
of Oddi’ under the entry for 1398.3 The work which frames this entry
was thus named because in the seventeenth century it was mistakenly
assumed to have its origins in the learned circle which formed around
Sæmundur Sigfússon (hinn fróði ‘the wiseʼ, 1056–1133) and his descend-
ants, the Oddaverjar ‘men of Oddi’, in the twelfth century. The text exists
in its entirety in only one sixteenth-century manuscript, AM 417 4to,4
and can be dated on the basis of references within the text and margins to
the period 1575–1591.5 Oddverjaannáll is a heterogeneous work, the style
changing greatly as the centuries flow by, and the ever more abundant
interpolations have the effect of shifting it generically from a typical me-
dieval annal towards an early modern chronicle. The early section focusses
2 Milwright, “So Despicable a Vessel,” 317.
3 To my knowledge Timur appears in no other Icelandic annals. See, for example, the single
reference to Timur (‘Tamerlanes Scyta’) in the ‘navneregister’ in Islandske annaler indtil
1578, ed. by Gustav Storm (Oslo (Christiania): Grøndahl & Sons, 1888), 641.
4 A number of excerpts, all of which can be traced back to AM 417 4to, appear in manuscripts
of later provenance. See Oddaannálar og Oddverjaannáll, ed. by Eiríkur Þormóðsson and
Guðrún Ása Grímsdóttir, Rit 59 (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á íslandi, 2003),
cxlix–cliv.
5 The most recent editors, however, give the time of writing of the main text as 1540–1591
(Oddaannálar og Oddverjaannáll, cxii). It would thus seem that they choose to see the many
borrowings from Anders Sørensen Vedel’s Den danske Krønicke (1575) (listed on cxlii–cxliii)
as additions to a preexisting ‘main’ text.