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on Roman emperors and the growth of the church, often taking the form
of a series of short biographical sketches or anecdotes of wonders and
martyrdoms. As the annals reach the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
the information provided is denser: each year is supplied with informa-
tion on climate conditions, natural phenomena, the sinking of merchant
ships, church matters, lay disputes and Scandinavian monarchs, all of this
stacked together with little attempt being made to smooth over transitions
from one topic to another. This unevenness is of course natural, since the
sources available for the various periods differed greatly. The early part
(up to AD 67) seems to rely more heavily on the so-called óstyttir ‘unab-
breviated’ Oddaannálar, a non-extant forerunner to both the extant styttir
‘abbreviated’ Oddaannálar and the text under consideration here. Eiríkur
Þormóðsson and Guðrún Ása Grímsdóttir formulated the hypothesis of
the dependence on the unabbreviated forerunner, which may itself have
taken texts as varied as Tacitus’ Annals, Hector Boece’s Historia gentis
scotorum and Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum as source material.6 The
later sections, within which the description of Timur is found, focus pre-
dominantly on Scandinavian events and rely more heavily on a number of
sagas, as will be mentioned below, with the most recent period also most
likely making use of oral traditions which transmitted information on
events within a national ambit.
Timur, while nowadays identified as a Turco-Mongol, is presented
in the annals as a Tartar king,7 yet prior to his appearance the place of
the Tartars within world history is far from being a principal interest of
the annals’ compiler. Nevertheless, changing times and new geopolitical
entities such as the Turks (Ottomans) or Tartars do gradually make their
presence felt to a certain degree as the Middle Ages wear on. The Tartars
are first mentioned in 1241, the same year that Snorri Sturluson dies, with
the unobtrusive comment ‘Tartarar baurdust j Vngariaʼ [the Tartars fought
in Hungary]. Following this in 1246 Cam, King of the Tartars, is said to be
baptised, in 1260 a Tartar army is massacred in Jerusalem, in 1277 Tartars
kill the Sultan of Babylon, in 1286 they send messengers to the Danish
6 Oddaannálar og Oddverjaannáll, xx–xxv, xxxviii–xliv.
7 On the Icelanders’ complex and changing relationship to the Turkic peoples see Sverrir
Jakobsson, “Saracen Sensibilities: Muslims and Otherness in Medieval Saga Literature,”
jEGP 115 (2016): 226–29.
TIMUR, ‘THE WRATH OF GODʼ