Gripla - 2020, Blaðsíða 131

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1572. Many reprints and translations exist, making charting how material
from this chronicle-complex circulated difficult, but we can be sure of its
influence on Icelandic culture through, in particular, an Icelandic transla-
tion found in BL Add. 11153. Robert Cook produced a survey of this and
other Icelandic works which show the influence of Carion’s Chronicle and
addressed Storm’s comments regarding Oddverjaannáll.13
To summarise Cook’s assessment, he shows that in spite of what
Storm affirms, the entries around the year 1400 in Oddverjaannáll show
too many divergences from the known versions of Carion’s Chronicles for
them to be directly derived from them.14 In the case of the entry on Timur,
for example, the detail of the olive-branch-carrying maidens being tram-
pled to death, which is the core of the portrait provided in the Icelandic
annal, simply does not appear in Carion’s work, which thus cannot be the
source.15 The description of the maidens does, however, as Cook notes,
appear in Petrus Perondinus’ Magni tamerlanis scytharum Imperatoris vita
(1551), Pope Pius II’s Asiae Europaeque elegantissima descriptio (1458), Pedro
Mexia’s silva de varia lección (1543), Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia
(1544), as well as many of the translations and adaptations that all of these
works spawned. Cook does not proceed any further in an attempt to de-
termine which of these texts might lie at the root of the entry in the annal
(which is understandable, since his interests lie solely with the influence of
Carion’s Chronicles), and Eiríkur Þormóðsson and Guðrún Ása Grímsdóttir
in their more recent edition of Oddverjaannáll add no new information on
this matter.16
To determine which, if any, of the sources mentioned by Cook was avail-
able (in one form or other) to the compiler of the Icelandic annal, a compari-
son of the main points is required.17 These are five, namely (i) the Scythian
origin of Timur (combined with the statement that he is called the king
13 Robert Cook, “The Chronica Carionis in Iceland,” Opuscula 8 (1985): 226–63.
14 Cook, “The Chronica Carionis,” 233.
15 Cook, “The Chronica Carionis,” 231. Examples which give an idea of the variety of
descriptions of Timur to be found in different versions of Carion’s Chronicles can be found
on f. 157v of the 1531 German edition and pp. 1027–28 of the 1573 German edition.
16 Oddaannálar og Oddverjaannáll, cxlvii–cxlix.
17 It should be noted that no known direct translations into Icelandic of the works of any
of these authors are known. See, for example, their absence from the (admittedly not
comprehensive) list of personal names which can be browsed on handrit.is.