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ritorial conquest or the involvement of their countrymen in the sack of
Constantinopleʼ.52 Constantinople and its environs thus remained central
for Iceland in ways which it did not for mainland Europeans, but the
relationship with the east was constantly developing. By the seventeenth
century, for example, the dominant power in Asia Minor, the Ottomans,
came to be associated with abductions and terror as Algerian pirates (called
tyrkjar ‘Turks’ in Icelandic sources), raided the coasts of Iceland.
As an example of the ways in which historiographical texts were made
use of in imaginative engagements with the east, I will end with a discus-
sion of a post-Reformation literary text which makes use of material
familiar from the Timur entry in Oddverjaannáll. The example will show
how the annal entry can aid our wider comprehension of Early Modern
Icelandic literature. Thus, following the appearance of ‘Tamerlanes Scytaʼ
in Oddverjaannáll, the conqueror’s name is absent from Icelandic culture
until it surfaces again in the seventeenth-century Ambáles saga and Ambáles
rímur.53 The relationship between these two works (and the versions of
the prose saga) remains a matter of debate,54 but the precise nature of
their relationship need not be determined in order to appreciate the ways
in which they present anew the character Tamerláus (as he is called), as I
52 Geraldine Barnes, the Bookish Riddarasögur: Writing Romance in Late Medieval Iceland, The
Viking Collection 21 (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2014), 13.
53 The form of the name ‘Ambálesʼ varies. Israel Gollancz, Hamlet in Iceland (London: David
Nutt, 1898), always uses ‘Ambalesʼ. In Ambáles rímur eftir Pál Bjarnason, ed. by Hermann
Pálsson, Rit Rímnafélagsins V (Reykjavík: Rímnafélagið, 1952), the form ‘Ambálesʼ is
consistently used (and I follow this usage). In Heiko Uecker, ed., Der nordische Hamlet,
Texte und Untersuchungen zur Germanistik und Skandinavistik 56 (Frankfurt am Main:
Peter Lang, 2005) the earliest form of the saga is called ‘Amlóða sagaʼ, but Uecker says
that ‘Ambales sagaʼ (without accent) is the title commonly used in later witnesses. In fact,
the earliest manuscript witnesses also provide alternative titles: in AM 521 b 4to we read
‘saga af Amlod edur ambalesʼ (f. 1r) and in AM 521 c 4to ‘hier biriar søgu Af Ambulo edur
Amloda enum heymskaʼ (f. 1r). I use ‘Ambáles sagaʼ when referring to the prose text.
54 Earlier scholars assumed that the rímur were based on the saga, but then Hermann Pálsson
claimed that sagas had been written on the basis of the rímur on two separate occasions
(Ambáles rímur, x). The two similar sagas based on the rímur are the texts found in, on the
one hand, AM 521 a 4to and AM 521 b 4to and, on the other hand, in AM 521 c 4to and the
majority of other manuscripts. More recent studies such as Uecker, Der nordische Hamlet,
and Ian Felce, “In Search of Amlóða saga: The Saga of Hamlet the Icelander,” studies in
the transmission and Reception of Old norse Literature: the Hyperborean Muse in European
Culture, ed. by Judy Quinn and Adele Cipolla (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 101–22, have
not fully accepted Hermann Pálsson’s thesis, and more work needs to be done before the
relationship can be stated with certainty.
TIMUR, ‘THE WRATH OF GODʼ