Gripla - 2021, Blaðsíða 37

35
7. Summary
Even though the text of Anecdotes spans more than six hundred years, from
Augustine in the late sixth century to Edmund in the thirteenth century,
only a few of the archbishops of Canterbury in that period are mentioned.
Most of those included have been canonised. This is to be expected as
they are the ones who have had their legends and miracles recorded and
disseminated throughout Europe, for example in compendiums such as
Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale and expanded versions of Jacobus
de Voragine’s Legenda aurea. Hence, they would be easily accessible to
Icelandic scribes and authors working in the fourteenth century. That St
Dunstan gets the longest narrative is most likely because he is the only one
of the archbishops of Canterbury who had his own Old Norse-Icelandic
saga, except for St Thomas Becket, who is only mentioned in passing in
Anecdotes. Thomas Becket was greatly popular in medieval Iceland, and
his life and miracles are told in at least three Old Norse-Icelandic sagas
and several anecdotes.90 The fact that Thomas is only briefly mentioned
in Anecdotes might indicate that at least one of his sagas in Icelandic was
already in the possession of whichever library AM 764 4to was destined
for, whether it was the convent at Reynistaður or some other place.
Otherwise, it is difficult to see why the compiler would not say more about
this popular saint.
Analogous with what Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir has discovered about
the texts in the first half of AM 764 4to (fols 1–23), most of the texts in
Anecdotes are also found in other sources. Rather than making his or her
own translations, the compilator has collected texts from various works
already available in Old Norse-Icelandic that fit a particular theme, in this
case English bishops and kings. Clearly, the compiler has had at his or her
disposal manuscripts containing Dunstanus saga, Játvarðar saga hins helga,
a short life of St Cuthbert, and a collection of Marian miracles and legends.
The compiler may also have made use of some sort of encyclopaedic work
or an annal, from where he or she has obtained the additional material on
90 Kirsten Wolf, The Legends of the Saints in Old Norse-Icelandic Prose, Toronto Old Norse and
Icelandic Series 6 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 354–67. On the popularity
of Thomas Becket in Medieval Iceland, see Margaret Cormack, The Saints in Iceland: Their
Veneration from the Conversion to 1400 (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1994), 156–57,
and Fell, “Anglo-Saxon Saints in Old Norse Sources and Vice Versa,” 97–98.
ANECDOTES OF SEVERAL ARCHBISHOPS OF CANTERBURY