Gripla - 2021, Blaðsíða 59
57
BEN ALLPORT
UNEARTHING ST EDMUND
A Source for Edmund’s Martyrdom in Íslendingabók*
at some point between 1122 and 1133, the Icelandic scholar Ari fróði
Þorgilsson penned the oldest known vernacular history of the Icelandic
people.1 Íslendingabók represents the birth of Icelandic historiographical
tradition, but it did not emerge from a vacuum. It was instead the product
of genres, styles, and information which circulated within and outside
Iceland before being skilfully synthesized into a single document by the
remarkably well-informed Ari fróði.2 This note suggests a candidate for
one of Ari’s more elusive sources of information: the so-called “saga” of
the martyred King Edmund of East Anglia.
Ari borrows from this source in Íslendingabók’s first chapter to date the
settlement of Iceland:
Ísland byggðisk fyrst ýr Norvegi á dǫgum Haralds ens hárfagra,
Hálf danarsonar ens svarta, í þann tíð — at ætlun ok tǫlu þeira Teits
fóstra míns, þess manns es ek kunna spakastan, sonar Ísleifs byskups,
ok Þorkels fǫðurbróður míns Gellissonar, es langt munði fram, ok
Þóríðar Snorradóttur goða, es bæði vas margspǫk ok óljúgfróð,
— es Ívarr Ragnarssonr loðbrókar lét drepa Eadmund enn helga
Englakonung; en þat vas sjau tegum <vetra> ens níunda hundraðs
eptir burð Krists, at því es ritit es í sǫgu hans.3
1 Íslendingabók: The Book of the Icelanders; Kristni Saga: The Story of the Conversion, trans. Siân
Grønlie (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2006), xiii. The claim that Ari
was Iceland’s first vernacular historian was made by Snorri Sturluson a century later and has
yet to be contradicted; see Heimskringla, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, 3 vols., Íslenzk fornrit
XXVI–XXVIII (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1941–51), I:5.
2 Hermann Pálsson, “Játmundar saga hins helga,” Skírnir 132 (1957): 139–51.
3 Íslendingabók; Landnámabók, ed. Jakob Benediktsson, Íslenzk fornrit I (Reykjavík: Hið
íslenzka fornritafélag, 1968), 4.
* This research was completed with the generous financial support of the Leverhulme Trust.
My thanks to Prof. Lesley Abrams, Dr Synnøve Midtbø Myking, Dr Jon Hui, Dr Tom
Grant, and my anonymous reviewers for their thoughts and suggestions, and to Jon Wright
and Zuzana Stankovitsova for their help with my “ágrip.”
Gripla XXXII (2021): 57–72