Gripla - 2021, Síða 60

GRIPLA58
Iceland was first settled from Norway in the days of Haraldr
Fairhair, son of Hálfdan the Black, at that time — according to the
estimate and count of Teitr, son of Bishop Ísleifr, my foster father,
the man I know to be wisest; and of Þorkell Gellisson, my paternal
uncle, who remembered a long way back; and of Þóríðr, daughter
of Snorri goði, who was both very wise and well-informed — when
Ívarr, son of Ragnarr loðbrók, had St Edmund, king of the English,
killed; and that was 870 winters after the birth of Christ, according
to what is written in his saga.
The martyrdom is referred to on three further occasions throughout the
text: the foundation of the Alþing, the conversion to Christianity, and the
conclusion.4
Ari’s imprecise reference to a “saga” of St Edmund has intrigued mod-
ern researchers, who have proposed sources ranging from Icelandic oral
traditions to Latin vitae circulated in tenth- to twelfth-century English
manuscripts. It is here suggested that Ari’s information came from a
witness to one such English manuscript tradition, attested from c. 1100,
that combined two texts: Abbo of Fleury’s Passio Sancti Eadmundi and
Hermannus the Archdeacon’s De miraculis Sancti Eadmundi. It is argued
that this witness circulated in Iceland during the twelfth to fourteenth
centuries and informed subsequent references to the saint’s legend.
*
The identification of a possible source is hindered by the parsimony with
which Ari drew upon it. The piece of information least ambiguously
indebted to the source was the date of 870 for the martyrdom; Ari states
directly that Edmund’s “saga” provided this date. The passage also names
the man responsible for Edmund’s death as Ívarr and informs us that he
was the son of Ragnarr loðbrók. Ari’s turn of phrase does not necessitate
that either of these pieces of information came from the saga, but it is
likely that at least the first of them did.
This gives little data with which to narrow down our search for a
feasible source. Furthermore, the surviving record of potential sources is
imbalanced; all known texts that refer to St Edmund in the period between
4 Ibid., 9, 18, and 25.