Gripla - 2021, Blaðsíða 65

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Íslendingabók, such as an Old Icelandic saga which preserved English or
Anglo-Latin forms and acknowledged its English sources, should not be
disregarded but must remain hypothetical. We must therefore turn to
the corpus of Anglo-Latin accounts to seek the ultimate source of Ari’s
information.
*
The earliest reference to Edmund’s martyrdom, the sparse notice in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is unlikely to be Ari’s source, as the phrase “sǫgu
hans” (his saga) implies a narrative devoted specifically to Edmund. By the
same token, we can dismiss a derived passage in Asser’s ninth-century Vita
Ælfredi — a biography of King Alfred of Wessex could hardly be described
as a saga of Edmund!26
The oldest viable source for Ari’s information is therefore the Passio
Sancti Eadmundi, penned by the French scholar Abbo of Fleury between
985 and 988 at the East Anglian monastery of Ramsey.27 This elaborate
Latin narrative was widely circulated from the late eleventh century and
was an antecedent for all subsequent traditions.28 It was the first narrative
to link the martyrdom to a Viking leader named Hinguar, but it provides
no date for the murderous act. Despite this, the Passio was regarded as the
most likely source by Konrad Maurer, Einar Ól. Sveinsson — who sup-
posed that Ari’s copy simply had the date included — and more recently by
Paul Cavill and Alison Finlay.29
Not long after its completion, an Old English summary of the Passio
was written by Ælfric of Eynsham. Ælfric added little to the tradition but
26 Asser’s Life of Alfred, together with the Annals of Saint Neots erroneously ascribed to Asser, ed.
William Henry Stevenson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 26. Kellogg (“What is a Saga?,”
501) discusses the use of “saga” as a literary device to designate stories told within other sto-
ries, but Ari’s usage (particularly paired with OIcel ríta) does not fit this narrative context.
27 Rowe, Vikings in the West, 51.
28 The Annals of St Neots with Vita Prima Sancti Neoti, eds. David Dumville and Michael
Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition 17 (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 1985), lix.
29 See Svend Ellehøj, Studier over den ældste norrøne historieskrivning, Bibliotheca
Arnamagnæana 26 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1965), 64–65; Paul Cavill, “Anglo-Saxon
Saints’ Lives – and Deaths,” Visions and Revisions: The Word and the Text, eds. Roger
Kojecký and Andrew Tate (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2013), 91; Finlay,
“Chronology,” 47.
UNEARTHING ST EDMUND