Gripla - 2021, Blaðsíða 67

65
1122–33 thus grants only a very narrow window for the information in the
Chronicon to have been transmitted to Ari.
Another product of the flourishing literary milieu at Bury St Edmunds
is the misleadingly named Annals of St Neots. This Latin chronicle bor-
rowed lengthy passages regarding Edmund’s martyrdom from Abbo’s
Passio under its entry for 870, thus providing both the year and the attribu-
tion of the act to Hinguar.37 In contrast to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, this
bloated entry is almost entirely taken up with St Edmund’s martyrdom and
could plausibly be regarded as the saint’s “saga.” Furthermore, a subsequent
entry identifies Hinguar’s father as “Lodebrochus.”38 It is the earliest
surviving text to suggest that Hinguar and Hubba were brothers, the earli-
est English text to mention Ragnarr loðbrók, and the only contemporary
text to contain all the features present in Íslendingabók. Elizabeth Ashman
Rowe suggests tentatively that this could have been Ari’s source based on
this compelling alignment of features.39
Unfortunately, the timeframes assigned to the Annals and Íslendingabók
make this identification nearly next to impossible. David Dumville dates
the composition of the Annals to c. 1120–40 but subsequently notes that
the compilers drew in part upon John of Worcester’s Chronicon. This
presumably took place during or after the time when the autograph manu-
script of the Chronicon (Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 157) was cop-
ied into Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 297 at Bury St Edmunds.40
Darlington and McGurk’s analysis dates this to between 1133 and 1143.41
Assuming these timeframes are correct, the time required for the informa-
tion to make its way from England to Iceland effectively disqualifies the
Annals as Ari’s source.
*
As no single text is an obvious candidate, we must consider the possibil-
ity that Ari was using some combination of other texts, the most likely
being Abbo’s Passio and Hermannus’s Miraculis, with Ívarr’s connection
37 The Annals of St Neots, 56–65.
38 Ibid., 78.
39 Rowe, Vikings in the West, 185.
40 Annals of St Neots, xvi–xix and lx–lxi; Rowe, Vikings in the West, 82.
41 John of Worcester, liii.
UNEARTHING ST EDMUND