Gripla - 2021, Side 68
GRIPLA66
to Ragnarr loðbrók being derived from elsewhere. On their own, neither
tradition can have provided Ari with the necessary information: Abbo is
silent on the date, and Hermannus does not name Edmund’s killer. Thus
far, only Siân Grønlie has suggested that Ari used “some kind of composite
version,” without further elaboration.42
The most compelling argument for this composite version is the likeli-
hood that, as Tom License points out, Hermannus deliberately penned
his list of miracles as an update to the miracles listed in Abbo’s Passio and
intended for the two texts to be read in conjunction.43 Indeed, the Passio
and the Miraculis are bound together in the earliest known manuscript of
the latter text (one of the earliest witnesses to the former).44 This manu-
script, London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius B. ii, was composed
at Bury St Edmunds around the year 1100, so close to the composition
date of Hermannus’s text that only copying errors suggest it is not an
autograph.45 It is feasible that an early copy of this manuscript or of its ex-
emplar made its way to Iceland in the early twelfth century. A link between
Bury St Edmunds and Iceland is not inconceivable. In the twelfth century
the abbey energetically promoted the cult, which had spread at least as far
as Norway by the 1150s.46
Hermannus’s Miraculis were almost certainly known in Iceland in the
following century. As mentioned previously, en episode in Heimskringla
recounts that Sveinn tjúguskegg was killed by Edmund’s revenant “sem inn
helgi Merkúríús drap Júlíánúm níðing” (as St Mercurius killed Julian the
Apostate).47 This story first appears in the Miraculis, which notes that
Edmund “æquiparatur Mercurio martyri ulciscenti injuriarum blasfemias
apostatæ Juliani” (becomes equal to Mercurius the Martyr avenging Julian
42 Book of the Icelanders, 16, n. 12.
43 Miracles of St Edmund: Herman the Archdeacon and Goscelin of St-Bertin, ed. and trans. Tom
License (Oxford: University Press, 2014), lv.
44 Annals of St Neots, lix.
45 Ibid., xci; Helmet Gneuss and Michael Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A Bibliographical
Handlist of Manuscripts Written or Owned in England up to 1100 (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2014), 296.
46 Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307 (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1974), 380; Tore Nyberg, Monasticism in North-Western Europe, 800–1200
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 144.
47 Heimskringla, II:14.