Gripla - 2021, Blaðsíða 70

GRIPLA68
Else Mundal argues that Ari himself may have had access to Adam’s
Gesta.54 If so, he would have known of Adam’s pairing of Inguar and
Lodparchi and could thus have deduced a connection between Hinguar, the
slayer of St Edmund in Abbo’s Passio, and Ívarr, the son of Ragnarr loðbrók
he knew from Norse tradition. Ari was undoubtedly rare among Norse
scholars in reconciling the names Hinguar and Ívarr, but Íslendingabók
itself is proof that either he or a hypothetical intermediary made this con-
nection.55
*
Ari fróði seems to have drawn upon a manuscript containing both Abbo
of Fleury’s Passio Sancti Eadmundi and Hermannus the Archdeacon’s De
miraculis Sancti Eadmundi to date the martyrdom of King Edmund of East
Anglia and thus the settlement of Iceland. It was this text, a passio updated
with additional miracles, that Ari referred to as a saga. That the manuscript
was based in Iceland is indicated by the sporadic use of its contents by
Icelandic scholars over the next two centuries.
Ari’s use of the Passio/Miraculis, the Gesta Hammaburgensis, and per-
haps even more far-flung sources, such as Fulcher of Chartres’s Historia
Hiero solymitana, demonstrate the impressive connectivity of the Icelandic
scholarly milieu at the birth of its vernacular historiographical tradition.56
This is underscored by Íslendingabók’s parallels with contemporary texts,
such as the Annals of St Neots and Chronicon Roskildense, which reveal the
extent to which Ari was abreast of developing trends in both East Anglia
and Denmark, integrated into networks of intellectual exchange. Icelandic
scholars need not be regarded solely as passive recipients in such networks;
scholarly connections facilitate the flow of ideas in both directions, as ref-
erences to Icelandic scholarship in Scandinavian Latin texts reveal.57 Thus,
although the Annals of St Neots are unlikely to have been Ari’s source, we
should keep our minds open to the reverse: that Icelandic traditions such
54 Else Mundal, “Íslendingabók vurdert som bispestolskrønike,” Alvíssmál 3 (1994): 63–72;
Ellehøj, Studier, 66–67.
55 Rowe, Vikings in the West, 185.
56 Poul Skårup, “Ari frodes dødsliste for året 1118,” Opuscula 6 (1979): 21–22.
57 Such as the reference to the Icelandic “numerum annorum” (enumeration of years) in
Theodrici Monachi: Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium, ed. Gustav Storm,
Monumenta Historica Norvegiæ: Latinske kildeskrifter til Norges historie i middelalderen
(Kristiania: A. W. Brøgger, 1880), 6.