Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1961, Page 100

The fifteen Steps of the Temple
A Problem in the Mariu saga
By Ole Widding and Hans Bekker-Nielsen
Like most of the other saints’ lives in Old Nor se, the life of the
Blessed Virgin, Mariu saga, is based upon foreign sources. We
know little about its origin, not even the author’s (or translator’s)
name is known, a later tradition has that a certain Kygri-Bj prn,
a priest, composed the Mariu saga. However, since the saga was
probably written towards the end of the 12th century, and the
statement in favour of Kygri-Bj prn’s authorship does not appear
till the middle of the 14th century, the statement cannot be ac-
cepted at its face value. Almost as little is known about the sources,
though the editor, C. R. Unger, pointed to the Gospel of the Birth
of Mary as the probable source of the first twelve chapters of the
saga. Besides this apocryphal gospel, Unger believed that the
author made use of the canonical gospels (St. Luke and St. Mat-
thew) and the Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus. Since Unger
wrote his introduction to the Mariu saga (1871) nothing mucli was
written about its textual history and the relation to foreign sources,
until Gabriel Turville-Petre wrote his paper on certain details in
the Mariu saga (in Mediaeval Studies IX, 1947), and a few years later
in his Origins of Icelandic Literature (1953) gave a detailed survey
of the problems facing us in this saga. Turville-Petre showed that
the author occasionally supplements the sources, mentioned by
Unger with others, such as the Trinubium Annae and the Gospel
of Pseudo-Matthew.
However, Unger’s and Turville-Petre’s erudition has not solved
an intricate problem in the beginning of the saga. Folio wing the
Gospel of the Birth of Mary the narrative tells of her parents, and
the birth of Mary, until the author interrupts the story, when he