Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1996, Page 139
Attempts at Biblical Exegesis in Old Norse:
Some Examples from Mariu saga
Laura Tomassini
Mariu saga, the Old Norse narrative of the Virgin’s life from her pro-
digious birth until her assumption into Heaven, is preserved in nineteen
manuscripts. Of these five preserve only the Vita, while the remaining
fourteen add to the story of Mary’s earthly life a great number of mira-
cles.1 There is no doubt, however, that the Vita was originally composed
and transmitted independently from the miracles. In addition, while the
saga is homogeneous in its structure and can easily be attributed to a
single author, the legends about the miracles were clearly composed at
different times and by a variety of authors.2
There has been a tendency among Old Norse scholars, however, to
regard the saga as a sort of prologue to the legends and C.R. Unger’s
title to his edition of 1871 - Mariu saga: Legender om Jomfru Maria og
hendes Jertegn (The Saga of Mary, Legends about the Virgin Mary and
Her Miracles) - is both symptomatic of this tendency and has also
worked to perpetuate it. I prefer to view Mariu saga as consisting sole-
ly of the Vita, to which the miracles have been added as a kind of ap-
pendix.
Unger based his editon of the saga on two manuscripts: Holm 11 4to,
from about the middle of the 14th century, containing what Unger be-
lieved to be a first version of the Vita, and AM 234 fol., which dates
back to about 1340 and preserves a second version, very similar to the
1 In the preface to his edition of Mariu saga (Christiania 1871) C.R. Unger gives a
lengthy but nevertheless incomplete description of the manuscripts containing both the
saga and the miracles. Thanks to the kind help of Wilhelm Heizmann from the University
of Gottingen 1 could use the far more accurate and up-to-date list of manuscripts for his
forthcoming edition of the Old Norse Vita of the Virgin.
2 The most complete survey of the Old Norse legends of the Virgin to date is given by O.
Widding in his study “Norrøne Marialegender på europæisk baggrund” in the present vol-
ume, pp. 1-128.