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KATELIN MARIT PARSONS
MAGIC, MARGRÉTAR SAGA AND
ICELANDIC MANUSCRIPT CULTURE1
Ma r g r é t a r s a g a , the Life of St. Margaret of Antioch, survives in
three Old Norse-Icelandic translations.2 Medieval copies fall broadly into
two categories: large folio collections of saints’ legends and tiny duodecimo
volumes in which Margrétar saga and other legends of virgin martyr saints
take centre stage.3 St. Margaret was the patron saint of childbirth, and an
episode in the saga in which St. Margaret prays for the health of mothers
and neonates includes a specific request for the protection of those living
in places where her vita is physically present.
Pregnancy and childbirth are unsurprisingly the central concern of
many medieval Margrétar saga manuscripts. AM 433 c 12mo contains a
number of items relating specifically to childbirth and labour, including
Margrétar saga, prayers for women in labour and a Latin hymn to St.
Margaret.4 Stefán Karlsson examined the scribal marginalia in AM 433 a
12mo and concluded that it had been produced for the scribe’s daughter.5
Another copy, AM 431 12mo, was produced by the priest Jón Arason in
the Westfjords and contained both Margrétar saga and obstetrical charms.6
1 Many thanks to Margrét Eggertsdóttir and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable
feedback on this article. This project, grant no. 218209-051, was supported by the Icelandic
Research Fund.
2 Kirsten Wolf, The Legends of the Saints in Old Norse-Icelandic Prose (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2013), 217–21. On the cult of St. Margaret in Iceland, see Margaret
Cormack, The Saints in Iceland: Their Veneration from the Conversion to 1400, Subsidia
hagiographica 78 (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1994), 121–22.
3 Three folio and ten duodecimo manuscripts survive of Margrétar saga. Two leaves also
survive from a fourteenth-century quarto copy of Margrétar saga (now AM 667 I 4to); this
may have originally been part of a larger volume, but nothing is recorded of its provenance.
4 Hans Bekker-Nielsen, “En god bøn,” Opuscula 2.1 (1961): 52–58.
5 Stefán Karlsson, “Kvennahandrit í karlahöndum,” Stafkrókar: Ritgerðir eftir Stefán Karlsson
í tilefni af sjötugsafmæli hans (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum,
2000), 378–82, at 380–81.
6 Ásdís Egilsdóttir, “Handrit handa konum,” Góssið hans Árna: Minningar heimsins í íslenskum
handritum, ed. by Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í
íslenskum fræðum, 2014), 51–61.
Gripla XXXIII (2022): 157–185