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ests and needs of the individuals who produced and/or owned them.49
Although Margrétar saga is unusual for being a prose legend of a saint
that circulated widely after the Reformation, female saints continued to
be a popular subject in post-medieval vernacular Icelandic poetry. In this
context, material on saints could often be found in eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century miscellanies.50 It seems particularly unlikely that Icelanders
would have feared the wrath of their local ministers so greatly that they
would attempt to hide their copies of Margrétar saga in books of rímur and
prose romances. Prose romances and rímur on non-religious subjects were
targets of Lutheran orthodoxy, and a clergyman vehemently opposed to
Margrétar saga would hardly have been more pleased to discover it bound
together with titles like Nikulás saga leikara (as in Lbs 2098 8vo) or Bósa
rímur (as in Lbs 2856 8vo).
Although seminal in shifting the focus from the text of Margrétar saga
to the function of Margrétar saga manuscripts, Jón Steffensen’s investiga-
tion of the saga’s transmission predated the rise of material philology in
post-medieval Icelandic manuscript studies.51 It therefore did not take
into account the more recent concept of the codicological or production
unit, which is a useful tool for distinguishing between the manuscript as
currently bound and/or stored on an archive shelf and the manuscript as it
circulated within a community over time.52 The present paper employs the
codicological unit (CU) as defined by Gumbert: one or more gatherings
in a manuscript written consecutively and over a more-or-less continuous
period of time.53 Through division into codicological units, one can dis-
tinguish systematically between items bound together in the archive and
49 Guðrún Ingólfsdóttir, „Í hverri bók er mannsandi“: Handritasyrpur – bókmenning, þekking
og sjálfsmynd karla og kvenna á 18. öld, Studia Islandica 62 (Reykjavík: Bókmennta- og list-
fræðastofnun Háskóla Íslands, 2011).
50 Cf. e.g., Margrét Eggertsdóttir, “The Once-Popular and Now-Forgotten Verónikukvæði,”
trans. by Margaret Cormack, Sainthood, Scriptoria, and Secular Erudition of Medieval and
Modern Scandinavia: Essays in Honor of Kirsten Wolf, ed. by Dario Bullitta and Natalie M.
Van Deusen, Acta Scandinavica 13 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), 365–96.
51 For an overview, see Davíð Ólafsson, “Post-medieval Manuscript Culture and the
Historiography of Texts,” Opuscula 15 (2017): 1–30.
52 Beeke Stegmann, “Árni Magnússon’s Rearrangement of Paper Manuscripts” (PhD thesis,
Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen, 2016).
53 J. P. Gumbert, “Codicological Units: Towards a Terminology for Stratigraphy of the Non-
Homogenous codex,” Segno e testo 2 (2004): 17–42.
MAGIC, M A R G R É T A R S A G A