Gripla - 2022, Síða 332

GRIPLA330
Paradise, a text Esther Quinn calls “The Quest of Seth for the Oil of Life”
(hereafter Quest).4 The Old Icelandic rendition of this story is extant in
more than ninety manuscripts dating from the fourteenth to nineteenth
centuries, some of which were edited by Marianne Overgaard in The
History of the Cross Tree down to Christ’s Passion in which she treats the
Quest as a part of the legend of the True Cross, both in prose and poetry.5
In the only in-depth study of the Quest, Esther Quinn presents the very
problem at hand: that the legend of the True Cross “is not one, but two:
first, the journey of Seth to Paradise, and, second, the experiences of the
wood which later became the cross.”6 She is inferring that there is a pre-
history of the Quest before it was combined with the Legend of the Wood
of the Cross (hereafter, Cross), when it was an independent tale in Jewish
and, eventually, early Christian literature. Because the joining of the Quest
and Cross happened around the twelfth century, it is standard practice to
treat the Quest in its medieval Christian form as a part of the Legend of
the True Cross material.7 The matter in which the Quest was preserved in
Old Icelandic manuscripts, however, shows that the Quest was separated
from its medieval partner, the Cross, as early as the thirteenth century
and treated as its own individual tale, a phenomenon that has not been
observed elsewhere in Adamic literature.
The present study examines the prose Quest and its poetic counterpart,
Sethskvæði in Old Icelandic manuscripts, in order to identify – for the first
time – an individual transmission history of the Quest in thirteenth- to
nineteenth-century Iceland. The implications of this newly revealed trans-
mission are substantial, for the Quest, in its Christian medieval form, has
4 Esther Casier Quinn, The Quest of Seth for the Oil of Life (Chicago & London: University
of Chicago Press, 1962). Quinn’s monograph, which focuses on both Latin and vernacular
texts (excluding Icelandic) is the only study of the Quest to date.
5 Mariane Overgaard (ed.), The History of the Cross-Tree down to Christ’s Passion: Icelandic
Legend Versions, Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, series B, 26 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1968).
Overgaard edits twenty-three manuscripts containing prose accounts and twenty-two
manuscripts containing poetry but acknowledges in her introduction that there are several
texts (albeit mostly poetry) not included in her study. Of those not included are sixty-one
known manuscripts of Sethskvæði and two additional manuscripts that include the Quest.
6 Quinn, The Quest of Seth for the Oil of Life, 8.
7 In addition to Overgaard, Unger edits the Quest in Carl R. Unger (ed.), Heilagra Manna
Søgur. Fortællinger og Legender om hellige Mænd og Kvinder, vol. I (Copenhagen: B. M.
Bentzen, 1877), 298–301.