Gripla - 2022, Qupperneq 348

GRIPLA346
Guðmundsson lærði mentions Ódáinsakur in connection with the Quest.
He titles the very beginning of the Quest with Odains akur Eða oþolnandi
Ferð,67 followed by the sentence, Eigi hef eg af oðru odains akur lesið Enn
Paradijs sem Adam var i settur.68 In this sense, we could see the Quest on
par with stories such as Eiríks saga víðförla, in which the saga’s namesake
travels to Paradise (also referred to in the saga as Ódáinsakr). This short
tale was very popular, evidenced by the more than sixty extant manuscripts
from the fourteenth to twentieth centuries.69 Additionally, the themes of
the two texts are intricately linked in that they discuss theological matters
important to salvation.
In her study of the thirteenth-century Picard-French Andrius manu-
script (Bibliothèque Nationale Fr. 95), Esther Quinn notes that its
contents are largely Arthurian, the Quest and the Cross legends placed at
the end of the codex.70 She uses this codicological evidence to speculate
about the medieval French perspective on the genre of the Quest. That is
a valid conclusion when working with manuscripts in their original state;
however, Old Icelandic manuscripts have been separated and rebound
extensively, for a large part by Árni Magnússon himself, indicating that the
extant bindings are often not reflective of original practices of categorizing
texts according to theme or other factors.71 However, these “unstable
codicological boundaries”72 in the Icelandic corpus tell us a variety of other
useful things about the history of a text. For example, the manuscript ÍBR
Ashurst, “Imagining Paradise,” The Fantastic in Old Norse/Icelandic Literature. Sagas and
the British Isles. Preprint Papers of the Thirteenth International Saga Conference, Durham and
York 6th–12th August, 2006, ed. by John McKinnel, David Ashurst, et al., vol. I (Durham:
The Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), 71–80; Rosemary Power,
“Journeys to the Otherworld in the Icelandic Fornaldarsögur,” Folklore 96.2 (1985): 156–75;
Sverrir Tómasson, “Ferðir þessa heims og annars. Paradís-Ódáinsakur-Vínland í íslenskum
ferðalýsingum miðalda,” Gripla 12 (2001): 23–40.
67 Reykjavík, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum, AM 727 II 4to, 12v, line 25.
68 Ibid, 12v, lines 25–26.
69 Kolbrún Haraldsdóttir, “Eiríks saga víðfǫrla í miðaldahandritum,” Gripla 30 (2019): 49.
70 Esther Casier Quinn, The Penitence of Adam: A Study of the Andrius MS. (Bibliothèque
Nationale Fr. 95 folios 380r–394v) (University, Mississippi: Romance Monographs, 1980).
71 For a detailed study on Árni Magnússon’s practices in rearrangement, see Beeke Stegmann,
“Árni Magnússon’s Rearrangement of Paper Manuscripts,” (PhD diss., University of
Copenhagen, 2016).
72 Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, “Manuscripts and Codicology,” A Critical Companion to
Old Norse Literary Genre, ed. by Massimiliano Bampi, Carolyne Larrington, and Sif
Rikhardsdottir (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020), 100.