Gripla最新文献

{"title":"Lapidaries and Lyfsteinar. Health, Enhancement and Human-Lithic Relations in Medieval Iceland","authors":"Adèle Kreager","doi":"10.33112/gripla.33.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33112/gripla.33.4","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the properties of powerful stones in medieval Iceland, focusing on the applications of such stones in learned treatises and in saga literature. The relationships between humans and stones in these sources offer a useful case study for engaging with medieval Icelandic conceptions of the interplay between the human and the non-human world, specifically in terms of bodily health and enhancement. The article has two parts: the first part examines the Old Norse-Icelandic lapidary tradition as witnessed in the translated lapidary text in AM 194 8vo (ff. 45v–48v), providing an overview of the range of physiological, emotional and cognitive effects stones were thought to have on humans (from the curative and prophylactic to the enhancive); the second part discusses the appearance of stones in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century saga literature, examining how their properties alter and develop over time and across genres. This research builds on the growing bodies of scholarship on dis/ability and medicine in Old Norse-Icelandic literature and finds that the presentation of powerful stones in these texts suggests an understanding of the human body and mind as fundamentally “open” to the vibrant, material world. It therefore further supplements contemporary research into conceptions of the self in medieval Iceland, as well as attitudes towards the non-human world.","PeriodicalId":40705,"journal":{"name":"Gripla","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69502617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Jón Árnason and Gríshildur the good. How the editor changed one woman’s narrative about another woman","authors":"Reynir Þór Eggertsson","doi":"10.33112/gripla.33.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33112/gripla.33.12","url":null,"abstract":"In 1864, an Icelandic folktale, Sagan af Gríshildi góðu (the Story of Gríshildur the Good) was published in print for the first time, in Jón Árnason andd Guðbrandur Vigfússon’s folktale collection. The story, a version of the famous story of the Patient Griselda, has its roots in Boccaccio’s Decamerone from c. 1350, which Petrarch rewrote in Latin in 1373, so that it became widespread in European literary circles during the next centuries. The story reaches Iceland c. 1600 and became relatively popular, as at least 18 different versions of the story exist in Icelandic, both in prose and verse, preserved in 52 manuscripts, in addition to the few that have been published in print. When the folktale collection was republished in the 1950s, it included two Griselda folktales, the one from 1864, and also, a shorter, previously unpublished tale, which appeared in volume 5 in 1958. Upon a closer inspection, it turns out that both tales go back to the same handwritten tale in Jón Árnason’s folktale manuscript, Lbs 533 4to, written by Ragnhildur Guðmundsdóttir (fol. 176r–78r). In fact, the 1864 edition is Jón Árnason’s own rewriting of the tale (also preserved in Lbs 533 4to, fol. 220r–23r) while the one from 1958 presents Ragnhildur’s original version. The article attempts to analyse and explain the changes Jón Árnason makes to Ragnhildur’s story, in addition to present the folktalee's influence on later literary works. The main results of the study is that Jón mainly makes three types of changes. Firstly, he embellishes segments where Ragnhildur’s narrative is short and without many details. Secondly, he changes back to the Boccaccio/Petrarch tradition some details which have been spoiled by orality, for instance, by returning the number of Griselda’s children from the folktale traditional three, to Boccaccio/Petrarch’s original two. Jón also removes connections to other narrative traditions, when he makes Ragnhildur’s King Artus (Arthur) nameless. Thirdly, Jón seems to be influenced by the same misogyny as his contemporary colleagues in Europe, when he increases the power of the king and other male characters at the cost of female ones. With his changes, Jón actually created a new version of the Griselda story, so further research into the story’s intertextuality and development must treat his version as an independent text, different from the one written by Ragnhildur.","PeriodicalId":40705,"journal":{"name":"Gripla","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69502565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The z text of Laxdæla saga – a philological experiment","authors":"Haukur Þorgeirsson","doi":"10.33112/gripla.33.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33112/gripla.33.1","url":null,"abstract":"The manuscripts of Laxdæla saga were divided by Kristian Kålund into an x class and a y class. The y class manuscripts include Möðruvallabók, the only medieval manuscript to preserve the complete saga and the basis of all editions so far. The z text has never been edited as a whole and the present article is an investigation into how such an edition might be brought into being. Only some 43% of the saga text is preserved in vellum fragments of the z class but there are paper manuscripts which preserve the z text as a whole. The early editors of the saga regarded the text of these paper manuscripts as too poor in quality to serve as the basis of an edition. This contention is empirically tested here by studying the part of the saga preserved in the oldest vellum fragment, the 13th century D2. The text of that fragment is compared with the corresponding text in five manuscripts which preserve the saga as a whole. Word-level Levenshtein distance is used as the comparison metric and the results are published in table 1 while a stemma of the five manuscripts appears in figure 1. The main result is that the 17th century paper manuscript AM 158 fol. is, by a large margin, the manuscript which has the most similar text to the oldest fragment. It would be a suitable basis for an edition of the z text.","PeriodicalId":40705,"journal":{"name":"Gripla","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69502517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Repository of Protestant Exempla in Icelandic Translation","authors":"D. Bullitta, Kirsten Wolf","doi":"10.33112/gripla.33.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33112/gripla.33.11","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a first critical edition of Nokkrar eftirtakanligar smáhistoríur samantíndar til fróðleiks 1783, an Icelandic translation of sections of Andreas Hondorff’s Promptuarium exemplorum (“Repository of exempla”), which survives as Item 10 of Reykjavík, Landsbókasafn Íslands – Háskólabókasafn, JS 405 8vo (fols 25r–25r–56r), a paper codex written between 1780 and 1791 by the farmer Ólafur Jónsson í Arney (c. 1722–1800). The Promptuarium was a highly popular compendium gathering wonders, agades, parables, and legends from antiquity, late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance arranged according to the Ten Commandments. It found an ever-expanding audience among Lutherans interested in wisdom drawn from Scriptures, history, and the natural world and circulated widely in Europe in both German and Latin. The present study demonstrates that in all likelihood Ólafur Jónsson translated sections of the rearranged Latin text of the Promptuarium published by Philip Lonicer (1532– 1599) in 1575 under the title Theatrum historicum.","PeriodicalId":40705,"journal":{"name":"Gripla","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69502558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Magic, Margrétar Saga and Icelandic Manuscript Culture.","authors":"K. Parsons","doi":"10.33112/gripla.33.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33112/gripla.33.5","url":null,"abstract":"Using the evidence of AM 428 a 12mo, this paper argues that ownership of Margrétar saga in early modern Iceland was not closely associated with witchcraft, as has been previously argued. Margrétar saga in AM 428 a 12mo dates from the fourteenth century but was rebound in 1689–1690 for an Icelandic woman named Helga Sigurðardóttir (d. before 11 June 1691), the wife of the landowner Jón Þórðarson of Bakki in Melasveit (1648–1719). A century earlier, it had belonged to the matriarch Helga Aradóttir (c. 1538–1614), and before Helga it had been owned by Jón Arason (1484–1550), the last Catholic bishop of Hólar. Although Margrétar saga continued to be associated with women and childbirth after the Reformation, its traditional use as a birthing aid did not lead to systematic suppression of its circulation in manuscript form. The transition from vellum to less durable paper is the most likely reason for the poor survival of early modern copies of the saga. AM 428 a 12mo is unusual in that Jón Þórðarson added new vellum leaves to the manuscript for Helga Sigurðardóttir, including two elaborate title-pages decorated with red and gold, and it is suggested that the volume was Jón’s bridal gift to Helga. Jón’s use of vellum was a deliberate aesthetic choice that served to protect the older fourteenth-century leaves until the volume came into the collection of Árni Magnússon.","PeriodicalId":40705,"journal":{"name":"Gripla","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69502662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Homiletic Symbolism in Heimskringla","authors":"Á. Einarsson","doi":"10.33112/gripla.33.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33112/gripla.33.2","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the hypothesis that the home-coming episode in St. Olaf’s Saga (ch. 32–34) in Heimskringla is an allegory based on homiletic symbolism. The episode is about Olaf’s return to his home in Norway after many years abroad and is one of the events that define the onset of his mission to control and Christianise Norway. Olaf arrives at his mother and stepfather’s home in a vivid, personal and detailed narration, imbued with action and excitement. It is harvest-time, and Olaf’s stepfather, Sigurdur sýr, king of Ringerike, is busy overseeing the harvest activity. He is walking around a field with two other men, dressed in a blue tunic and leggings, a grey cloak and a wide grey hat, a cloth over his face and a staff in his hand with a gilded silver cap on the top, surmounted by a silver ring. He is then summoned by Ásta – his wife and Olaf’s mother – to come home quickly as she has been informed that her son will be arriving soon. Sigurður puts on his royal outfit, including a scarlet robe, spurs of gold and a golden helmet, and goes home with thirty men. Meanwhile, Ásta and twenty others prepare a welcoming feast. She sends envoys to the neighborhood with an invitation to the banquet while the hall is prepared. Everything is just ready when Olaf arrives at his homestead with a retinue of a hundred men. He is greeted by Sigurdur, Ásta and the local crowd, and is led to the throne by his mother. The potential hagiographic nature of St. Olaf’s Saga, combined with the detailed narrative containing many potential symbols in the form of numbers, colours, artefacts and action, give a strong impression of allegory. There is a likely allusion to Mark 6:7 when Ásta assigns twelve people in six pairs to prepare the hall, and again when she sends four people in four directions to invite magnates to the event, echoing the angels in Mark 13:27 who were sent to bring the chosen ones from the four winds. The arrival of Olaf with his hundred men would seem to be a key event. The number 100 (or 120 if a long hundred is meant) is interpreted by Bede, for example, as a symbol of happiness of the elect in eternal life and directly associated with the biblical parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin, which in Christian patristic tradition alludes to the Redemption, the restoration of humanity as the tenth celestial order, a key feature in the history of salvation. This number, one hundred, here associated with a saint, is flanked by many other potential symbols. One is that the combined flocks of Olaf (100+1), Sigurdur (30+1) and Ásta (20+1) make 153 people, a biblical number that has been associated with the elect in the heavenly land, i.a. by Gregory the Great. An examination of how other potential symbols group with Sigurdur and Ásta, reveals a consistent pattern. Sigurdur’s symbols associate him with heaven, the Trinity and the eternal word of God. Typological allusions associate Sigurdur and his staff with Moses and Judah, whose antitype is Christ","PeriodicalId":40705,"journal":{"name":"Gripla","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69502603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The “Quest of Seth” in Old Icelandic Literature: Sethskvæði and Its Antecedents","authors":"Tiffany N. White","doi":"10.33112/gripla.33.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33112/gripla.33.9","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, Sethskvæði is identified as a poetic re-working of a text which Esther Quinn calls “The Quest of Seth for the Oil of Life.” This connection is important not only for Old Icelandic studies but also for the study of pseudepigrapha and apocrypha, because the Quest has not been preserved elsewhere in medieval or early modern literature separated from the Legend of the Holy Cross. The transmission of Sethskvæði is traced from its early Judaic beginnings up to its inclusion in Icelandic literature. Three trends are explored: the shortening of the Legend of the Holy Cross in the Legenda (The “Quest of Seth” plus the Legend of the Holy Cross), the use of rubrics that title the text as having to do with Adam and Seth rather than the Holy Cross, and the eventual existence of the Quest on its own in the form of Sethskvæði. Because Sethskvæði has yet to be edited, a transcription of two versions of the poem from AM 100 8vo is included in the appendix.","PeriodicalId":40705,"journal":{"name":"Gripla","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69502764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Grotesque Advice in Seventeenth-Century Iceland. The Mysterious Origins of Grobbians rímur","authors":"Philip Lavender","doi":"10.33112/gripla.33.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33112/gripla.33.10","url":null,"abstract":"Grobianus et Grobiana was an influential sixteenth-century German work by Friedrich Dedekind which presented advice on how to behave badly, supposedly as an inverse way of encouraging people to behave well. This article looks at an Icelandic work from the seventeenth century, Grobbians rímur, which drew on the figure of Grobianus and his wife Grobiana (who becomes Gribba in the Icelandic text) but is no mere translation. Grobbians rímur is little studied and has a complex transmission history, with several authors contributing additional fitts over a period of many decades. The focus here is the earliest four fitts (what I call the “core Grobbians rímur”), usually attributed to a single author, either Jón Magnússon í Laufási or Guðmundur Erlendsson. Through a consideration of the three extant seventeenth-century manuscripts, two early versions come to light, one consisting of only three fitts as well as another consisting of the more familiar four fitts. A hypothesis is developed that these two versions could be the result of two authors working together and expanding on each other’s compositions, thus both Jón Magnússon and Guðmundur Erlendsson could equally be considered the authors. Other poems by these poets suggest that they responded to each other’s works. Thus arguments are presented that the three-fitt version is most likely the earlier form of the poem, probably composed principally by Jón Magnússon, while the four-fitt version came after and Guðmundur Erlendsson was probably involved in its composition. This study will hopefully pave the way for future research which will consider the literary and cultural value of this intriguing work.","PeriodicalId":40705,"journal":{"name":"Gripla","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69502544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Lost Liturgical Books of Iceland. Understanding the Aspiciensboekr","authors":"Ryder C. Patzuk-Russell","doi":"10.33112/gripla.33.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33112/gripla.33.7","url":null,"abstract":"The surviving charters of late medieval Iceland record the books owned by many parish churches. These small collections contained mostly liturgical books, described by a variety of Latin and Old Norse terms, among which the term aspiciensbók is common. The argument is here put forth that aspiciensbók refers to an Antiphonal, a category of Office book for use by church choirs. The name comes from the fact that the Latin word aspiciens is the first word of the responsory following the first lesson of the first Sunday of Advent. Antiphonals appear to be identified by several other words, including the ambiguous term söngbók, but are clearly distinct from Breviaries, another important type of Office book. This conclusion stands in contrast to a long history of scholarship, going back to Guðbrandur Jónsson, that has identified aspiciensbók as a type of Breviary. This study corrects this misidentification and points the way forward for new research into the liturgical book collections of medieval Icelandic churches.","PeriodicalId":40705,"journal":{"name":"Gripla","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69502680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sources about the monastic church and library at Þingeyrar","authors":"Gottskálk Jensson","doi":"10.33112/gripla.33.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33112/gripla.33.8","url":null,"abstract":"The Benedictine Abbey of Þingeyrar in North-West Iceland was the earliest monastic house in Iceland, established in the early 12th century. Today, it is mainly famous for its literary production and for manuscripts, some of whom are still preserved. All remnants of the monastic buildings have now vanished from the face of earth, but we have fairly precise descriptions of these buildings in official appraisals from 1684 and 1704, which are found in the Collection of the Procurators at the National Archive of Iceland. Further, current archeological research at Þingeyrar has added considerable new knowledge about Þingeyrar, e.g. the location of the monastic church. The appraisals of Þingeyrar Abbey can be compared to other known documents, medieval annals and charters, to construct a more complete picture of the monastic buildings and their interiors, primarily of the church where the monks had their library. This study forms an introduction to the first publication of the appraisals and it attempts to tell the history of the Church of Þingeyrar Abbey, which as it turns out seems to have survived more or less intact until 1695, when the Danish official Lauritz Gottrup had it torn down and a new one built.","PeriodicalId":40705,"journal":{"name":"Gripla","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69502757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}