From Schedæ Ara Prests Fróða to Íslendingabók – When an Intradiegetic Text Becomes Reality

In this chapter, I will argue that the text we know today as Íslendingabók was not understood as such in the days of its textualization in the mid-seventeenth century. In fact, Íslendingabók in its present-day manifestation and conception can be regarded as a product of an interaction between different modes of modification. These modes of modification can individually be enumerated as follows: paratextual, medial, scholarly or editorial, and mnemonic. Most of the modifications applied to the text seem to be rather marginal, in the most literal sense, as they mainly affected the title of the text, as well as the narrative’s textual, or rather, paratextual framing. Nevertheless, together with the paratextual feature we call the title of a text, the whole notion of the text in question changed tremendously due to the aforementioned modifications. Hence, I will argue that the modification of the title influenced the text’s perception on a scholarly level and on the levels of the cultural memory and the national identity that the text produces. I did not chose Íslendingabók to discuss these modes of modification on the basis of paratexts and paratextual features simply because it is a highly canonized text in the corpus of Old Norse-Icelandic literature or because this is something solely to be found in this specific text. On the contrary, the present study of Íslendingabók can readily be transferred to other texts of the same literary corpus from the “renaissance of Old Norse-Icelandic manuscript production”.