The Book of Reykjahólar: The Last of the Great Medieval Legendaries

338 Pages·1996·18.02 MB·English

by  Marianne E. Kalinke

THE BOOK OF REYKJAHOLAR:
THE LAST OF THE GREAT MEDIEVAL LEGENDARIES
In this study Marianne E. Kalinke examines what may be considered the last
great medieval legendary, the Book of Reykjaholar, produced on the very eve of
the Reformation. The significance of this legendary resides in its preserving in
Icelandic translation a group of otherwise unattested medieval Low German
saints' lives. Kalinke presents a literary analysis of the Reykjaholar compilation,
demonstrating what kind of sources the translator used and how he collected,
combined, and adapted these texts to suit his Icelandic audience. The book also
offers stylistic, thematic, and comparative analyses of the legends.
A number of these Christian myths are apocryphal, and some transmit folk-
tales and romances, such as the legend of the hairy anchorite (St John Chrysos-
tom), the tale of the search for the highest king (St Christopher), the tale of the
grateful lion (St Jerome), the tale of the dragon-slayer (St George), and the story
of the holy sinner (Gregorius peccator). The legends belong to the vast corpus of
German hagiography, yet the currency of these particular versions is docu-
mented today only by virtue of their inclusion in this Icelandic legendary. The
book opens with a survey of the development of German hagiography, goes on
to a discussion of the religious and intellectual climate in early sixteenth-century
Iceland, and follows with a consideration of the legendary's Low German
sources and its production by one of the wealthiest Icelanders of the time, Bjorn
Porleifsson of Reykjaholar.
MARIANNE E. KALINKE is professor in the Department of Germanic Languages
and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is author
of several books, including Bridal-Quest Romance in Medieval Iceland, and is
associate editor of The New Arthurian Encyclopedia.
This page intentionally left blank
MARIANNE E. KALINKE
The Book of Reykjaholar:
The Last of the Great
Medieval Legendaries
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1996
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 0-8020-0824-0 (cloth)
ISBN 0-8020-7814-1 (paper)
Printed on acid-free paper
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Kalinke, Marianne E.
The Book of Reykjaholar ; the last of the great
medieval legendaries
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8020-0824-0 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-7814-1 (pbk.)
I. Reykjaholabok. 2. Christian saints - Legends -
History and criticism. 3. Christian hagiography -
History - Sources. 4. Old Norse literature - Low
German influences. I. Title.
PT7I92.K3 1996 839'.63 €96-930211-8
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing
program of the Canada Council
Contents
PREFACE vii
ABBREVIATIONS xi
1 Legenden/Liigenden 3
2 The Eve of the Reformation in Iceland 24
3 The Low German Sources of Reykjaholabok 45
4 Bjorn f»orleifsson of Reykjaholar: Copyist, Translator, Editor, and
Compiler 78
5 The Communion of Saints 125
6 'God alone knows whether this legend is true' 165
7 Sacred Romances 199
8 Bjorn Porleifsson: Collector of Myths 238
NOTES 249
BIBLIOGRAPHY 291
INDEX 309
This page intentionally left blank
Preface
In the year 1521 Martin Flach published in Strassburg the last edition of Der
Heiligen Leben, the most popular vernacular legendary of the Middle Ages.
Thereafter separates of individual vernacular saints' lives still appeared sporad-
ically, but the era of the great legendaries had come to a close. In the 15308,
however, a unique anthology was produced in the West Fjords of Iceland, the
Book of Reykjaholar, so named after the home of its presumed 'author,' the
copyist, editor, compiler, and translator Bjorn t>orleifsson.
Reykjaholabok, as the manuscript is known in Icelandic, contains twenty-five
saints' lives, several of them apocryphal. The collection, while certainly read,
had no demonstrable impact on either the religious or the literary life of Iceland.
Nor was it known, as far as one can tell, outside Iceland, except by a few
scholars. The language of the legendary is a strange Icelandic affected by Low
German syntax and vocabulary. The sources of all but three legends are demon-
strably Low German but to date unidentifiable. For several decades scholars
held that the translated legends in Reykjaholabok were renderings, albeit at
times rather free, of legends in Dat Passionael, the Low German version of Der
Heiligen Leben. That is not so, as I intend to demonstrate. If the legends were
translations of their Low German counterparts in Dat Passionael, this mono-
graph would have taken a rather different form, for then my objective would
have been to analyse Bjorn Porleifsson as a translator and to introduce him as a
creative writer who, despite his semantic and stylistic oddities, deserves to be
known as a fascinating sixteenth-century Icelandic author. But that is not the
case.
Bjorn Porleifsson was a collector of myths, Christian myths, in the tradition
of Snorri Sturluson, the great anthologizer of pagan Germanic mythology.
Bjorn had a scholar's propensity for collecting as many sources as possible
about a subject, in this case the lives of the saints, and making them available in
viii Preface
the vernacular. The product of his collecting is a book containing narratives in
versions and redactions that presumably are no longer extant in the original lan-
guage; at least, it has been impossible to identify the sources. For this reason
Reykjaholabok is as significant for Low German as for Icelandic literature, for it
contains otherwise unattested versions of such apocryphal narratives as the Ger-
man bridal-quest romance Oswald, the bridal-quest/marital romance of Henry
and Cunegund, the Gregorius peccator legend, and the legend of the hairy
anchorite. Reykjaholabok has preserved in translation works that bear compari-
son with the German prose romances, the chapbooks, of the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries. Included among some rather sober vitae are several gems of
medieval fiction.
The significance of Reykjaholabok extends beyond the borders of Iceland in
that the work transmits in Icelandic translation a corpus of Low German leg-
ends. For this reason the introductory chapter provides a survey, albeit succinct,
of the development of vernacular hagiography in the German-language area.
No such overview exists in English. What I have written in this chapter is
largely derivative, and I am indebted to German scholarship, especially the pub-
lications of Werner Williams-Krapp. This introduction to German saints' lives
will, it is hoped, enable the reader to place the many references to and com-
parisons with German redactions in subsequent chapters in a proper historical
context.
In the course of my research it became clear to me that a number of texts in
Reykjaholabok presented problems, primarily of a philological nature, that had
to be addressed in greater detail than I considered appropriate in a monograph.
For this reason I published several articles - on Gregorius saga biskups, Stefa-
nus saga, Laurencius saga, and Mariu saga og Onnu — as the necessary basis
for some of my assertions here. Other articles — on Reykjaholabok, Jons saga
gullmunns, and Jeronimus saga — are of a more general nature and anticipate
some of my concerns in this monograph, where, however, my perspective is that
of the legendary as a whole.
The manuscript became known to scholars in this century through
nal work of the Danish scholars Ole Widding and Hans Bekker-Nielsen. They
held that most of the legends in Reykjaholabok are translations from a late
fifteenth-century imprint of the Passionael, the Low German version of Der
Heiligen Leben. This assumption led to their classifying the texts in Reykjahol-
abok according to their textual proximity to those in the Passionael. The trans-
lator appeared to be following at best an inconsistent methodology of transla-
tion: at times he seemed to translate word for word, at other times to adapt and
even re-create his sources. This is not the case, however, and by a close analysis
of the textual evidence I attempt to lay the matter to rest in chapter 3. Chapter 4
is a similarly philologically k as