Sagas, Saints and Settlements (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sagas, Saints and Settlements Judith Jesch Sagas, Saints and Settlements. Edited by Gareth Williams and Paul Bibire. Pp. x, 153. ISBN 90 04 13807 2. Leiden: Brill. 2004. EUR 47.00. The Northern World is a newish series from Brill, with the wide remit of covering the 'peoples, economies and cultures' of 'North Europe and the Baltic c. 400-1700 AD'. Given the presence of Barbara Crawford, Jón Viar Sigursson, Ingvild Øye, Przemyslaw Urbanczyk and others on the editorial board, it is no surprise, however, that the series has a particular strength in Scandinavian and Baltic studies—of the fourteen volumes published since 2002, seven have had such a focus, balancing the volumes on the more heavily-studied 'Northern Europe' of Britain and the Continent. This is to be welcomed, since few publishers provide such a roomy home for books on Scandinavian and Baltic topics: the only obvious rival is Brepols' series Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, which has published only six volumes since 1999, three of them on Scandinavian or Baltic topics. Both series reflect the current trend for publishing essay collections on a theme, many of which started life as papers at a conference on the same subject. The success of such volumes depends on the interest of the theme, the calibre of the contributions, and the efforts of the editors in drawing it all together. Most such volumes are rather mixed at the best of times, and this is also true of the one under review. The symposium that was the starting-point of Saga, Saints and Settlements took place in St Andrews in 1996 and had the theme of 'the history, culture and literature of the Viking Age and of mediaeval Iceland' (p. vii). With such a broad topic, and only seven papers surviving the eight years until publication, the chances of an interestingly coherent volume were never very great. Nevertheless, a sub-theme of Scandinavian Scotland emerges in four of the contributions, and the reader with a benevolent eye can discern threads that link all of the papers. While there is some coherence in theme, the style, approach and aims of the seven contributions are quite different. This is partly disciplinary—officially the contributors are three historians, three literar y scholars and an onomast—and partly to do with age and experience: four of the contributors were PhD students at the time of the conference and their papers are based on their thesis work, the other three are (and were then) more established scholars, one of them since retired. Three of the contributors are Icelanders, the others British. The three non-Scottish papers are all on aspects of Icelandic manuscripts and literature, on texts that are relatively unknown beside the great Eddas and sagas. Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir (in 'The World and its Ages: the Organisation of an "Encyclopaedic" Narrative in MS AM 764 4to') makes a learned case for the study of encyclopaedic literature, using the example of such a codex of miscellaneous material produced in a Benedictine convent in the north of Iceland in the third quarter of the fourteenth century. Given that most readers will not be very familiar with this manuscript, her account of its contents could have been [End Page 338] clearer. While she notes that few studies have been devoted 'principally' to encyclopaedic literature, her study is partial, too, raising interesting points and leaving many of them unexplored. For instance, what does the fact that the first half of the codex was copied from another manuscript but the second half was compiled (p. 2) tell us about the nuns of Reynistaur? Phil Cardew ('The Question of Genre in the Late Islendinga Sögur') raises the problem of the ways in which modern generic labels like Íslendinga sögur and fornaldarsögur give rise to unwarranted preconceptions and judgements about lesser-known sagas like orskfiringa saga. Much of the paper is a traditional, descriptive reading of this obscure text, which to my mind only reinforces, rather than challenges, the generic prejudices about which Cardew is complaining. Like the previous paper, this feels incomplete, and is slightly awkward in both style and structure—two promising young scholars...