Saints and Their Legacies in Medieval Iceland, ed. Dario Bullitta and Kirsten Wolf. Studies in Old Norse Literature, 9. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2021, xvi, 383 pp.

Abstract

Abstract By the thirteenth century, when the best-known sagas of Icelanders had been committed to print thanks to Latin and vernacular literacy, the most prosperous Icelandic farms had their own Church, a patron saint, and, in a substantial number of cases, a vernacular life of their patron, whether native- or foreign-born. This dimension of medieval Icelandic life was disregarded in the Íslenzk fornrit editing project which began in 1933. What came to be called the “nativist” perspective gave pride of place to domestic narratives of the centuries after the settlement of the island, seeing the sagas of Icelanders, as they came to be known, as literarily styled reflections of an historical past. It was not until 1998 that sagas of native Icelandic bishops found a place in the ÏF series and even today the vernacular lives and miracles of both the native and non-Icelandic saints remain unrepresented there. Beyond this editorial restriction, the study of Old Norse hagiography has been hampered by a limited number of well edited texts by the small but devoted collegium of scholars, several represented in the volume under review, which seeks to redress this critical imbalance.