Parergon

This volume is a Festschrift honouring its recipient on her sixtieth birthday in 2019. Kirsten Wolf is one of the most distinguished living scholars in the field of Old Norse–Icelandic studies, particularly though not exclusively known for her often-pioneering work on the explicitly Christian vernacular literature of the North, long largely neglected, not least the lives of saints. A glance at the volume’s context pages, readily available online through Brepols’s webpages, shows many other eminent scholars in the field honouring her with an essay contribution.

There are eighteen essays, with an introduction by the editors. In the first section, ‘Pictorial and Sculptural Sainthood’, Thomas A. Dubois provides an accessible discussion of how medieval audiences in many ways looked differently from modern people at religious sculptures. Numerous high quality colour plates illustrate the essay, which focuses on mainland Scandinavia—not, as the editors imply, Iceland (p. 34). In the section’s second essay Marianne Kalinke sheds light on a somewhat mysterious Gotland church mural displaying the German emperor Henry II (973–1024).

In the second section, ‘Medieval Sainthood’, Ásdís Egilsdóttir focuses on the emotions associated with two narratives of the lives of Icelandic bishops, and Margaret Cormack discusses two Saint Cecilia miracle stories, providing texts and English translations. In the section’s third essay, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson considers Mikjáls saga by Bergr Sokkason (c. 1270–1350), widening the discussion to explore issues relating to lordship, service, and friendship.

There are two essays in the section devoted to the sagas focusing on the controversial thirteenth-century Icelandic bishop Guðmundr the Good. In easily the volume’s longest essay (thirty-eight pages in length) Gottskálk Jensson examines the evidence suggesting a now lost Latin original lies behind the so-called [End Page 246] D redaction of Guðmundar saga, strongly agreeing that Björn M. Ólsen was correct to postulate such a work in 1902. Shaun F. D. Hughes argues that though Icelandic folklore has a flagð or troll women figure called Selkolla, the Selkolla in Guðmundar saga B is an ecclesiastical construct not indebted to folklore.

Section 4 is devoted to ‘Spiritual Readings’. Siân E. Grønlie explores how the theologically problematic Old Testament account of Abraham’s ultimately aborted sacrifice of his son Isaac is treated in the Icelandic sources known collectively as Stjórn. Dario Bullitta provides a relatively detailed description and analysis of a manuscript of religious material, AM 624 4to, focusing particularly on ‘the idiosyncrasies of the first codicological unit’ (p. 213).

There are three essays in the section headed ‘Skaldic Poetry’. Writing with a linguistic focus, Russell Poole explores possible Danish and East Norse features in the skaldic corpus. Margaret Clunies Ross and Martin Chase (whose research focus is devotional poetry from the decades leading up to the Reformation in Iceland) explore how skaldic poetry changed, in some respects degenerated, and in some respects quite skilfully adapted to changed circumstances in the period after what might be regarded as its golden age.

Two essays appear under the heading ‘Secular Erudition’. Úlfar Bragason considers Sturla Þórðarson as simultaneously the author of Íslendinga saga in the Sturlunga saga compilation and as a participant in and observer of events he describes. For many students of Old Norse–Icelandic the next essay, by Todd Michelson-Ambelang, will be the most intriguing in the volume. He argues that in uttering one of the most famous lines in Icelandic literature, Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir, telling her son Bolli in Laxdæla saga ‘Þeim var ek verst er ek unna mest’ (‘Though I treated him worst I loved him best’, pp. 326–27) is referring not to Kjartan...