Creating the Medieval Saga: Versions, Variability and Editorial Interpretations of Old Norse Saga Literature (review)

This book comprises a selection of papers delivered at the symposium Creating the Medieval Saga, which was organized by the editors at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bergen in the spring of 2005. The presentations have been revised after discussion with respondents and other members of the audience. One of the authors, Guðrún Nordal, had already published her paper elsewhere, and instead she substituted a paper she delivered at the Thirteenth International Saga Conference, held at the University of Durham in August 2006. Professor Judy Quinn of Cambridge University has written the introduction. Other contributors are—in the order of their papers in the volume: Odd Einar Haugen, Karl G. Johansson, M. J. Driscoll, Þórður Ingi Guðjónsson, Emily Lethbridge, Judith Jesch, Guðrún Nordal, Margaret Clunies Ross, Kate Heslop, Russell Pole, and Andrew Wawn—established scholars in the field of Old Norse-Icelandic studies and two postdoctoral students.

As Judy Quinn rightly points out in her introduction, little attention has been paid to the scholarly basis of the work of producing editions of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, although editors have, of course, provided some insight into their work in their introductions. Nor has any history of Old Norse-Icelandic philology been written. Although this collection of essays is specifically intended to deal with publications of saga literature, the contributions cover a wide range. The book will surely be welcomed by all those who wish to learn more about the place of philology in Old Norse-Icelandic studies, and not least by the many students who attend the annual summer school in manuscript studies organized by the twin Árni Magnússon Institutes in Reykjavík and Copenhagen.

As a rule, Old Norse-Icelandic literature survives in manuscripts of far later date than the period when they are believed to have been written. In addition, many manuscripts are damaged and in poor condition. To a considerable degree, the sagas are believed to have been passed down initially in oral form, and the authors of many remain anonymous. The editor's task is thus a difficult one. As M. J. Driscoll writes in his essay, "The Words on the Page: Thoughts on Philology, Old and New," Finnur Jónsson (1858-1934), long a professor at the University of Copenhagen, and a prolific editor of saga literature, claimed to base his editions on the "best" text, with variants from other manuscripts. His successor, Jón Helgason (1899-1986), continued where Finnur had left off. But, unlike his predecessor, he deemed it necessary to study all manuscripts of a work—not only the oldest—and to explore their relationship. However, while the publications of the two Árni Magnússon Institutes generally give a thorough analysis of the various manuscripts and how they relate to each other, normally the "best" text is selected for publication, and not a critical edition constituted through stemmatic analysis of variants. Driscoll draws a distinction between the "work," the "text," and the "artefact." In his view, conventional philology has focussed on the "work." He, on the other hand, is an advocate of the "new" or "material" philology, in which, he states, the focus is on the "artefact": "In 'new' philology, however, the focus is entirely on the lower, the artefactual, side, on the interplay between the text and the text-bearing artefact, the way in which the 'bibliographic codes' affect—are part of—the text's meaning, just as much as its lexical content. And it is here, in this shift in orientation, that the 'new' in the 'new' philology is to be found" (p. 95).

In their papers, Odd Einar Haugen and Karl G. Johansson take account of the new philology, exploring the potential advantages of electronically-encoded texts of multiple manuscript witnesses of a "work." Johansson comes up with a model for an open corpus edition...