The Legends of the Saints in Old Norse-Icelandic Prose by Kirsten Wolf (review)

It is fitting that the publication of this monumental contribution to medieval scholarship should coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the work to which it pays homage, “The Lives of the Saints in Old Norse Prose: A Handlist,” an index of sources, manuscripts, principal editions, and selected secondary scholarship in hagiographic writing in Old Norse by Hans Bekker-Nielsen, Ole Widding, and Laurence K. Shook, published in 1963 in the journal Mediaeval Studies. In an article that appeared in the same journal the previous year, Bekker-Nielsen expressed the hope that the “Handlist” would inspire research into the neglected topic of Old Norse hagiography by scholars both inside and outside the field of medieval Scandinavia. The Legends of the Saints in Old Norse-Icelandic Prose, Kirsten Wolf’s meticulous and painstaking revision of the “Handlist,” comprehensively shows the extent to which Bekker-Nielsen’s goal has been fulfilled over the last fifty years and serves as an indispensable resource for further advances in the subject.

Wolf conforms faithfully to the “Handlist’s” organizational format for individual saints’ sagas, but the extent to which Legends exceeds its blueprint in content and scope reflects the veritable revolution that the scholarly approach to Old Norse–Icelandic hagiography has undergone in the last few decades. There were, for example, sufficiently few primary and secondary sources by the early 1960s to warrant full publication details for the majority to be given only once in the “Handlist,” in the list of abbreviations, and thenceforth cited by author name and page number. Wolf’s bibliographical mapping of the scholarly topography of the corpus to 2011 is divided into five sections: “Catalogues and Bibliographies”; “Collections and Anthologies”; “General Works”; “Essay Collections, Festschrifts, and Conference Proceedings”; and “Individual Legends,” with generous publication details in subsequent citations. An additional boon is the index of manuscripts at the end of the book.

Entries under “Individual Legends” provide an exhaustive register of sources, manuscripts, editions, and secondary literature. An important addition to the “Handlist” is a separate category for translations into English, French, German, and the Scandinavian languages, and a further bonus is the inclusion of unpublished PhD dissertations. Each legend’s listing is cross-referenced by page number to the corresponding item in the “Handlist” and also, on the pattern of the “Handlist” in the case of those legends that correspond to Latin vitae, to its number in the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina. In another noteworthy addition to the “Handlist,” Wolf offers future scholars an invaluable heads-up by identifying the relationship of the different manuscript branches and textual traditions of each legend, both to their likely sources and to each other. This authoritative work of reference is framed, moreover, in a thoroughly reader-friendly layout, with barely a typographical error, equally hospitable to interested browsing and close consultation.

As Wolf notes in her preface, the volume of scholarship on medieval hagiography has surged over the last forty years. The present work shows a comparable but more recent quickening of the pace for the Old Norse–Icelandic corpus from the mid-1980s, with an upswing in momentum in the following decade and indications of a further acceleration over the last few years. Among the bibliography’s most recently published books are two essay collections (Sanctity in the North, 2008; Saints and Their Lives on the Periphery, 2010) and a monograph (Holy Vikings, 2007) that, from varying perspectives and emphases, consider the lives of both foreign and native saints within specifically Scandinavian contexts of narrative traditions and history, a trend in scholarship suggestive of an escalating interest in the influence of hagiographic writing on the literary and cultural development of medieval Scandinavia.

Much of the groundbreaking work in Old Norse–Icelandic hagiography over the last two decades has been by Wolf herself, whose books and articles, in addition to the present volume, span the full spectrum of editions, translations, manuscript studies, and literary scholarship and make her a worthy successor to the seminal...