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  • The Saints in Old Norse and Early Modern Icelandic Poetryby Kirsten Wolf and Natalie M. Van Deusen
  • Marianne Kalinke
T heS aints inO ldN orse andE arlyM odernI celandicP oetry. By Kirsten Wolf and Natalie M. Van Deusen. Toronto Old Norse and Icelandic Series. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 363. $95.

In 2013 the University of Toronto Press published Kirsten Wolf's The Legends of the Saints in Old Norse-Icelandic Prose, an essential resource and reference work for anyone conducting research on northern hagiography. The Press has now published a sequel devoted to the saints in Old Norse and early modern Icelandic poetry.

The volume includes poetry from the Middle Ages through Reformation and post-Reformation times. Icelandic devotional poetry from the Reformation period is largely unknown, and much of it has never been edited. An astonishing number of post-Reformation manuscripts contain poems about the saints. In all, Icelandic poems about eighty-two saints, the Holy Cross, the Virgin Mary, and Michael the Archangel are found in over six hundred manuscripts in libraries and private hands in Iceland and in repositories in Copenhagen, Edinburgh, London, Oxford, [End Page 92]Stockholm, Trondheim, Uppsala, and Utrecht. The manuscripts date from the Middle Ages and extend into modern times, some written as late as the early twentieth century. The saints celebrated in Icelandic poetry include those from the earliest days of the church, such as the apostles and St. Stephen, as well as medieval Scandinavian saints, for instance, Olaf of Norway, Magnus of Orkney, and the Icelandic bishop Guðmundr the Good. The collaborators understand "poems" not only as verses dedicated in their entirety to a saint but also as stanzas on the saint in question in a poem on a larger topic or devoted to another saint. Thus, the early-sixteenth-century poem "Rósa," a cosmological poem with emphasis on the life of the Virgin Mary, is listed for both St. Anne and St. Joachim, since stanzas 39-47 concern Mary's parents.

A bibliography of Catalogues and Bibliographies, Editions and Collections, and General Works (pp. 3-11) precedes the entries for the saints, commencing with St. Agatha and concluding with St. Zachariah, a poem in praise of the Virgin Mary from ca. 1400-550 that includes stanzas concerning Zachary's relationship to Mary's cousin Elizabeth. The entry for each saint identifies the poems and their incipit, and records the manuscripts, editions, translations, and literature. The entry for St. Margaret of Antioch lists six poems, with manuscripts, editions, and literature. One longer poem, "Heilagra meyja drápa" ( Drápaabout Holy Maidens), which contains three stanzas devoted to St. Margaret, is found in Danish and English translations. Another poem, "Margrétar kvæði," was composed ca. 1725 and has been transmitted in fifty manuscripts, some as late as the twentieth century. The abundance of manuscripts transmitting poems about St. Margaret may be attributed to the fact that she is the patron saint of midwives and women in labor, and the presence of manuscripts of her legend was believed to assist women in giving birth. Not unexpectedly, the largest number of poems, seventy-one in all, is devoted to the Virgin Mary. A number of the Marian poems have been edited repeatedly in the past, and scholarly studies devoted to them are abundant. The case is similar with the twelve devotional poems about Saint Olaf of Norway. Four of these date to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and these have been published in many editions, starting in the nineteenth century, and have enjoyed translation into Danish, English, German, Latin (late eighteenth century), Norwegian, and, in one instance, Swedish. The scholarly literature on poems about Saint Olaf is extensive.

In the Preface to the volume, the compilers state that they do not presume to be exhaustive but that their aim has been twofold: "on the one hand, to celebrate the work on the poems that has been done, and, on the other, to draw attention to the work that remains to be done" (p. 10). They have succeeded admirably. Kirsten Wolf and Natalie Van Deusen have produced...

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