Poetry in Fornaldarsögur ed. by Margaret Clunies Ross (review)

Nine years ago the undersigned was privileged to review in this journal Poetry on Christian Subjects (Brepols, 2007), the first volume to appear on what is intended to be a nine volume critical edition, with English language apparatus and translations of the poems, of what the new publication describes as 'the corpus of Scandinavian poetry from the Middle Ages, excluding only the Poetic Edda and closely related poetry, and the rímur' (p. lv). This new volume is the fifth to appear, and the second, after Poetry from Treatises on Poetics, published in 2017. Its focus is on poetry preserved in fornaldarsögur ('sagas of the ancient time'), a somewhat heterogeneous genre of sagas dealing with heroes and adventures from times before the settlement of Iceland in the 870s. Though these sagas were clearly popular for many generations in Iceland, and were amongst the first medieval Icelandic texts to attract scholarly attention in early modern times, their fabulous and clearly unhistorical qualities caused them to fall into comparative disfavour during much of the twentieth century, until a considerable revival of interest and appreciation in recent decades.

The new volume is under the general editorship of Margaret Clunies Ross, whose introduction discusses the fornaldarsögur and their poetry, and outlines editorial practice. One section of the introduction, 'Metre', is the work of Kari Ellen Gade. Eleven contributors, including Clunies Ross, are responsible for the editions of the poems, arranged under the names of twenty-one fornaldarsögur, as well as of arguably related material (Merlínusspá I and II, Krákumál, and Skaufhala bálkr, attributed to Svartr á Hofstöðum).

The arrangement of the volume will be largely familiar to anyone who has used any of the four that appeared earlier in the series, although here the main arrangement of the editions is normally by saga rather than poet. There is a generally brief introduction to each saga and its poetry. Individual stanzas are presented in normalized orthography, followed by a rearrangement of the text into prose order, an English translation incorporating an interpretation of the kennings (poetic figures of speech), details of manuscripts and variant readings, information about the stanza in the work of earlier editors (particularly Finnur Jónsson), a brief account of the prose context where relevant, and notes. The volume accompanies the editions with detailed listings of general abbreviations, sigla, and technical terms employed, brief notes about contributors (who include several of the most distinguished names in contemporary Old Norse studies), a comprehensive bibliography compiled by Hannah Burrows, and indices of names and terms. Like the four volumes which appeared before it, this one consists of two large, attractively presented hardcover books. As with them, too, its content is also being published in an electronic edition, the responsibility of Tarrin Wills, this electronic edition being 'fully searchable' and providing manuscript transcriptions (p. lv).

Like the earlier volumes, Poetry in Fornaldarsögur impressively combines scholarship of formidable range and depth with a lucid mode of presentation which makes realistic the expressed hope that the work might find users amongst students of other European languages and in disciplines such as history, archaeology, and the history of religion (p. xciii). The standard edition of skaldic poetry hitherto, Finnur Jónsson's monumental Den norsk-islandske skjadedigtning (Gyldendal, 1912–15), which provided very little introductory and explanatory material, will clearly be superseded for the purposes of almost all scholars who wish to use and understand skaldic poetry.

This reviewer will, however, confess to one minor disappointment. In the 'Volume Editor's Preface and Acknowledgments', Clunies Ross acknowledges the role of Rory McTurk, who by speaking from the floor at a Sydney conference in 2000 saved those responsible for the series 'from the serious mistake of omitting the contents of this volume from our new edition' (p. ix). Some account of why it was intended originally to omit the considerable corpus of fornaldarsaga...