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Rev. of Eddukvæði, Red SCRIPTA ISLANDICA ISLÄNDSKA SÄLLSKAPETS ÅRSBOK 67/2016 REDIGERAD AV LASSE MÅRTENSSON OCH VETURLIÐI ÓSKARSSON under medverkan av Pernille Hermann (Århus) Else Mundal (Bergen) Guðrún Nordal (Reykjavík) Heimir Pálsson (Uppsala) Henrik Williams (Uppsala) UPPSALA, SWEDEN Publicerad med stöd från Vetenskapsrådet. © Författarna och Scripta Islandica 2016 ISSN 0582-3234 Sättning: Ord och sats Marco Bianchi urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-307788 http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-307788 Innehåll AÐALHEIÐUR GUÐMUNDSDÓTTIR, Tales of Generations: A comparison between some Icelandic and Geatish narrative motifs .......... 5 ELDAR HEIDE, The term leizla in Old Norse vision literature – contrasting imported and indigenous genres? ................ 37 HEIMIR PÁLSSON, DG 3 in memoriam ......................... 65 SVEINN YNGVI EGILSSON, Jónas Hallgrímssons inre och yttre natur .. 103 ÚLFAR BRAGASON, Jón Halldórsson of Stóruvellir and his reading circle: Readings in the farming community in Iceland around 1870 ................................................ 121 Recensioner JUDY QUINN, rev. of Eddukvæði, red. Jónas Kristjánsson & Vésteinn Ólason .............................................. 135 DANIEL SÄVBORG, rec. av Riddarasǫgur: The Translation of European Court Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, utg. Karl G. Johansson och Else Mundal ...................................... 141 HEIMIR PÁLSSON, rec. av Þórunn Sigurðardóttir. Heiður og huggun: Erfiljóð, harmljóð og huggunarkvæði á 17. öld ............... 151 VETURLIÐI ÓSKARSSON, anm. av Jón Ólafsson úr Grunnavík: Ævi­ sögur yppar legra merkismanna, utg. Guðrún Ása Grímsdóttir ... 155 Isländska sällskapet AGNETA NEY & MARCO BIANCHI, Berättelse om verksamheten under 2015 ................................................ 159 Författarna i denna årgång ................................. 161 Recensioner JUDY QUINN, rev. of Eddukvæði, red. Jónas Kristjánsson & Vésteinn Ólason Recensioner Eddukvæði, red. Jónas Kristjánsson & Vésteinn Ólason. 2 vols. (Íslenzk fornrit.) Reykjavík 2014: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag. 460 p. + 466 p. For most of the last hundred years, the standard edition of eddic poetry for scholars and students world wide has been that of Gustav Neckel and Hans Kuhn, first published in Heidelberg in 1914 by Neckel with the fifth edition (revised by Kuhn) issued in 1983. The need for a new scholarly edition of the corpus of eddic poems has been apparent for some time. While Ursula Dronke’s three-volume edition (1969–2011) provided imaginative readings and a stimulating commentary to a selection of poems, her editorial methodology was grounded in an earlier era of textual criticism, resulting in texts of the poems sometimes marred by contro- versial emendation. During the last few decades, moreover, two significant shifts have occurred that have had a profound impact on the editing of Old Norse texts, particularly those preserving traditional works. Cross- cultural research on texts derived from oral tradition has raised awareness of the kinds of variation that were likely to have occurred during the process of recollection and recitation over time, causing a re-evaluation of the differences between texts of the same work, a re-evaluation which moved away from the framework of detecting errors and identifying inter- polations with the aim of conjuring up a lost original (an editorial frame- work itself developed for the reconstitution of a text that stemmed from a single authorial original). A reappraisal of philological conventions has also been underway, leading to a more nuanced understanding of medieval manu script culture – where, for a variety of reasons, verbatim copying was often not the goal of scribes – bringing with it a new focus on the manu script as artifact. As a result, the integrity of each manuscript text has come to be regarded as having independent value as unique testimony to the textual tradition of a particular time and place. The influence of the first of these shifts is evident in the decision of the http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-310201 136 Recensioner editors of the Íslenzk fornrit edition of eddic poems to present separate editions of the two manuscript versions of the poem Vǫluspá, one the opening work in the collection of eddic poems in the Codex Regius (GkS 2365 4o, dated to ca 1270) and the other preserved within the fourteenth- cen tury compilation manuscript, Hauksbók (Am 544 4o). That portions of one text are imported into the edition of the other – for example two lines from the Hauksbók text into the Regius text of stanza 58 – suggests that the influence of the second of these shifts has been resisted. As a con­ se quence, the particularity of the Hauksbók text is muted to some degree by the decision to emend its readings on the basis of the Regius text; so Va­fǫðrs (‘of ?Woe-Father’) is emended to Valfǫðrs (‘of the Father of the Slain’) in stanza 1 of the Hauksbók text to bring it into line with the Regius text, for example, and in a partially illegible section of the manuscript towards the end of the poem, the Hauksbók reading ormi (‘snake’) – which can be read – is replaced by the conjectural eitri (‘poison’) in stanza 47 to accord with the sense, if not the exact wording, of the Regius text. This phase of the Regius text is itself also emended – the úlf (‘wolf’) of stanza 53 replaced by orm (‘snake’) – presumably guided in part by the prosaic account of ragnarǫk set out in Gylfaginning.1 A certain ambivalence towards the value of variant versions of medi- eval texts is also apparent in the presentation of a third text of Vǫluspá, the stanzas preserved in Snorra Edda (where they are quoted singly or in clusters of different lengths within the prose of Gylfaginning). The Ís- lenzk fornrit edition presents the stanzas not in the order in which they are quoted in the manuscripts of Snorra Edda but rearranged according to the order of the Regius text of the poem, as a rather artificial twenty­ seven stanza précis of the poem. Even though there is interesting variation between the texts of the stanzas in the different manuscripts of Snorra Edda – some of it possibly arising from different recollections of remembered stanzas by scribes during the process of transmission – the editors have opted for a fairly minimal apparatus with considerably less detail than that of the Neckel Kuhn edition. Somewhat surprisingly, the state ment (in the notes to the edition, I, 317) ‘Hér er textinn að mestu eftir 1 For a fuller account of the variant texts of eddic poems and what is at stake in the editorial emendation of them, see my recent chapter, ‘The editing of eddic poetry’, in A Handbook to Eddic Poetry: Myths and Legends of Early Scandinavia, ed. Carolyne Larrington, Judy Quinn and Brittany Schorn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 58–71, and an earlier article, ‘Editing the Edda: the case of Vǫluspá’, Scripta Islandica 51 (2001): 69–92. Eddukvæði 137 SnW. Birtur er valinn orðamunur úr öðrum handritum en sleppt því sem virðist vera misritun’ is not supplemented by an explanation of the choice of Codex Wormianus (AM 242 fol.) as the base text in the section of the Formáli on manuscripts. Indeed there is some dissonance between the execution of the edition itself (undertaken by Jónas Kristjánsson) and the editorial approach described in the Formáli (written by Vésteinn Ólason). Vésteinn’s posi- tion is explained early on in his introduction: ‘Öruggast er þó að halda sig við hina fornu texta óbreytta nema þar sem augljóst virðist að þeir hafi aflagast’ (I, 18). Yet this does not always square with Jónas’s practice, where occasionally the received editorial wisdom of a century ago (when it was the fashion to make conjectural emendations to the manuscript text) is reproduced with only a cursory note. Vésteinn’s description of the collaborative process, as a prolonged but trouble free one, ends with the hope that any differences in opinion between the editors should none- theless leave the matter of interpretation open to the reader (‘… var það ein fald lega leyst með því að gefa lesendum kost á að velja milli skýringa …’ II, 203–204). But how well does the edition furnish the reader with the infor mation required to do this? The audience the edition seeks to engage is not apparently one that would expect a full critical apparatus, but in that case it seems redundant to include mention in the notes of what other editors have proposed – with observations prefaced by vague formulations such as ‘Ýmsir útgefendur og ritskýrendur telja að …’ or ‘sumir telja að …’ – without sufficient detail provided to allow the reader to follow up the point. Serious students of eddic poetry will therefore need to use this edition in tandem with the multi-volume Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, a point perhaps anticipated in an early footnote to the Formáli (I, 18). One of the drawbacks of the Neckel Kuhn edition, especially in its fifth iteration, was its orthography and in this respect the Íslenzk fornrit edition undoubtedly presents a more approachable text, particularly for students. The norm to which the text conforms is not the orthography of the Codex Regius text, however, but a necessarily contrived one, designed to recreate the spelling of the period at the beginning of the thirteenth century when it is postulated eddic poetry might first have been written down. All the same, the Neckel Kuhn edition (and other older editions) will continue to be of value to readers wishing to get a sense of the Codex Regius as a compilation, since the text of the manuscript is edited as an integral whole there, with other poems in a similar style which have been preserved 138 Recensioner in different manuscript contexts edited separately in an appendix. The Íslenzk fornrit edition, on the other hand, inserts poems and stanzas into the Codex Regius sequence: Baldrsdraumar, Rígsþula, and Hyndluljóð are edited after the ‘mythological’ section of the compilation (Vǫluspá, Háva­mál,­Vafþrúðnismál,­Grímnismál,­Skírnismál,­Hárbarðs­ljóð, Hymis­ kviða, Lokasenna, Þrymskviða,­ Vǫlundarkviða and­ Alvíssmál).
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