Out Now: Reading the Old Norse-Icelandic “Maríu saga” in Its Manuscript Contexts
Front Cover (AM 232 fol., 55r)
Is reading more books your new year’s resolution? Interested in medieval devotion to the Virgin Mary, Icelandic literature, and manuscripts? Need a new paperweight? My book is now available and can be ordered from De Gruyter, Bookshop.org, and Amazon.
The book is a study of the Old Norse-Icelandic Maríu saga and its manuscript history. Maríu saga was compiled in the first half of the thirteenth century by a Benedictine priest named Kygri-Björn Hjaltason. The saga recounts the life of the Virgin Mary from her conception and birth to her death and assumption to heaven. Kygri-Björn supplements his history of Mary with interpretations of biblical text, explanations of church doctrine and liturgical practice, and digressions on history, theology, and other subjects.
The saga begins with a prologue (in most manuscripts) before discussing the Virgin Mary’s genealogy, her parents Joachim and Anne, her conception and exemption from sin in the womb, her birth and life in the temple in Jerusalem, her marriage to Joseph, the Annunciation, her meeting with Elizabeth, Jesus’s birth, the Adoration of the Magi, and the flight into Egypt. The saga then moves forward in time to discuss the Crucifixion, Mary’s life after the death of her son, and her own death and Assumption into heaven. In the theological commentary supplementing the vita, which Wilhelm Heizmann argues gives “the saga its distinctive stamp,” the author addresses “Mary’s original sin, the name ‘Mary,’ the significance of the fifteen steps of the temple in Jerusalem and the Psalms associated with them, the mystery of Jesus’s human and divine nature, Mary’s freedom from sin, the painless virgin birth, the gifts of the three magi, the Slaughter of the Innocents in Bethlehem, the resurrection of the body at the Last Judgment, and man as the likeness of God” (Wilhelm Heizmann, “Maríu saga,” in Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia, pp. 407–8).
Maríu saga survives in nineteen manuscripts; only five of these manuscripts preserve the saga in its entirety. Oslo, National Archives (NRA) MS 78 (ca. 1250–1300) and Árni Magnússon (AM) MS 240 XI fol. (ca. 1275–1300), both fragments, provide the earliest evidence for the saga. The youngest complete manuscript, AM 633 4to, was copied in the early eighteenth century by Magnús Einarsson (1688–1752).
The book asks a number of questions about the saga and its manuscript history that have not yet been answered. The study aims not just to better understand the text Maríu saga, but also to discover how Maríu saga and its manuscripts participated in the cultural, literary, and devotional lives of the Icelanders who copied, read, and engaged with the text in a variety of ways for over five hundred years. While the 1871 edition of the saga provides readers with two versions based on multiple manuscripts and prints significant variants in the notes, the edition does not preserve the literary and social contexts of those manuscripts. In the extant manuscripts Maríu saga rarely exists in the codex by itself. The chapters in the book are presented as case studies in the manuscript tradition of Maríu saga which seek to restore the individual texts to their manuscript contexts and thus offer a clearer representation of the thematic connections between the texts, of the social institutions that produced the manuscripts, and of the readers who continued to find value in possessing them.
