A Stemma of Sigurgarðs saga frækna, and a Case Study of Saga-Anthologization
Journal
Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe
ISSN
1526-1867
Publisher
Zenodo
Date Issued
2026
Author(s)
Mcdonald, Sheryl
University of Copenhagen, University of Leeds, University of Leeds / SSHRC, University of Victoria
Hall, Alaric
University of Cambridge, University of Glasgow, University of Helsinki, University of Leeds
Parsons Katelin Marit
Association for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies in Canada, Scandinavian-Canadian Studies, University of Iceland, Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies
Simpson, Ian
Type
text::journal::journal article
Abstract
This article publishes the first stemma of the manuscripts of the fifteenth-century Icelandic romance Sigurgarðs saga frækna, taking in 58 of the 61 known witnesses. It capitalizes on digitally-native publication to publish all underlying data, presenting a fully open-data approach to stemmatics. The article shows how the post-medieval transmission of the saga supports previous claims about how Icelandic sagas in this genre circulated but also takes manuscripts containing Sigurgarðs saga frækna produced in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries in the Dalir region of Iceland as a case study for a methodologically novel investigation of how scribes went about anthologization. Refining previous work on the manuscript filiations of Ambrósíus saga og Rósamundu, Sigurðar saga turnara, Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar, Nítíða saga, and Konráðs saga keisarasonar, and making the first outline of a stemma of Nikulás saga leikara, the study gives our first systematic insight into how the scribes of the eighteenth-century manuscript Rask 32 assembled their anthology, and how their work influenced subsequent anthologies that drew material from that manuscript.
License
Acceso Abierto.
URL License
How to cite
McDonald, S., Hall, A., FERNÁNDEZ-ACEVES, H., Parsons, K. M., & Simpson, I. (2026). A Stemma of Sigurgarðs saga frækna, and a Case Study of Saga-Anthologization. Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe, 22. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18475600
Table of contents
1. Introduction -- 2. Manuscripts -- 3. Stemma and methods -- 4. How Sigurgarðs saga frækna corroborates what we already thought we knew -- 5. What Sigurgarðs saga frækna can tell us that we did not know -- 6. Conclusions.