Elizabeth Ashman Rowe Cultural Paternity in the Flateyjarbók Óláfs saga

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1998
• Subjects: Bergen; Breiðafjörður; Húnavatn; Norway; Rowe; Skagafjörður; Skálholt; Tunga; Víðidalstunga; Þingeyrar; Iceland; Flatey
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.693.3950; http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/%7Ealvismal/8pater.pdf

Flateyjarbók is the name given to Gks 1005 fol., the largest and certainlyamong the most beautiful of all extant medieval Icelandic manuscripts,containing a number of exceptionally fine historiated initials and marginaldrawings. The manuscript was given to Brynjólfur Sveinsson, bishop of Skálholt, by the farmer Jón Finnsson of Flatey in Breiðafjörður, whence its name. Brynjólfur presented it in turn to the king, Frederik III, and it subsequently passed to the Royal Library in Copenhagen, where it remained until being transferred to Iceland in 1971. Originally commissioned by Jón Hákonarson, a wealthy farmer who lived at Víðidalstunga in the Húnavatn district in the north of Iceland, Flateyjarbók was undoubtedly written somewhere in that area, either at Víðidals-tunga or at the nearby monastery of Þingeyrar, or possibly to the east of Húnavatn, in Skagafjörður. It was begun by the priest Jón Þórðarson in 1387; his hand begins on folio 4 verso, originally the verso of the first leaf of the manuscript, and contin-ues through the next-to-last line of the first column of folio 134 verso. On these pages he copied Eiríks saga víðforla, Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar, and virtually all of Óláfs saga helga. Jón Þórðarson evidently left Iceland for Bergen, Norway, in the spring of 1388, and the work of continuing Flateyjarbók fell to another priest, Magnús Þórhallsson, whose hand begins on the last line of the first column of