| Summary: | Sigurdur saga turnara is a late mediaeval Icelandic romance. The text is contained in one parchment and twenty-two paper manuscripts dating from 1470 through the 1800's. After an examination of all extent manuscripts, the present edition was based on ms. Folio 7 of the Royal library in Stockholm and mss. A.M. 122 and Rask 32 of the Arnamagnaean Institute in Copenhagen. The defective manuscript Folio 7, reproduced in a diplomatic edition, is supplemented by A.M. 122 and Rask 32, presented in parallel. Besides the saga text the dissertation provides manuscript descriptions and a proposed stemma outlining the chronology and interrelationships between the parchment and later series of paper copies. A full English translation is provided for comparatists with no knowledge of Icelandic. When the saga was first edited by Agnete Loth in volume 5 of the Late Mediaeval Icelandic Romances in 1965, no research on the romance's literary content had been attempted. The dissertation therefore examines the text's structure, themes and verbal formulae with reference to other riddarasogur, lygisogur, fornaldarsogur and family sagas. Sigurdur saga turnara proves to be a compendium of the most common romance motifs distilled to their essence and presented in a spare style with an overlay of satire borrowed from Old French fabliau. The author's debt to fabliau literature is evident in his adaptation of the cross motif from Du Prestre Crucifie. The story of the naked lover who escapes the wrath of his pursuers by assuming the pose of a living crucifix appears in French, German and Italian texts from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. Examination of the variants shows that the Icelandic composer borrowed the theme from its hitherto unrecognized French source. Sigurdur saga turnara is therefore one of three romances with a known fabliau source for an otherwise thoroughly "Icelandicized" motif. PhD Comparative literature University of Michigan http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/159283/1/8304600.pdf
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