SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

MARGRETAR SAGA
AND ITS HISTORY IN ICELAND
By J6N STEFFENSEN
THE life of St Margaret of Antioch was one of the many
saints' lives that came to Iceland with the new Christian
faith. According to Unger, it may have been translated
from its original Latin as early as in the twelfth century.'
Translations of such saints' lives exist in manuscripts
written in Iceland before the Reformation (before 1550),
some in many copies, some in few or only in one. The
variation in number is not surprising, of course, for not
every saint was as popular as the next or it may be mere
accident which has decided which manuscripts have been
preserved and which destroyed. It is worthy of note,
however, that we also have many copies of the M argreiar
saga that were written after the Reformation - and in
this respect it is unique among the lives of saintly virgins.
It was because of this that I began to look closer at this
life of St Margaret, which at a casual reading would not
seem to have any advantage over other saints' lives in
Icelandic, either in its matter or in the quality of the
translation, sufficient to justify its abiding popularity
among the ordinary folk of Iceland long after they had
ceased to invoke the saints of the church in the old way.
According to 'The Lives of the Saints in Old Norse
Prose: a Handlist', 2 texts of lives of virgin saints are
represented thus: the life of the Blessed Virgin in 19
manuscripts, of St Margaret in 15, of St Agnes in 7; lives
of seven other saints are extant in fewer than 7 copies.
1 C. R. Unger, Heilagra manna segu» (1877), I I.
• By Ole Widding, Hans Bekker-Nielsen and L. K. Shook, in Mediaeval
Studies XXV (1963), 294-337. Cf. Katalog over den Arnamagnceanske
Hdndskriftsamling I-II (1889-94); Katalog over de oldnorsk-islandske
Hdndskrifte« i det store kongelige Bibliotek (1900).