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Bergr Sokkason's Michaels saga 357
In considering the relationship of Michaels Saga to its
sources it is necessary to consider something of Berg's
attitudes to his material and his aims. His interest in his
work seems on the whole to be more that of editor or
compiler than just translator. Whether or not he may
have been responsible for any of the saints' lives in
Icelandic which are direct translations from a single Latin
original is not possible to determine, but where texts are
associated with his name they are not of this kind. In
the Nikolaus Saga the extent of his reading is partly
indicated by the number of authorities to whom he refers,
John of Naples, Isidore of Seville, Gregory, Augustine, the
Ecclesiastica Historia, and there are presumably others
whom he does not name. Certainly the Nikolaus Saga
contains one passage on the nature of dreams taken
directly from the fourth book of Gregory's Dialogues,15 but
Bcrgr does not mention Gregory here, though elsewhere he
has mentioned historical and doctrinal points taken from
Gregory's work. In the Michaels Saga there are fewer
explicit references, but there is obviously the same degree
of background reading. Bergr is drawing on all available
sources, drawing together scattered references, and
attempting to weld them into one coherent whole. The
verbs he uses of his own work are, at the beginning of the
Nikolaus Saga, snara (Hms. II 49/17), in the Michaels
Saga, skrifaIJr ok samansettr, saman lesit, and samsetti 16
(Hms. I 676/2,677/4,713/6). Similarly the references to
Berg's work in Laurentius Saga use the words setti saman
and samansetti (Bps. I 832, 850), the verb in Bergsb6k is
snaraIJi. 17 The cumulative effect of these references is
clearly enough that Bergr and others thought of his work
in terms of compilation, not straightforward translation.
Berg's own approach is further indicated in his Prologue
r e Umberto Moricca, Gregorii Magni Dialogi (1924), 309, ct. Hms, II 86.
.. samsetti here is Unger's editorial emendation from AM 657 a-b 4tO which
has samsati, AM 657 c 4to has the variant saman setti,
11 For a discussion of the use of the verb snara in connection with Berg's
work, see Gustaf Lindblad, op, cit. 12-13.