Sigurdar Saga Pogla: The Shorter Redaction.

Matthew Driscoll's Sigurdhar saga pogla: The Shorter Redaction is a welcome addition to the growing collection of scholarly editions of medieval Icelandic romances. Popular in their own time, as the large number of surviving manuscripts attests (sixty in the case of the 'longer' recension of Sigurdhar saga pogla), the home-grown, 'independent' Icelandic riddarasogur have tended to be relegated to the academic sidelines in our day. Nevertheless, these poor relations in the saga family are currently enjoying a process of rehabilitation as the study of 'popular culture' itself becomes a respectable scholarly pursuit. After something of a dearth of 'independent' riddarasogur criticism since the publication of Margaret Schlauch's seminal and highly regarded Romance in Iceland (1934), the last ten years have produced two major studies: Jurg Glauser's Islandische Marchensagas (1983) and Marianne Kalinke's Bridal-Quest Romance in Medieval Iceland (1990). Schlauch based much of her discussion on unedited manuscripts, and it has been during only the last thirty years or so that modern critical editions have made these texts available to a worldwide audience. Driscoll's book complements Agnete Loth's 1963 edition of the longer Sigurdhar saga pogla (Ssp) in the Editiones Arnamagnaeanae series, but provides a much fuller scholarly apparatus. Although, like Loth's, Driscoll's edition is 'unnormalized,' it does supply a detailed account of the orthography and morphology of AM 596 4to (the defective but only extant MS of the shorter redaction of Ssth) which makes the text readily accessible to Old Norse specialists, but, in its lack of a glossary, daunting for undergraduates and discouraging for teachers keen to introduce them to the popular literature of medieval Iceland.

Part 1 nf the Introduction provides details of manuscripts and previous editions of both recensions of Ssth, as well as a comprehensive description of AM 596 4to, which, after judicious consideration of its scribal Hands (pp.lx-lxiii), Driscoll is inclined to date to the last quarter of the fourteenth century (ff. 1-6) and the early part of the fifteenth (ff. 7-10). Part II considers the saga in its literary and rhetorical contexts, and the Introduction concludes with an Icelandic summary of its contents (pp. cxlvii-clix). The text of Ssth is followed by a three-part index (to the Introduction; MSS of other sagas; Ssth itself). The Introduction contains extensive footnotes, but - a minor cavil - there is no separate bibliography.

Although the title to the first section of the Introduction Part II, "Sigurdhar saga pogla in the context of Old Norse-Icelandic literary tradition," suggests a wide degree of critical and historical latitude, the discussion is limited to a brief, somewhat discursive account of the saga's three major motifs: the unpromising hero; the grateful lion; the maiden king. Driscoll sometimes seems a little diffident and tentative here. He raises, for example, but does no more than touch on, the subject of medieval and post-medieval variations on the narrative themes of 'grateful lion' and 'haughty princess' by Icelandic sagawriters. Drawing attention to the innovatory nature of the treatment of the latter in the ...