Ól‡fs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta. Ed. Ólafur Halldórsson. Editiones Arnamagn¾an¾, Series A, vol. 3. Copenhagen: Reitzel, 2000. Pp. cccl + 156. Dkr 550.

îl‡fs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta is not a household text. Even Finnur J—nsson's compendious history of Norse literature (2nd ed., 1920-24) failed to devote a separate discussion to it. As if to compensate for that omission, Finnur did, however, publish a twenty-page paper on the compilation in Aarb¿ger for nordisk oldkyndighed og historie for 1930. In it he dated the text ca. 1300 (more recent literary historians prefer "fourteenth century") and thought that the Benedictine Monastery of Pingeyrar was a likely location for the composition, which required a large library and depended extensively on the biographies of Olaf Tryggvason by the Pingeyrar monks Oddr Snorrason and Gunnlaugr Leifsson a century or so earlier. Finnur showed that the text was based primarily on Snorri's Heimskringlabut was expanded not only with supplements from Oddr and Gunnlaugr but from a long list of other texts: Landn‡mab—k, Hallfredar saga, Laxdoela saga, J—msv’kinga saga, F¾reyinga saga, Eir’ks saga rauda, Kristni saga, and an array of shorter texts and p¾ttir. Finnur's study referred to the text as îl‡fs saga Tryggvasonar hin meiri, perhaps to distinguish it from the even longer redaction in Flateyjarb—k, the expansions of which he had emphasized in an earlier paper on Flateyjarb—k in Aarb¿ger for nordisk oldkyndighed for 1927 (see pp. 167-68).

Theodore M. Andersson
Indiana University