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Saint Oswald of Northumbria: Continental Metamorphoses.
With an Edition and Translation of Ósvalds Saga and Van Sunte Oswaldo
Deme Konninghe. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 297.
By Marianne E. Kalinke. Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies, 2005. Pp. xiii + 207, 3 plates.
A decade ago, in 1996, Marianne E. Kalinke published her literary analysis
of the Icelandic manuscript Stock. Perg. fol. no. 3 (also known as Reykjahólabók)
from around 1525. Her work, The Book of Reykjahólar: The Last of the
Great Medieval Legendaries, was a milestone in the study of Icelandic
hagiography in that Reykjahólabók's sources and, by extension,
the compiler's treatment of his sources, were thoroughly addressed and
examined. St. Oswald of Northumbria: Continental Metamorphoses may be
said to be a continuation of Kalinke's analysis of Reykjahólabók,
for Ósvalds saga, the legend of Saint Oswald of Northumbria, the king
and martyr slain by pagans in the year 642, is one of the twenty-five
legends contained in the manuscript. It also happens to be the legend
in Reykjahólabók that has attracted the most scholarly attention,
no doubt because it was the only one that had been available in an earlier
edition, namely Jón Sigurdsson's 1854 edition in Annaler for nordisk
Oldkyndighed og Historie, before Agnethe Loth edited the entire codex
in 1969–70. the legend has, as one would expect, been of interest
not only to scholars within the field of Old Norse-Icelandic studies,
but also to Germanists, and in fact been a topic of quite some discussion.
the debate has centered primarily upon the source of the legend, with
one scholar (Ignaz V. Zingerle) maintaining that it is the High German
Der Heiligen Leben; another (Anton Edzardi) that it is an older
and more complete version of the High German legendary, since the German
text shows considerable abridgement; a third (C. R. Unger) that it is
a Low German legendary (he doesn't specify which); and a fourth (Oskar
Klockhoff) that this Low German legendary is Dat Passionael,
but with additions and amplifications made by the Icelandic translator,
a view adopted first by Georg Baesecke and later by Ole Widding and Hans
Bekker-Nielsen. In St. Oswald of Northumbria: Continental Metamorphoses,
Kalinke settles the matter through an examination of the legend and its
development on the European continent.
Kirsten Wolf
University of Wisconsin-Madison
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