Holly McArthur

A New Critical Edition of Flóvents saga

Þriðjudaginn 1. apríl 2025 kl. 16.30 / Tuesday, April 1, 2025, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)

A little-known work, Flóvents saga claims to tell the story of the first Christian king of Frakkland. Translated from a now-lost chanson de geste, it survives today in 23 manuscripts with the oldest dating from the first quarter of the fourteenth century. Moreover, Flóvents saga has the (perhaps dubious) honor of being the oldest surviving relative of its particular branch of stories of Flóvent, the nephew of Constantine, connecting the narrative to epic cycles produced in Italian and German in the late medieval and early modern periods.

Despite the saga’s relative popularity in Iceland through the centuries, it was last edited in 1884, by Swedish philologist Gustaf Cederschiöld, who, as might be expected of nineteenth century philological practice, dismissed younger copies of the text, and was seemingly unaware of a major part of the saga’s transmission history.

This presentation will focus on the questions that underly a new critical edition of Flóvents saga, with particular attention paid to the balance between authenticity and accessibility, and the question of how best represent a text that holds a relatively unique place for both Old Norse and medieval European literature. It does so in light of the saga’s manuscript rich tradition which spanned almost to the twentieth century to illuminate the role of Flóvent both in Iceland and in Europe.

Holly McArthur is a 2024–2025 Leifur Eiríksson fellow and a Ph.D. Candidate in Scandinavian Philology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She holds an MA in Viking and Medieval Norse Studies from the University of Iceland (2019). Her work studies cultural transmission and literary translation between Old French and Old Norse-Icelandic.