sources and media was an important aspect of Sighvatur’s ever-increasing literary practices throughout his twenties and a prerequisite for his role as a mediator of texts via reading, lending, or commissioned transcripts. A handful of transcripts thought to be from around 1860 survive, along with other indications of literary activity from the years before Sighvatur began to keep a regular diary in 1863. Most of them are connected in some way or another to Gísli Konrásson. Direct evidence of Sighvatur acquiring texts from other sources is scarce before 1863, but judging from his later activities it is likely that he had tapped every source available.19
Aside from his short autobiography, two major sources document Sighvatur Grímsson’s literary activity from 1863 onwards. One is the body of surviving manuscripts composed or collected by him, often including the date and place of composition and at its best containing short endnotes on their source. Secondly, Sighvatur Grímsson’s diaries give us access to a detailed and extensive account of his literary activities throughout his adult life. Entries reporting reading and writing are scarce and scattered at first, but soon grow into what can be assumed to be a nearly comprehensive report of his acquisition of books, his reading and his writing.
Both Sighvatur’s diary and manuscripts confirm the extent to which Gísli Konrásson’s manuscript collection became the fundamental resource for his transcripts. Their relationship constituted a central part of Sighvatur Grímsson’s self-education. The immediate impact of their encounter is attested by Sighvatur’s composition of a rímur-cycle, Skáld-Helga rímur, in the winter of 1861-1862, based on a prose narrative borrowed from Gísli Konrásson.20 Sighvatur had produced occasional poetry from an early age, as mentioned in an earlier chapter, and had in some sense
19 Lbs 2285 4to: ‘Amlói’. Compilation of various texts written by Sighvatur Grímsson in 1892-1895. It includes, for example, three folk tales that Sighvatur had originally penned down from an oral presentation in Breiafjörur in autumn 1862.
20 Lbs 3623 8vo, [ p. 6]. Sighvatur’s Skáld-Helga rímur are only preserved in his autograph manuscript, which was unknown to Finnur Sigmundsson when he made his Rímnatal. Matthew J. Driscoll has commented on the transference between the two forms: ‘The fact that rímur, themselves based on prose sagas, could be taken and turned back into prose sagas – and that prose sagas that in main bear no mark of having been so composed – demonstrates not only the existence of a mechanism for deriving texts, or ‘discourses’, from ‘stories’, but also suggests that the people who were involved in the production of these are unlikely to have regarded them as ‘fixed’’. Matthew J. Driscoll, ‘The Oral, the Written, and the In-Between: Textual Instability in the Post- Reformation Lygisaga’, in Hildegard L.C. Tristram, ed, (Re)Oralisierung. ScriptOralia, 84 (Tübingen, 1996), p. 151.
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recorded his life in verse throughout his late teens and early twenties.21 His composition of Skáld- Helga rímur is, in contrast, one of his first attempts to compose something of wider significance, within the living tradition of communicating and reproducing Icelandic and Nordic literary heritage. In addition to being representative of the endurance of the rímur-tradition in the second half of the nineteenth century, this composition is a particularly fascinating example of how texts and themes could transform and remodel themselves within the spheres of scribal and oral transmission. The tale of Skáld-Helgi (‘Helgi the poet’) is thought to have been first composed in prose form in the eleventh century, in all likelihood after circulating orally for some time. This medieval text is now lost, but its content survived in the (older) Skáld-Helga rímur, dating from the fifteenth century. Then, in the early 1820s, Gísli Konrásson composed a new prose version of the story of Skáld-Helgi, based on the medieval rímur.22
Sighvatur not only turned the tale of Skáld-Helgi into metrical form but he transcribed the saga as well. This transcript of Skáld-Helga saga became the opening text in a 700-page tome of almost thirty family sagas and tales, legendary sagas, modern sagas, and rímur, which Sighvatur compiled between 1861 and 1867.23 Though the transcript itself is not dated in the manuscript, it was apparently started on 1 October 1861, judging from the heading on the front page.24 This hefty miscellany stands as an impressive testimony to Sighvatur’s relentless quest for literary and historical material to copy and collect, and evidence of the rich resources he could tap into. Furthermore this compilation, and especially the short but informative endnotes attached to most of the texts, gives vivid insight into the process behind its creation and the cultural milieu that this took place in.
21 See Lbs 2325 8vo: ‘Syrpa’, vol. I-III. Anthology of Sighvatur Grímsson’s poetry. Autograph.
22 Gísli Konrásson’s Skáld-Helga saga is preserved in four transcripts, including Sighvatur’s. It was first published in Reykjavík in 1897: Sagan af Skáld-Helga (Reykjavík, 1897).
23 Lbs 2328 4to: ‘Íslendingasögur. Eftir bestu handritum, mjög óvía til, frá fornöld. Skrifaar í köldum og óhentugum sjó[búum] me allar í landlegum en endaar í Flatey á Breiafiri 1867 af [Sighvatur Grímsson’s name in runes] 1. október 1861-13. desember 1867’. Compilation of sagas written in 1861-1867 by Sighvatur Grímsson. Another example of an original composition by Gísli Konrásson that was copied by Sighvatur from an autograph was Hellismanna saga, reproduced from a single-text volume in 8vo between 20 November and 6 December 1865, also in this same compilation.
24 This dating is supported by an endnote to another transcript Sighvatur made for a fellow lay scholar, Jón Borgfiringur, in 1885. There Sighvatur notes: ‘Skáld Helga sögu skrifai eg fyrst veturinn 1861 eftir handriti Gísla Konrássonar, á eirri bók var brot af orsteins sögu Síu-Hallssonar og margir ættir af Íslendingum’. Lbs 13.11. 2000: ‘rjár íslenzkar fornsögur. Hafa aldrei veri prentaar. Skrifaar á Höfa í Drafiri, veturinn 1885 fyrir herra Jón Borgfiring lögreglujón í Reykjavík’. Compilation of three sagas written in 1885 by Sighvatur Grímsson.