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

Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta is not a household text. Even Finnur Jónsson'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 Aarbøger 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: Landnámabók, Hallfredar saga, Laxdoela saga, Jómsvíkinga saga, Færeyinga saga, Eiríks saga rauda, Kristni saga, and an array of shorter texts and pættir. Finnur's study referred to the text as Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar hin meiri, perhaps to distinguish it from the even longer redaction in Flateyjarbók, the expansions of which he had emphasized in an earlier paper on Flateyjarbók in Aarbøger for nordisk oldkyndighed for 1927 (see pp. 167-68).

Theodore M. Andersson
Indiana University