Parergon

This high-quality publication is a true collaboration, to the extent that the four authors take joint responsibility for the content. As a consequence, it retains coherence and consistency throughout, a quality that is often lacking in volumes of collected chapters. Overall, there are but a few quibbles, and the only one worth noting is the volume’s title, which promises, but does not deliver, the ‘Viking World’. Perhaps the book it might be better titled The Textualities of Late Medieval Contacts between Norse and Gaelic Elites. This work is concerned geographically with the ‘Norwegian Insular Viking Zone’ and the subject matter is confined to late textual reflexes and interactions of cultural elites, not really the ‘Viking World’ at all.

The professed focus of this book ‘is to account for the continuing relevance of Norse-Gaelic contacts’ (p. 3) in the ‘long’ thirteenth century, from the 1169 Norman invasion of Ireland to the early fourteenth-century Hauksbók edition of Landnamabók: a period that is nominally post-Viking Age. Within this frame, four textual witnesses from the thirteenth century are examined: Konungs skuggsjá, Njáls saga, Landnámabók, and (perhaps the least known of the four) Baile Suthach Síth Embna, a Gaelic praise poem for Raghnall mac Godfraidh, king of Man, that incorporates the dual Gaelic-Scandinavian heritage of Man as its subject matter. The four texts are examined for signs of Norwegian influence during the period, within the wider context of increasing Norman influence in Scotland and the Isle of Man. Indeed, Man comes out of this study enjoying a significant degree of centrality for the milieu, as a location that was politically, culturally, and geographically critical to the continued Norse presence, influence and textual production in the ‘Zone’.

The authors argue a sound case that both the ‘Wonders of Ireland’ component of Konungs skuggsjá and the source material (that is, the putative *Brjáns saga) behind the Norse accounts of the Battle of Clontarf in Orkneyinga saga, Njáls saga, and Þorsteins saga Síðu-Hallssonar was composed in the Norse-Gaelic milieu on the Isle of Man. Moreover, they argue evidence for this early twelfth-century Manx Norse source material to have made its way to Iceland (as source for the Icelandic saga versions) via thirteenth-century Norway. The authors also note ties and reciprocal interests between Hákon IV’s Norway and the thirteenth-century Norse kings of Man, arguing, inter alia, that Norway’s interests in Ireland (such as is revealed in Konungs skuggsjá) are mirrored by Manx interests in Hákon’s predecessor, Ingi II Bárðarson, evidenced in Baile Suthach. In that poem, Raghnall’s status idealizes both Irish and Norse cultures, and the poet is shown to be operating at the intersection of high-status Gaelic and Norse cultural and political spheres. [End Page 207]

The volume incorporates the text of much of the material it discusses, with much of this newly edited and translated: the ‘Wonders of Ireland’ section of Konungs skuggsjá and Baile Suthach are both presented anew here. Also included in original and translation are the four Icelandic texts dealing with the Battle of Clontarf: the three excerpted prose accounts from the sagas noted above, along with the verse version (also found in Njáls saga) known as Darraðarljóð. Moreover, the Konungs skuggsjá text is analysed in tabular comparison with three related mirabilia texts: De mirabilibus Hiberniae (attributed to Bishop Patrick), the Middle Irish Do Ingantaib Érenn and Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica, examining both context and motivation behind Norse interest in Ireland. Similarly, Baile Suthach is edited and read closely in the context of the array of political and cultural factors intersecting in the Irish Sea during the period, and implications for...