Pious Fictions and Pseudo-Saints in the Late Middle Ages: Selected Legends from an Icelandic Legendary (Mediaeval Sources in Translation)

About the Author

Marianne Kalinke is Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is an authority on cultural and literary relations between Scandinavia and the continent in the medieval and early modern period. Her study of the transmission of the Arthurian legend to Norway and Iceland, King Arthur, North-by-Northwest (1981), reconsidered the impact of continental romance on the development of indigenous Icelandic saga genres, while Bridal-Quest Romance in Medieval Iceland (1990) revised the received classification of Icelandic literary genres. The Book of Reykjaholar: The Last of the Great Medieval Legendaries (1996) considered the role of Iceland in preserving German hagiographic texts that have otherwise been lost. Most recently, Stories Set Forth with Fair Words: The Evolution of Medieval Romance in Iceland (2017) focuses on the origin and development of the earliest translated and indigenous romances in Iceland. Kirsten Wolf is Professor and Torger Thompson Chair in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature and Scandinavian linguistics. She has written extensively on hagiography, color, non-verbal communication and has edited several Old Norse-Icelandic texts, including Gydinga saga and the legends of Saints Anne, Barbara, and Dorothy. Her most recent monograph is The Legends of the Saints in Old Norse-Icelandic Prose (2013). Her book The Priest's Eye: AM 672 4to in The Arnamagnaean Collection is forthcoming in the series Manuscripta Nordica: Early Nordic Manuscripts in Digital Facsimile.