Matthew James Driscoll – författare

This volume of Opuscula presents a selection of essays on the subject of post-print manuscript cultures along what may be called the north Atlantic fringe -- Ireland, Gaelic-speaking Scotland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands. While printing had been adopted as the primary mode of literary dissemination in the majority of western European cultures by the mid-seventeenth century, in these countries chirographic transmission remained the norm until well into the nineteenth century for most genres of literature. Written by noted scholars from Denmark, Iceland, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, the essays gathered here seek to establish overarching reasons for the continuance of manuscript culture across this region, and analyse the common modalities of scribal practice from each area. Particular attention is paid to the interaction of manuscript and print. The study of post-print manuscript culture is still in its infancy, but has been receiving increasing attention in recent years. It is hoped that this book will facilitate its further development, cementing its position as an area of academic endeavour in its own right.

This volume brings together twenty-one articles by Matthew Driscoll, Professor of Old Norse Philology at the University of Copenhagen, written between 1991 and 2024. The articles have previously appeared in journals, anthologies, handbooks, companions and festschrifts and deal for the most part with literary production, dissemination and reception in Iceland in the Middle Ages and what may be termed the ‘late pre-modern’ period, roughly from the advent of print in the early sixteenth century to the establishment of the Icelandic State Broadcasting Service in the early twentieth century.The twenty-one articles are divided into the following subject areas:Rímur and other poetry: ‘The cloak of fidelity: Skikkjurímur’ (1991); ‘Words, words, words: Textual variation in Skikkjurímur’ (1997); ‘Herdís & Ólína: The poetry of everyday life’ (2019); ‘Rímur’ (2024)Fornaldarsögur/Riddarasögur/Lygisögur: ‘Late prose fiction’ (2005); ‘Skanderbeg’ (2007); ‘Plans for a new edition of the fornaldarsögur, anno 1937’ (2008); ‘A new edition of the fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda’ (2009); ‘Líkafrón og lagsmenn tveir’ (2009); ‘Arthurian ballads, rímur, chapbooks and folktales’ (2011); ‘Gellert’s Gräfin in Iceland’ (2018); ‘The French connection’ (2019)Lucian and Gedula: ‘The best medicine in the bitterest of herbs: An eighteenth-century moral tale’ (2008); ‘Lucian and Gedula’ (2016); ‘Lucian og Gedula: The missing link’ (2021)Manuscripts and textual scholarship: ‘Postcards from the edge: An overview of marginalia in Icelandic manuscripts’ (2004); ‘The words on the page: Thoughts on philology, old and new’ (2010); ‘What’s truth got to do with it? Views on the historicity of the sagas’ (2012); ‘The long and winding road: Manuscript culture in late pre-modern Iceland’ (2013); ‘The Rev. James Johnstone, septentrionalist and man of mystery’ (2019); ‘Finnur Jónsson, editor of everything’ (2022).