SOURCE: Louis-Jensen, Jonna. “A Good Day's Work: Laxdaela Saga, ch. 49.” In Cold Counsel: Women in Old Norse Literature and Mythology, edited by Sarah M. Anderson, pp. 189-99. New York: Routledge, 2002.

[In the following essay, Louis-Jensen attempts to correct possible textual corruptions in Laxdaela Saga chapter 49 in order to unveil a subtle, ironic reading of Gudrun's character in her response to Kjartan's death.]

I

A notable feature of the “saga style” is the emphatic phrase (apophthegm, laconism), which marks the dramatic peak of a dialogue, and thereby of a scene. Well-known examples are the heroic understatements “Hneit þar,” “Þau tíðkask nú en breiðu spjótin,” “Vel hefir konungrinn alit oss, feitt er mér enn of hjartarœtr”. With its “slow, measured dialogues” (Clover 1974:65), Laxdæla saga may be atypical in this respect, but even Laxdæla contains at least two phrases that have been assigned to this category. It is perhaps no coincidence that both are spoken by Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir, the primadonna assoluta of the saga, who is not only “kvenna vænst” but also “bezt orði farin”. One of them is of course the aging heroine's enigmatic confession: “Þeim var ek verst er ek unna mest”. The other is more difficult to quote, for it has been badly bungled in the manuscript tradition of Laxdæla saga, and critics have disagreed as to how it should be emended.

The textual history of Laxdæla was treated by Kristian Kålund a century ago in his edition of the saga (Laxdæla 1889-91). Kålund established two main classes of manuscripts, y and z, but his edition only sporadically goes beyond constituting the text of the y-class, and no editor has as yet coped with the task of editing the z-class, which is represented by fragments and late paper manuscripts only.¹

The passage under discussion here reads thus in Möðruvallabók, the main text of Kålund's edition:

Þá mælti Guðrún: “Mikil verða hermdarverk, ek hefi spunnit tólf álna garn, en þú hefir vegit Kjartan”.

The word “hermdarverk” is a hapax legomenon in Old Norse, and its precise sense accordingly difficult to establish, although it has been used in later Icelandic in the sense “act of terrorism; sabotage” (Sverrir Hólmarsson et al. 1989:184). It is, however, questionable whether the word has been in continuous use in the language; it might conceivably be a revival, based on the above passage as it reads in the older editions of Laxdæla. Einar Ól. Sveinsson, in his edition of the saga for Íslenzk fornrit (henceforth, ÍF), rejected the Möðruvallabók reading “Mikil verða hermdarverk” and replaced it with a variant reading found in a paper manuscript of the z-class: “Misjofn verða morgunverkin”. This is most likely a pessimistic twist of the maxim “Drjúg eru morgunverkin,” (cf. Ólafur Halldórsson 1973) and probably means something like “it varies how much work one gets done in the morning,” although most translators of the saga have understood it differently. Jónas Kristjánsson (1984) gives a comprehensive survey of translations of this passage, but omits the snappy, if unorthodox “Morning tasks are often mixed” (Laxdæla 1969:176). As demonstrated convincingly by Ólafur Halldórsson (1973), however, the basis of the reading “Misjofn verða morgunverkin” in the manuscript tradition of Laxdæla is so slender that there is in fact no chance of its being original; Jónas Kristjánsson (1984), notwithstanding, puts up a gallant defence of the ÍF text.

Ólafur Halldórsson goes on to suggest that the reading “hermdarverk” in Möðruvallabók with its variants hernaðar- and hefndarverk could be due to corruptions of an original reading “hér váðaverk”, which he sees as a pun on the double meaning of váð(a)verk, “accidental damage” and “cloth-making”. Even if we accept the somewhat strained homonymy between váðaverk and váðverk, other objections suggest themselves: Guðrún has been spinning, not weaving, and the word váðverk seems to denote the latter only, also, as Guðrún has occasion to remember, the killing of Kjartan was far from accidental.

Although I cannot accept his solution in its entirety, I do think Ólafur Halldórsson has put the discussion on the right track: hermdar and hernaðar are both likely to be corruptions of the adverb hér + a sequence of graphs bearing some resemblance to “mdar,” and the same can be said to apply to hefndar, since this reading could well have been copied from hem(n)dar in an exemplar.

At this point I should like to draw attention to a translation of our passage not included in Jónas Kristjánsson's survey. This is W. P. Ker's rendering of central passages in Laxdæla saga (Ker 1908:223). Ker translated the passage as follows:

“A good day's work and a notable; I have spun twelve ells of yarn, and you have slain Kjartan Olaf's son”.

This translation seems to be based on inspired guesswork rather than on any printed or unprinted text of the saga that could have been available to Ker. Whether independently of Ker or not, at least two other translators render the passage in a similar way:

Da sa Gudrun: “Store blir dagsverkene nu; jeg har spundet garn til 12 alen tøi, og du har fældt Kjartan”.

(Laxdæla 1924:147)

Då sade Gudrun: “Goda dagsverk ha vi gjort. Jag har spunnit garn till tolv alnar, och du har dräpt Kjartan”.

(Laxdæla 1935:313)

My intuitive reaction to these translations of Guðrún's words is that they are much more satisfactory than the others on the market; it seems a pity that they translate a reading that is not found in any manuscript of Laxdæla. On reflection, however, I see it as a distinct possibility that the word “hermdarverk” with its variants “hernadarverk” and “hefndarverk” could be a corruption of a phrase that meant more or less what these translators guessed that it should mean. I also believe that this hypothesis can be supported by paleographical and orthographical evidence.

Laxdæla saga is thought to have been written around the middle of the thirteenth century, perhaps a little later (Heller 1968:135 ff.). In Icelandic manuscripts from this period (and later), a common type of the letter “x” was one that looked like minuscule “r” with an extra hook below the line.² It sometimes happens that the hook is quite detached from the descender, in which case the letter is easy to confuse with an “r”.³ The element “dar” in “hermdar”, “hernadar”, “hefndar” could thus very plausibly be a corruption of “dax”, which is how the genitive of dagr is written in some early Icelandic manuscripts, e.g. AM 645 4to A (early thirteenth century) (Larsson 1891:46); similar examples of the cluster “gs” being written “x”, even when it spans a morpheme boundary, can be found in manuscripts from the second half of the thirteenth century, e.g. “lax menn” in Grágás (Gks 1157 fol., c. 1300; Grágás 1852, II:166,10). Following Ólafur Halldórsson as far as the element “her” is concerned, I would suggest to emend the passage to “Mikil verða hér nú dagsverkin”. The sequence “her nu dax” is equally amenable to being misread as “hermdar,” “hernadar,” and “hemndar”, and the sentence has an authentic ring, for which compare “Skammt verðr hér nú illra verka í milli ok stórra” in Gísla saga Súrssonar, the S redaction (Íslendinga sögur 1985, I:924).⁴

II

One of the difficulties about the reading “Misjofn verða morgunverkin” is that it is hard to understand why Guðrún at three o'clock in the afternoon talks about her morning tasks as though they represent all the work she has done that day. This difficulty is neatly glossed over in the English translation, where nón is taken to mean “noon,” which of course marks the end of the “morning” in the modern English sense (Laxdæla 1969:176). In Old Icelandic, and no doubt well into the modern period, the morning did not extend beyond dagmál (9 a.m.), as may be inferred, e.g., from the refrain: “Stuttir eru morgnar í Möðrudal, því eru dagmál þá dagar”. The difficulty disappears if “morgunverk” is changed into “dagsverk”. Even if Guðrún's spinning were discontinued when her brothers came home to report the killing of Kjartan, this must have been considerably later than 9 a.m., judging from the activities that take place during the day: Kjartan starts out from Hóll “early in the morning,” and on his way to Hafragil, a distance of some 20 km, he stops at Hvítidalr to perform an errand. The fight at Hafragil must be assumed to take at least an hour, after which the brothers ride back to Laugar, a distance of about 7 km. All in all, it is not likely that the news reaches Laugar much before 1 p.m., which gives Guðrún at least four or five hours of spinning, most of which it would clearly be unidiomatic to refer to as “morgunverk”.

If we emend Guðrún's words to “Mikil verða hér nú dagsverkin”, we moreover get closer to understanding why the author of the saga opens the scene between the couple in such a strange way:

Síðan reið Bolli heim til Lauga. Guðrún gekk í móti honum ok spurði hversu framorðit væri; Bolli kvað þá vera nær nóni.⁵ Þá mælti Guðrún: “Mikil verða hér nú dagsverkin⁶ …”

Guðrún presumably knows as well as Bolli what time it is; what she wants from him is not the time of day, but the cue for her obviously well-prepared speech. She is staging the scene as a kind of elaborate metaphor, pretending that the couple are merely exchanging domestic commonplaces suitable for the end of a working day or shift.

Although the sources are very reticent on this point, a working day on an Icelandic farm in the eleventh or thirteenth century was no doubt organised much as in later times in Scandinavia and the Atlantic islands, i.e. divided into four or five shifts of approximately three hours each, interspersed with meals (Ejder 1969:423 ff.). One word for such a shift which seems to have been used in all the Nordic languages was eykt (older eykð) (Jansson 1958:393).⁷ We also know that nón marked the end of one such eykt; Ivar Aasen's Norwegian dictionary gives the following entry (Aasen 1918:539):

Nonsøykt (-ykt), f. den tredie Arbeidsstund paa Dagen, Tiden imellem Dagverd og Non.

In Iceland, too, nón must have meant time for a break between two shifts, or on a Saturday or the eve of a feast-day, the beginning of the weekend or feast (nónheilagt), and the opening lines of the dialogue between Guðrún and Bolli could have been spoken by any industrious farming couple, making a preliminary assessment of the day's work towards the end of the third eykt.

A closer look at the composition of this and the preceding chapter reveals that the scene of Bolli's return parallels that of his departure earlier in the day; both scenes are staged by Guðrún in much the same manner, using everyday situations as her frame of reference. It is expressly stated in the saga that the day on which Kjartan was killed was Thursday in Easter week. In medieval Iceland this was the first workday after four holidays (Grágás 1852, I:29), and Guðrún stages it emphatically as a workday by getting up at sunrise, waking up her brothers and asking them about their plans for the day. Except for the unusual casting of the lady of the house as supervisor of the work, this is an everyday situation in a large Icelandic farmhouse, as can be seen from a comparison with ch. 55 in Laxdæla: “Bolli hafði verit snemma á fótum um morgininn ok skipat til vinnu” and ch. 13 in Eyrbyggja: “Þóroddr bóndi stóð upp snimma um morguninn ok skipaði til verks”. Guðrún's brothers, still half asleep, react to the immediate content of her question and answer that they will be having a quiet day—“for there isn't much work to be done just now” (“ok er nú fátt til verknaðar”). This answer launches Guðrún on her famous Hetzrede, in which she reproaches her brothers in terms suitable for scolding lazy farmhands: instead of doing their work, they are acting like farmers' daughters, who do neither good nor harm (but presumably lead pampered lives), they sleep and play, sit at home and talk big (“láta vænlega”), and there are always too many of them about—the eternal complaint of women in a society with a clear division of labour between the sexes. In the course of the speech it becomes quite clear that Guðrún is in fact goading her brothers to undertake a revenge expedition against Kjartan, and several of the rhetorical elements in her speech are also well-known ingredients in the goading speeches delivered by women in Old Norse literature: charges of effeminacy (daughters rather than sons), somnolence, forgetfulness (Hermann Pálsson 1986:31-37), but the ambiguity of both the situation and the speech is exceptional. In her two speeches, Guðrún can thus be said to use the gender-determined division of labour as a metaphor for the different roles and duties of men and women in connexion with blood revenge.

When Guðrún pretends that Bolli's killing of Kjartan is all in a day's work and so belongs to the same sphere as her own spinning, she is no doubt being ironical about Bolli's deed and refusing to see it in a heroic light.⁸ But the equation works both ways: either both achievements are trivial or both are fateful. At a higher level of the text, the level of composition, Guðrún's spinning acquires a mythical dimension; the distaff is not only the emblem of women's work, but also the attribute of the Fates. Ólafur Halldórsson (1990:274) calls attention to the provision in Grágás, that twelve ells is the price of a burial-place: “Tólf álnum skal kaupa leg undir mann,” and suggests that the author of Laxdæla by letting Guðrún spin—or at least boast of having spun—“tólf álna garn” may have intended to designate her as the spinner of a fatal web, Kjartan's destiny.

This ingenious suggestion presupposes that the meaning of “tólf álna garn” is “twelve ells' worth of yarn” and not “twelve ells of yarn”, as W. P. Ker translates it. Jónas Kristjánsson (1984) advocates the latter, “minimalist” interpretation, and imagines that Guðrún is too restless to spin at an even pace while she is waiting for news of the outcome of the fight between Bolli and Kjartan. It seems to me that there is a strong linguistic argument against the translation “twelve ells of yarn”: the Icelandic equivalent of this phrase surely would be “tólf álnir garns,” not “tólf álna garn”. Moreover, twelve ells of yarn is an incredibly poor outcome of four or five hours of spinning (and of course incompatible with the reading “Mikil verða hér nú dagsverkin”). On the other hand, “yarn or warp for twelve ells of cloth” is an unrealistically large quantity to spin in half a working day: according to Jónas Kristjánsson's calculations, warp for twelve ells of standard vaðmál amounts to 3,600 metres of yarn, or the equivalent of twenty-four hours' spinning on a nineteenth-century spinning-wheel. However, as Ólafur Halldórsson (1990:274) reminds us, an old suggestion by Brynjólfur Jónsson frá Minna-Núpi (1892) is that “tólf álna garn” could mean “twelve ells' worth of linen thread”. This seems linguistically possible, but as far as I know nobody has made calculations of how much linen thread one can spin in less than a day; “twelve ells' worth” still sounds like rather a lot. Perhaps the old explanation, that “tólf álna garn” means “yarn or warp for twelve ells of cloth”, should not be dismissed out of hand. It would, of course, be a mistake to imagine Guðrún spinning all alone in a room by herself. More likely, we are meant to visualize her together with other female members of the household, all occupied with different aspects of cloth-making, as is the case in the hall at Bjarg in Grettis saga, ch. 14: “konur unnu þar tó á daginn”. When Guðrún says that she has spun warp for twelve ells of cloth, she may be referring to the joint efforts of the women of Laugar, for which she, the mistress of the house, is responsible.

Guðrún's statement, although not necessarily unrealistic, is certainly not without ambiguity. I do not want to argue that Guðrún herself is aware of the symbolic value of twelve ells' worth of yarn; it has already been suggested that this construction belongs to the compositional level of the saga. As I understand the dialogue, Guðrún's irony is aimed at Bolli; by reducing his killing of Kjartan to something trivial she means to hurt and humiliate him (and to provoke him to hit back); she may, however, be driving home an additional point. Having been informed by her brothers about the fight in Svínadalr, Guðrún knows that Kjartan died not in single combat but fighting alone against five. Perhaps the impossibly large quantity of yarn she alleges to have spun is a sly hint that the killing of Kjartan was no more of a singlehanded achievement than her own spinning.

III

In Epic and Romance, W. P. Ker characterizes Laxdæla in the following way:

Some of the Sagas are a reduction of heroic fable to the temper and conditions of modern prose. Laxdæla is an heroic epic, rewritten as a prose history under the conditions of actual life, and without the help of any supernatural “machinery”. It is a modern prose version of the Niblung tragedy with the personages chosen from the life of Iceland in the heroic age, and from the Icelandic family traditions … In Laxdæla, Kjartan stands for Sigurd: Gudrun daughter of Osvifr, wife of Bolli, is in the place of Brynhild wife of Gunnar, driving her husband to avenge her on her old lover.

(Ker 1908:209)

Ker views Laxdæla—or at least the story of Guðrún and her lovers—as a literary experiment of the same order as Ibsen's Hærmændene paa Helgeland, a conscious remodelling of the Eddic story of Brynhild and Sigurd, to meet the demands of a very different genre. In addition to the more general similarities between the saga and the Brynhild lays of the Edda, the dialogue between Guðrún and Bolli after Kjartan's death shows a specific and detailed agreement with Sigurðarkviða en skamma, an agreement that was analysed by Bouman (1962, see Further Reading) in terms of literary borrowing. Bouman proves his point, but there might be other aspects of the literary affinity between the two texts worth exploring. It is an interesting dissimilarity between the poem and the saga that the behaviour of the saga heroes is very restrained when compared to that of their poetical prototypes, a fact that is largely due to generic differences; the sagas are at least as fond of litotes as the Edda of hyperbole. Brynhild laughs “af ollum hug” on hearing the “gjallan grát” of her rival who is mourning her dead husband, whereas Guðrún coolly and collectedly remarks that to her the most important aspect of Kjartan's death is that his widow will not go laughing to bed that night. Both heroines, however, betray their true feelings by changing colour, but while Brynhild flushes, Guðrún characteristically turns pale. Throughout the saga Guðrún exercises remarkable self-control; the only reaction she shows to a particularly harsh treatment by the man who has just killed her husband is a smile (it is up to the reader to imagine what kind of smile). If saga-readers have generally not regarded Guðrún as an unfeeling monster, but rather as a woman who conceals strong passions under a cool and controlled surface, part of the reason might be the saga's intertext with the Brynhild legend.

The transformation of the heroic epic into a prose saga under what Ker calls “the conditions of actual life” or “the ordinary business of Icelandic life’ is for the most part successful, but at least in one scene it seems to me that the Icelandic paint has been applied too thinly to cover the foreign colouring. This is in ch. 46, where Guðrún is made to cede her time-honoured right to the high-seat at Hjarðarholt to Kjartan's new wife. This scene is, as shown by Marina Mundt (1973), modelled on the quarrel between Brynhild and Grimhild “in the version we otherwise know from Þiðriks saga”. Both queens have a certain claim to the throne—Brynhild by virtue of her marriage to Gunnar, and Grimhild by virtue of her royal birth; Icelandic women, on the other hand, never occupied the high-seat, either in their own homes or as visitors, if we are to believe the evidence of the sagas apart from this one instance. Guðrún herself, at the wedding-feast celebrating her fourth marriage, sits on the bridal bench “innar á þverpalli”, while the bridegroom takes the seat of honour.

A comparison between chs. 48-49 in Laxdæla and the chapter in Þiðreks saga in which Sigurd's death is related, shows quite striking similarities, which as far as I know have hitherto gone unnoticed. At the same time it illuminates the technique of transforming the paraphernalia of kings and queens into the ordinary business of Icelandic farm life. In Þiðreks saga the killing of Sigurd is placed in the context of a hunting expedition, which is initiated by the royal brothers Gunnar and Hogni having an early breakfast (“árdegis,” cf. Guðrún's getting up early, “snemma … þegar er sólu var ofrat,” on the day of Kjartan's death). In both texts, this apparently unusual behaviour elicits a question from one of the unsuspecting participants in the impending drama. Sigurd asks Gunnar, as Guðrún's brother Óspakr asks his sister: “Why are you up so early?” The answers are: “Because we are going hunting” and “Because I want you to get some work done,” respectively, but in both cases an innocent pursuit is used as a cover for a sinister intent: “Because we are going to kill you” / “Because I want you to kill Kjartan”. Out in the forest, Hogni stabs Sigurd to death, and the brothers subsequently refer to his dead body as “the bison ox” (“visundr”). On their return to the castle with the body, they are met by Brynhild who acts and speaks in a manner remarkably similar to her Icelandic counterpart, except that she draws her metaphor from the pastimes of princes rather than “the ordinary business of Icelandic life”:

Drottning Brynhildr … gengr ór borginni móti þeim ok mælti at þeir hafi veitt allra manna heilastir”.

(Þiðriks saga, II, 267, my normalization)

Guðrún gekk í móti honum ok spurði hversu framorðit væri … þá mælti Guðrún: “Mikil verða hér nú dagsverkin”.

(z-text, emended)

Along with the similarities, we find equally interesting dissimilarities. In Þiðreks saga, the hunting metaphor is employed by several of the characters (Gunnar, Hogni, Brynhild), who apparently have no purpose of their own in employing it. The “dagsverk” metaphor in Laxdæla is the exclusive property of Guðrún, who uses it as a weapon of manipulation and sarcasm. This observation would seem to lend additional support to Ker's view of the central plot in Laxdæla, the story of Guðrún, as mainly a literary experiment, a reworking of the Brynhild legend in the language of the Íslendingasögur. The inspiration to have Guðrún refer to Bolli's killing of Kjartan as a “dagsverk” could have come to the saga author from some version of the Niflung story, possibly Þiðreks saga itself,⁹ where Sigurd's Waldtod was placed in the context of a hunt and where the parties involved used hunting terms as a metaphor for manslaughter. Adapting this circumlocution to “Icelandic conditions” implied a complete change of both scenario and style, a change that would have been, I think, eminently successful, if an unlucky scribe had not accidentally destroyed the meaning of a whole phrase by confusing an “x” and an “r”.

Notes

1. An edition of the z-text is now in preparation at the Arnamagnæan Institute in Copenhagen.

2. A good example can be seen in the fragment AM 655 X 4to, fol. 1r, l. 3 in the word “rex” (Hreinn Benediktsson 1965, pl. 65). The fragment is dated to the second half of the thirteenth century.

3. An “x” of this type is e.g. found in AM 519a 4to (Alexanders saga) (Hreinn Benediktsson 1965: pl. 77, line 6). The word in question, the name Oxatreus, was in fact read as “Oratreus” in Árni Böðvarsson 1974:23.

4. The unpublished concordance to Íslendinga sögur 1985 has this one occurrence of the sequence “hér nú”, as Örnólfur Thorsson kindly informs me.

5. Thus the z-text; Möðruvallabók adds “þess dags”.

6. “-verkin”, thus the z-text; “-verk” Möðruvallabók.

7. The word eykt is thought to derive from Proto-Germanic *jaukiþō, cognate with English yoke. Its original meaning seems to have been “the act of yoking (harnessing) a draught animal”, but presumably also “the time between one yoking and the next” (Ejder 1969:107, with references). This assumption rests on the Old Norse evidence, since ON eykt meant both “temporal unit (shift) of three hours” and “point of time demarcating three-hour shift”. (The specialized sense of ON eykt: “three o'clock [or half past three] in the afternoon [= nón]” does not concern us here).

8. Helga Kress (1980:104-05) adopts Ólafur Halldórsson's conjecture (váðaverkin) and reads bitterness and sarcasm into Guðrún's words. According to her interpretation Guðrún stresses the contrast rather than the complementarity between the male and female fields of activity, thus expressing her frustration at being kept away from the centre of events (i.e., the battlefield).

9. On the question of the sources of Þiðreks saga, see most recently Andersson 1986.

Works Cited

Editions and Translations:

Gísla saga Súrssonar 1985: = Íslendinga sögur 1985, 1:899-953.

Grágás 1852: = Grágás. Islændernes Lovbog i Fristatens Tid. Ed. Vilhjálmur Finsen. Copenhagen.

Íslendinga sögur 1985: = Íslendinga sögur 1-2. Eds. Jón Torfason, Sverrir Tómasson, Örnólfur Thorsson. Reykjavík.

Laxdala 1889-91: - Laxdœla Saga. Ed. Kr. Kålund. STUAGNL vol. 19. Copenhagen.

Laxdæla 1924: = Laksdøla Saga. Oversat av Fr. Bie. Kristiania.

Laxdæla 1934: = Laxdœla saga. Halldórs þættir Snorrasonar. Stúfs þáttr. Ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson. Íslenzk fornrit V. Reykjavík.

Laxdæla 1935: = Isländska Sagor. Eyrbyggarnas Saga. Laxdalingarnas Saga. Översatta och utgivna av Hjalmar Alving. Repr. [1979]. Stockholm.

Laxdæla 1969: = Laxdæla saga. Translated with an Introduction by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson. Harmondsworth.

Þiðriks saga 1905-11: - Þiðriks saga af Bern 1-2. Ed. Henrik Bertelsen. STUAGNL vol. 34. Copenhagen.

Secondary Literature:

Aasen, Ivar. 1918. Norsk Ordbog. Fjerde uforandrede Udgave. Kristiania.

Andersson, Theodore M. 1986. “An Interpretation of Þiðreks saga”. Structure and Meaning in Old Norse Literature. Eds. John Lindow, Lars Lönnroth, Gerd Wolfgang Weber. Odense, pp. 347-77.

Árni Böðvarsson. 1974. Handritalestur & gotneskt letur. Reykjavík.

Bouman, A.C. 1962. Patterns in Old English and Old Icelandic Literature. Leiden.

Clover, Carol J. 1974. “Scene in Saga Composition”. Arkiv för nordisk filologi 89:57-83.

Ejder, Bertil. 1969. Dagens tider och måltider. Lund.

Helga Kress. 1980. “‘Mjok mun þér samstaft þykkja’—Um sagnahefð og kvenlega reynslu í Laxdæla sögu”. Konur skrifa til heiðurs Önnu Sigurðardóttur. Reykjavík:97-109.

Heller, Rolf. 1968. “Das Alter der Laxdæla saga”. Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur XCVII:135-55.

Hermann Pálsson. 1986. Leyndarmál Laxdælu. Reykjavík.

Hreinn Benediktsson. 1965. Early Icelandic Script: Íslenzk handrit. Ser. in folio. Vol. II. Reykjavík.

Jansson, Sam Owen. 1958. “Dygn (och dess indelning)”. Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder 3. København:389-94.

Jónas Kristjánsson. 1984. “Tólf álna garn.” Festskrift til Ludvig Holm-Olsen. Øvre Ervik:207-14.

Ker, W. P. 1908. Epic and Romance. New York. Repr. 1957.

Larsson, Ludvig. 1891. Ordförrådet i de älsta islänska handskrifterna. Lund.

Mundt, Marina. 1973. “Observations on the Influence of Þiðriks saga on Icelandic Saga Writing”. The First International Saga Conference, Edinburgh 1971, Proceedings, London: 335-59.

Ólafur Halldórsson. 1973. “Morgunverk Guðrúnar Ósvífursdóttur”. Skírnir 147. Reykjavík:125-8.

Ólafur Halldórsson. 1990. “Morgunverk Guðrúnar Ósvífursdóttur”. Grettisfærsla. Safn ritgerða eftir Ólaf Halldórsson gefið út á sjötugsafmæli hans. Reykjavík: 271-4.

Sverrir Hólmarsson, Christopher Sanders, John Tucker. 1989. Íslensk-ensk orðabók. Reykjavík.