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Abstract
C. C. Rafn's three-volume edition of fornaldarsogur (Copenhagen, 1829-1830) represents the decisive scene in the formulation of the genre's identity. His edition, however, was completed with a limited collation of manuscripts and under the influence of some literary and text critical assumptions that are now viewed as faulty. Confining itself to Ketils saga hoings and Grims saga lodinkinna, this dissertation aims at providing the basis for a new edition of them and, ultimately, for re-working an edition of a linked third saga, Orvar-Odds saga, last edited by R. C. Boer. My objective is to test the assumptions and results of Rafn's and Boer's editions by collating all extant manuscripts of the first two sagas, by suggesting a stemma that implies faults in Boer's editions of Orvar-Odds saga, and by collecting the evidence necessary to reconstruct the lost medieval exemplar of the E redaction.
Chapter one is a handlist of the manuscripts containing the sagas.
Chapters two through seven contain descriptions of all manuscripts and transcriptions of the primary witnesses to the A, B, and C redactions.
Chapters eight through twelve discuss the *E redaction. All extant manuscripts are described; the base text chosen for the reconstruction of *E, Gl. kgl. Sml. 1006 fol., is discussed in detail. Chapter eleven gives samples of two versions of a reconstruction of *E. Chapter twelve sketches a possible stemma for the *E redaction and some of its consequences for Orvar-Odds saga.
Chapter twelve contains evidence for some lost copies of the two sagas.
Appendices one through five are semi-diplomatic transcriptions of the five texts that are the primary witnesses to *E. Appendix six presents a semi-diplomatic transcription of the poetry from a "maverick" manuscript, Ny kgl. Sml. 1778b 4to. Appendix seven is a version of Gl. kgl. Sml. 1006 fol. in which the language has been normalized to the period when *E is thought to have been written down.
A select bibliography concludes the dissertation.