A legendary ancestry for poets: Skáldatal in Heimskringla and Edda manuscripts

Abstract

As is widely known, Skáldatal is a list of court poets and of their aristocratic patrons, from the 9th to the 13th century, i.e. from Starkaðr inn gamli to the Sturlung family. It is recorded twice, both inside Snorri’s Heimskringla and in Edda manuscripts. However, being contained in a shorter and in a longer version, respectively, in Kringla (the lost vellum codex of the Norwegian kings’ history) and in Uppsala-Edda, Skáldatal was omitted in some editions of both Snorri’s works (and, before them, in the 17th-century transcripts of the lost Kringla). In spite of editorial attempts to publish it as a unique autonomous writing, by means of hybrid editions which conflated the varia lectio in new redactional units, its textual variability is highly meaningful and reveals different contextual attitudes. The inventory of these specific textual issues is the main aim of the present paper.