,,Snørre Sturlesøns fortale paa sin chrønicke"

Om kildene til opplysningen om Heimskringlas forfatter.

Abstract

One of the principal arguments supporting belief in Snorri Sturluson's authorship of Heimskringla is that the claim is made by two translators of the work, Laurents Hanssøn (ca 1550) and Peder Claussøn (ca 1599). Later scholars have assumed that these two translators must have based their claims on some manuscript source, and have concluded that this source must have been the Preface to a manuscript of Heimskringla no longer extant. Some support for the attribution is to be found in manuscripts of Orkneyinga saga and in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta where Snorri is described as an author of chronicles. The present article shows that the evidence for this theory is unconvincing, relying as it does on the supposed witness of a single lost manuscript. It argues that the two translators were probably not working from the same manuscript, and that the manuscript sources supporting the attribution need be no other than texts of Orkneyinga saga and Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta. Information about Snorri and his work might also have been in circulation in the literary and cultural life of Bergen during Laurents Hanssøn's lifetime; and Peder Claussøn could have learnt of the thoughts and theories of literary scholars in Bergen from the lawyer Jon Simonssøn. If Peder Claussøn did not derive information about the authorship of Heimskringla from a lost manuscript of that work, it is not necessary to believe that he knew the Prologue at all. This could explain why the publisher of his translation, Ole Worm, derived the text of the Prologue from Laurents Hanssøn's translation rather than from a manuscript.