St. Anna i islandsk senmiddelalder

Abstract

St. Anne, mother of St. Mary the Blessed Virgin, had become a central figure in late mediaeval hagiography and devotion, and she seems to have been especially popular in Germany. From here her cult spread to Scandinavia, where several groups of the Madonna, Child, and St. Anne have survived the Reformation, as has the one from Holt in Iceland (now in the National Museum of Iceland) which was probably made in Liibeck. From Germany came also the printed sources of the saga of St. Anne in Holm 3 fol., the big collection of Saints' Lives, and it was recently distovered that the main source, the almost unique St. Annen Biichlein in Low German (Braunschweig 1507) was also the only source of a saga of St. Anne in AM 82,8° (on paper, 17th cent). This version had erronously been described as a Maríu saga, but is in fact a parallel to the fragmentary text in AM 238 fol III that can now be supplemented, so that it is possible to gain an almost complete idea of the composition and contents of this older, Icelandic saga of St. Anne (from c. 1500). A summary of the version in AM 82 concludes the paper.