The Earliest States of Eastern Europe
DG-2016, 97-110

The Dukedom of Braunschweig-Lüneburg and the Dating of Fagrskinna

H. Janson

The paper deals with the problem of dating of Fagrskinna in the context of
literary production on Iceland in the 12th and 13th centuries and especially of the
sagas about the Norwegian Kings. The dating and the original writing-context
of different sagas and saga compilations are of course of great importance
for analysing not only the source value in relation to the history they describe,
but also for understanding how the texts represent different positions within
the society they were written for. In the following paper a rather recent effort
to re-date the saga compilations Fagrskinna and Heimskringla will be taken into
consideration. Fagrskinna was written around 1225, and since Heimskringla made
use of Fagrskinna, at least in its later parts, it must have been written somewhat
later, suggestively from the middle of the 1220s to the beginning of 1230s.

Keywords:
Kings’ sagas, Fagrskinna, Heimskringla, text criticism
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