Ebook: Hemings þáttr

"Hemings þáttr" (The Story of Hemingr) was probably written in Iceland in the thirteenth century. The chief manuscripts are Hrokkinskinna (the relevant part of which was written in the sixteenth century), Flateyjarbók (the relevant part of which was written in the second half of the fifteenth century), and Hauksbók (written by the Icelandic Lawman Haukr Erlendsson in the first decade of the fourteenth century). None of these manuscripts contains the whole story. The text in Flateyjarbók has the first part, as far as the end of Hemingr’s testing by King Haraldr (breaking off just before the chapter heading on p. 21), while the text in Hrokkinskinna, which is considerably shortened compared with that in Flateyjarbók, breaks off just before King Haraldr’s expedition to England in 1066 (p. 28). Hauksbók has only the last part of the text, beginning just before the text of Hrokkinskinna breaks off, though the first leaf of the text in Hauksbók is now lost and has to be supplied from a copy made by Ásgeir Jónsson in 1697–8, when parts of the leaf were already illegible.

There is no reason to doubt that the text as reconstructed from these three manuscripts represents more or less the content of the original story, though the central section, based on the Hrokkinskinna text, besides being shortened, has a large lacuna (from 32/9 to 35/11 in the EA edition). This can be filled from a number of copies of the Hrokkinskinna text made in the seventeenth century or later; some late manuscripts also contain additional passages that may have been omitted from Hrokkinskinna or derived from some other source.