September 2025: “The little nation was the author.”

Eiríkur Magnússon was an extremely busy and creative individual, as Eline Elmiger already explained in the fascinating Find of the Month August 2025. In addition to his activities as a translator and editor of Old Norse-Icelandic texts and as an inventive librarian at Cambridge University Library, Eiríkur was also a lecturer in Icelandic at the University of Cambridge from 1893 onwards.

As part of his academic activities, he also gave an evening lecture on Icelandic literature, the manuscript of which is kept in Handritasafn Landsbókasafns in Reykjavík under the shelfmark Lbs 4555 4to. According to the rubric on the dust jacket, which contains the lined, hand-paginated pages of the lecture, written on one side only but heavily corrected, he gave the lecture at Newnham College in Cambridge. Newnham is known to have been one of the first university educational institutions in Cambridge to be open to women, and to this day Newnham College, founded in 1871 under the name Newnham Hall, is an all-women’s college.

The fact that Eiríkur Magnússon gave an evening lecture on Icelandic literature at Newnham College can be traced back to an invitation, as stated at the beginning of Lbs 4555 4to on folio 1r: “Dr Paues has asked me to say something to you tonight relating to Iceland; preferably to the literature of that county; and I have acceded to the request.”

The person who invited Eiríkur was Dr Anna Carolina Paues (26.9.1867-2.9.1945), who studied German and Scandinavian philology at the University of Stockholm from 1886, took her tripos at Newnham College in 1897 and then studied at the University of Heidelberg until 1899. In 1901 she obtained her licentiate at the University of Uppsala, where in 1902 she was one of the first women in Sweden to receive a doctorate in Germanic philology. Anna Paues was a Research Fellow at Newnham College from 1902-1906, before joining the faculty as a Fellow and Lecturer in English from 1906-1927, as well as an examiner for Old and Middle English from 1916-1919 in Leeds and from 1926-1936 also in Cambridge and London. In 1934 she was the first woman to be named professor by the Swedish government. Paues was not only one of the most important English-language Bible scholars, Chaucer philologists and manuscript specialists, but also worked on runology, older and newer pronunciations of English and was in close contact with Swedish women writers of her time.

Considering the extensive expertise that Paues had, it seems irritating at first glance how unspecific Eiríkur Magnússon’s evening lecture appears to be. However, if you take a closer look at the lecture, you can see how far ahead of his time Eiríkur was, especially with regard to the question of authorship. Although his views may also have been guided by his clearly recognisable Icelandic nationalism, it is astonishing that in his lecture he makes statements that are being put forward again today under the influence of current theories of memory studies, as well as those postulated by theories of plural authorship and distributed authorship with regard to the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas:

“One more peculiarity about the Icelandic saga – and I have done. We see writers on Icel. literature frequently wondering at the fact, that the authors of the Sagas never name themselves. I think you will readily understand from what I have said already, that this proceeds from no desire on their part to conceal their authorship. When, at last they were copied down, there was no man living who could honestly lay claim to the distinction. He who wrote the saga down was a copyist, even if he copied it down from his own memory, for he had learnt it from someone else. On the same ground no one who from memory dictated it to a scribe could lay claim to the authorship of it. This is the reason of the sagas’ anonymity.

The little nation was the author.” (Lbs 4555 4to, fol. 24r)

The lecture manuscript Lbs 4555 4to with Eiríkur Magnússon’s argument for the anonymity of Icelandic saga literature can show that we are experiencing an echo of these theses today. We should investigate this resonating, the networks resulting from the overlapping of the afterglow and the wavelike movements that emerge in the history of scholarship in greater depth. The mention of Dr Anna Carolina Paues in this manuscript may also provide an opportunity to finally take a closer look at female scholars in our discipline, whose research has far too often been suppressed and forgotten.