Icelandic Homily Book

The Old Icelandic Homily Book (Stock. Perg. 4to no. 15), also known as the Stockholm Homily Book, is one of two main collections of Old West Norse sermons; the other being the Old Norwegian Homily Book (AM 619 4to), with which it shares eleven texts. Written in around 1200, and both based on earlier exemplars, together they represent some of the oldest examples of Old West Norse prose.

The Old Icelandic Homily Book (OIHB) contains 62 texts and parts of texts, 50 of which are homilies. For this reason it is better considered a homiletic hand-book rather than a homiliary. Further, the ‘homilies’ it contains, as with most Old Norse homilies, conform more closely to the definition of sermons. The other texts are wide-ranging and include excerpts from Stephanus saga, a translation of part of pseudo-Ambrose’s Acta Sancti Sebastiani, and a fragment of a text dealing with musical theory, amongst others.

Nothing of the history of the OIHB is known for certain until 1682 when it was bought by Jón Eggertsson for the Swedish College of Antiquities. In 1789 it was moved, along with the other manuscripts of the college, to the Royal Library of Sweden.

The manuscript has been variously dated between the end of the 12th century and the middle of the 13th century, but it is now generally accepted that it was written ‘around 1200’. Both the handwriting and orthography confirm that the manuscript was written in Iceland.

The manuscript is written on 102 leaves of parchment, bound in a sealskin cover, which folds over in a flap at the front. Both the front cover and the flap have a number of signs carved into them, most of which can be identified as runes. The back cover has three signs which appear to be in Gothic script.

The text is predominantly in Carolingian minuscule script with insular thorn and wynn, written in brown ink. There are a number of headings in red ink and occasionally the first word of a sermon has been filled in with red ink. There are numerous marginal entries; some contemporary with the manuscript and others dating from the 16th – 19th centuries.

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