Kari Ellen Gade at work

Abstract

Kari Ellen Gade was a founding member of the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages project, an international collaboration which has the goal of editing the entire corpus of medieval Norse-Icelandic skaldic poetry. This essay looks at her editing decisions in the context of previous scholarship for one such poem, the six-stanza Gamanvísur of Haraldur harðráði (c. 1015–1066), a poem that was first published in 1689 with a Latin translation, and which subsequently attracted the attention of such luminaries as Bishop Thomas Percy and Johann Gottried Herder. The first modern translation, also into Latin and by Sveinbjörn Egilsson, appeared in 1831. Kari Gade edited and translated the poem twice in her career. These translations and the textual choices which lie behind them are discussed in the context of the 1831 Latin translation and the Danish translation published in 1912 by Finnur Jónsson in the first volume of his Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning .