Kvæðabók sr. Ólafs Jónssonar á Söndum: Greining, samhengi, dreifing - verkefni lokið
Fréttatilkynning verkefnisstjóra
The project “The Songbook of Ólafur Jónsson á Söndum: Analysis, Context, Transmission” aimed to systematically study and analyze the transmission in manuscript sources of the songbook of the Icelandic priest Ólafur Jónsson (ca. 1560-1627), one of the leading poets of the early 17th century in Iceland.
Heiti verkefnis: Kvæðabók sr. Ólafs Jónssonar á Söndum: Greining, samhengi, dreifing
Verkefnisstjóri: Árni Heimir Ingólfsson, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar
Tegund styrks: Verkefnisstyrkur
Styrkár: 2012-2014
Fjárhæð styrks: 18,965 millj. kr. alls
Tilvísunarnúmer Rannís: 120641
His poetic corpus has survived in dozens of manuscripts, including 25 manuscripts of the complete songbook. Furthermore, several manuscripts – 9 of the songbook sources plus many others – contain musical notation to many of his poems, a total of 52 songs.
By collating readings from all the manuscripts containing musical notation, we have been able to show how the interrelation of the sources in a stemma codicum. A systematic search for the songbook melodies in foreign sources has yielded surprisingly few concordances, which suggests that many of the melodies are Jónsson's own, or drawn from local folk songs only written down in this particular context. The project has also studied the geographical distribution of the manuscript sources, finding that the strongest connection with his poetry was in the Western fjords and in Skálholt. Far fewer sources survive from the Eastern fjords, but this is true of manuscripts in general; overall, the geographic distribution is fairly wide.
This project has led to a greatly increased knowledge in a fundamental source of Icelandic music and poetry in the 17th century, as well as a more general knowledge of how music and texts were transmitted. This will have an impact on all further studies of music in 17th century Iceland, whether from a manuscript/philological or cultural viewpoint.
The results of the project have been presented in two day-long conferences (in Þingeyri, 2014, and at the Humanities Conference at the University of Iceland in 2015). A more complete publication, with texts and musical notation to all 52 of the songs contained in the songbook, is in preparation.
