M. J. Driscoll

Research interests | Academic qualifications | Publications | Conferences and workshops | Other interests

I am Emeritus Professor of Old Norse Philology (norrøn filologi) at the University of Copenhagen, where I have worked since 1995. From September 2016 to August 2017 I was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Ulster University, attached to the Irish and Celtic Studies Research Institute at Magee College in Derry, and from October 2011 to April 2012 Professeur invité at Université de Caen Normandie, associated principally with the Pôle Document numérique at the Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines.

Research interests:

My research interests include manuscript and textual studies, particularly in the area of late pre-modern Icelandic. But where traditional textual criticism sought to establish on the basis of the surviving manuscripts of a given work the text closest to the original, I prefer to see each manuscript not as a flawed representation of a putative Urtext but rather as a text in its own right, just as worthy of study as any other. I believe furthermore that no text can be dissociated from its physical embodiment, and that one must therefore always look at the whole book — including features such as format, layout, script, decoration and binding, as well as the surrounding texts — and the material processes through which it was produced and consumed. By shifting focus from the origins of literary works to their materiality — their existence as artefacts, shaped and reshaped by human hands — I believe we can achieve a better understanding of the structure and mechanisms of the production, dissemination and reception of not just the chirographically transmitted Icelandic material with which I have chiefly worked, but of texts of any kind, from any place or period.

Specific projects in which I have been involved include the following:

From 2011 to 2015 I was head of the research project Stories for all time: The Icelandic Fornaldarsagas, funded by the Velux Foundation, the aim of which was to survey the entire transmission history of the Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda. The project’s chief deliverable was an electronic catalogue of all the manuscripts in which Fornaldarsaga texts are found, along with a fully searchable bibliography of editions, translations and secondary material (available here). A volume of essays emanating from the project, The legendary legacy, appeared in 2018.

The Book of books project, which ran from 2020 to 2024, had as its focus the Libro de los epítomes, a collection of summaries of around 2000 books from the library of Hernando Colón (1488-1539), son of the navigator Christopher Columbus. Long thought to be missing, the Libro was in 2019 identified among the manuscripts in the Arnamagnæan Collection. Principal funding for the project was provided by the Carlsberg Foundation and a private donor. For more information, see the project’s website.

In 2023 my colleague Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh of the University of Edinburgh and I recieved funding from the Edinburgh–Copenhagen strategic partnership seed fund to continue our research into the Danish-Icelandic scholar and antiquary Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin (1752–1829). Our project, entitled Grímur Thorkelin and the septentrionalist republic of letters, seeks to reassess Thorkelin’s work within the context of late 18th-century interest in things Northern.

I have had, in addition, a long-standing involvement in the work of the Text Encoding Initiative. I served on the TEI Council from 2001 until 2010, during which time I acted as chair of the Task Force on Manuscript Description (2003-5), whose job was the definition of a module for the description of text-bearing artefacts, and of the Personography working group (2006-7), which was charged with defining special purpose elements for the markup of biographical and prosopographical data. The work of both these groups was subsequently integrated into the TEI Guidelines, TEI P5.

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Academic qualifications:

I hold degrees from the University of Stirling (BA (Hons.) 1979), Háskóli Íslands (Cand.mag. 1988) and Oxford University (DPhil 1994).

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Publications:

My publications include articles on various aspects of pre-modern Icelandic literature, editions and translations of a number of medieval and post-medieval Icelandic works, including Sigurðar saga þỏgla (Reykjavík, 1992), Ágrip af Nóregskonungasǫgum (London, 1995, 2nd ed. 2008) and Fjórar sögur frá hendi Jóns Oddssonar Hjaltalín (Reykjavík, 2006), as well as the monograph The unwashed children of Eve: The production, dissemination and reception of popular literature in post-Reformation Iceland (Enfield Lock, 1997). Among my recent publications is a volume of essays I edited with Nioclás Mac Cathmhaoil of Ulster University entitled Hidden harmonies: Manuscript and print on the North Atlantic fringe, 1500-1900, which was published in 2021 in the series Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana. The essays explore post-print manuscript traditions in Ireland, Gaelic-speaking Scotland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands. In May of 2024, in connection with my 70th birthday, a collection of my articles entitled Scripta minora: Selected essays on Icelandic manuscripts and texts, edited by Anne Mette Hansen, René Hernández Vera and Kıvılcım Yavuz, was published by Museum Tusculanum Press.

For a complete list of publications, click here.

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Conferences and workshops:

Pre-Covid, I got around a fair bit, and have given lectures and organised or participated in workshops and summer schools in some 25 countries, principally in Europe, but also places further afield. The lectures and conference papers have generally been on topics relating to Icelandic manuscripts, while the workshops have mostly dealt with various aspects of text encoding and manuscript cataloguing.

For a complete list of invited lectures and conference papers, click here.

I have for years been involved in the organisation of the conference The care and conservation of manuscripts, held every two years here in Copenhagen, and have edited the last nine volumes of the conference’s proceedings, published by Museum Tusculanum Press.

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Last update: 2025-01-07