This digital edition of Hjalmars och Hramers saga has been produced as part of the following project, funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship:

Principal Investigator: Philip Lavender
September 2017–August 2019, Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, University of Gothenburg

The high-stakes game of forgery, from priceless art to counterfeit banknotes, has stimulated public and professional interest for centuries. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scandinavia a number of texts appeared for the first time which subsequently came to be identified as forgeries. The most famous (although still relatively unknown) are Hjalmars och Hramers saga, Krembres saga and Hafgeirs saga Flateyings. Since their appearance very little research has been done on these works: as literary forgeries they have been deemed to have minimal value in the intellectual and literary history of Scandinavia. This project demonstrates, on the contrary, that these texts play a central role in the development of literary and philological studies in the region, as well as having ramifications more generally as regards various key concepts used by researchers: fiction, history, textual unity and, not least, national identity. It does so by showing that they are symptomatic of a paradigm shift, linked to the widespread use of the printing press in popular and intellectual culture and the political ramifications of nascent nation-state formations. Through a pioneering in-depth study of the texts as a group, along with supporting information gleaned from a large amount of relevant peripheral material, the mechanisms by which saga forgeries could be produced and texts could, for the first time in a northern context, even be characterised as forgeries, are laid bare.

The five main texts considered as part of the project are:
Hjalmars saga och Hramers (Sweden)
Krembres saga Gautakonungs og Augis konungs i Uppsala (Sweden)
Hafgeirs saga Flateyings (Denmark)
Þjóstólfs saga hamramma (Denmark)
Þóris þáttr hasts ok Bárðar birtu (Iceland)