Nítíða saga survives insixty-five known manuscripts ranging in date fromthe end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of thetwentieth century, making it arguably one of themost popular of all the late medieval Icelandicromances. Kalinke and Mitchell’s Bibliography of Old Norse–IcelandicRomances provides a list of sixty-fivemanuscript witnesses for this saga, but itstransmission history is more complex than this mightsuggest. While one of the manuscripts in the Bibliography’s list actuallycontains a poetic rímur rather than a prose version of thestory, there is also at least one further manuscriptnot listed, Lbs 3625 4to (1800s, with a number ofleaves missing from the middle), which also oncecontained Nítíða saga.Its table of contents lists Nítíða saga between two other romances,Nikulás saga leikaraand Þjalar-Jóns saga,and a later owner’s hand has added in the marginthat the text is now ‘vantari bókina’ (missing fromthe book). However, as not all manuscripts includelists of their contents, it is very likely that thesaga once also appeared in many more manuscripts,which are now fragmentary or simply lostaltogether.

Moreover, as well as the many witnesses of Nítíða saga in prose, thereare also a significant number of extant rímur manuscripts, which arevery rarely mentioned in scholarship dealing withromances in general, let alone Nítíða saga in particular, and these arejust as important to this story’s transmissionhistory as its prose versions. There are at leasttwenty-four additional manuscript witnesses of verseNítíða rímur cycles,and from these, there exist at least eight differentversions of the story. Combining the known saga andrímur manuscripts,then, there are today at least ninety separatewitnesses of the Nítíða story in verse and prose,spanning approximately five hundred years.Unfortunately, it is impossible to discuss all ofthese, given the scope of the present work and thesheer number of extant texts. In this book I will,therefore, as a whole and in this chapter, continuein the tradition of focusing on the prose sagarather than the rímur,in an attempt to manage such a vast corpus ofmaterial.