Andra saga and Andra rimur

Among the lost Icelandic sagas, there is one called Andra saga. A copy was located in the Copenhagen University Library, but it perished with much of the library, located in a church loft, in 1795 in a fire. But the story has survived in the form of ‘rimur’, a form of chanted epic that was a popular entertainment in Iceland from the 15th to the 18th century. Rimur are couched in elaborate skaldic imagery and constrained by strict metrical rules , but from cases where we have both prose and rimur versions of a story, we know that the rimur poet ‘translated’ a written source quite accurately. The bulk of the paper is concerned with reconstructing that story.