Should you order a manuscript to the reading room of one of the several libraries in the world where medieval Icelandic manuscripts are kept, the book will probably look very different from what it once was. Even in the best of cases you will see stiff or fragile parchment, holes, tears, damage from damp, soot and mould, repairs, loose and fragmentary leaves, faded ink, scribbles, and it may have been rebound in a modern binding. Nevertheless, when up close to a manuscript, the reader feels a tangible connection to a time hundreds of years gone by, a time when to own a book – even one with the lowest production value – was the preserve of the few. Whatever its state now, it is immediately apparent from any medieval manuscript that making a codex demanded a substantial quantity of raw material (animal hides, ink and pigments, twine, leather and wood), special tools and labour. The hides needed to be processed into parchment of the correct size, the layout painstakingly prepared, the text laboriously copied, the leaves and quires sewn together and attached to the external binding, which was also custom-made. The page format (sometimes called mise-en-page) varied: the text was arranged in one or two columns, with wide or narrow margins, the hand was spaciously or densely spaced, and the design incorporated paratext such as rubrics, majuscules and decorated initials, even large illuminations. The way a manuscript was designed is no coincidence. Rather, the material features, which are often not rendered in a printed edition, convey meaning no less than the text itself: they indicate where the text fits into the literary polysystem, steer the reader through the book and articulate which aspects are more important than others. When working with a medieval text in a modern edition, it can be easy to forget how differently medieval readers experienced it, but as I will discuss in this chapter, taking material aspects into account in the analysis of any given text can enhance our understanding of its genre, and the literary and historical context from which it emerged.

For many Icelandic medieval manuscripts, very little explicit knowledge exists about where they were originally produced, by whom, for whom, and what the patrons thought about the texts in them.