Genesis 1–11 has a different character from the rest of the Genesis narrative: as ‘primeval history’, it is often separated out from the ‘ancestral history’ of Genesis 12–50’. There is good reason for this: the universal perspective of Genesis 1–11 and its closeness to Ancient Near Eastern traditions about the Creation and Flood distinguish it from later chapters, which are more narrowly focused on national and domestic concerns. Its theological significance as a source for the Christian doctrines of creation, human nature and the Fall meant that it was one of the most heavily commentated parts of the Bible: Augustine wrote about the first chapters of Genesis in five of his works, including three of his commentaries. Other authorities who wrote Hexamera on the six days of Creation include Basil the Great, Ambrose, Alcuin, Bede and, in the twelfth century, Abelard. It is hardly surprising, then, that the beginning of Stjórn I is so heavy in commentary that the biblical text can appear to be overshadowed. This is also the case for the beginning of Genesis in the Glossa ordinaria, which may have been one of the compiler’s models.

All of Stjórn I draws heavily on Comestor’s Historia scholastica and Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale, but the first part also makes use of Augustine’s two finished commentaries on Genesis and Isidore’s Etymologiae, which gives it a more encyclopaedic character. It incorporates etymology, natural history and geography, as well as theological discourses on angelology, human nature and sin. There is some evidence that, at an early stage, this part of Stjórn may have been planned around the readings for Septuagesima and Lent: Noah’s Flood, for example, is introduced as ‘annarr partr þessarrar gerðar’ (‘the second part of this work’) and linked to the second Sunday in Septuagesima. This would also explain the inclusion of extracts on the liturgy for Septuagesima from Durandus’s Rationale divinorum officiorum, and the medley of sermons for ‘fyrsta sunnudegi í langa föstu’ (‘the first Sunday of the Lenten fast’). However, if this was the plan, it appears to have been abandoned, as no ‘third part’ is ever marked. This chapter explores how the compilatory character of Genesis 1–11 in Stjórn I works against any single mode of reading: we are presented not only with different ways of interpreting biblical narrative, but with differing versions of events and different styles of writing.