Gripla

						JÓN HNEFILL AÐALSTEINSSON

OLD NORSE RELIGION

IN THE SAGAS OF ICELANDERS1

The sagas of Icelanders as sources of Norse religious belief are ob-

scure and difficult to handle. So to begin with I shall run through some

main themes of the research carried out these last decades, and refer

to leading experts on the origin and nature of Icelandic saga-writing.

It is some fifty years since Sigurður Nordal wrote the introduction to

his edition of Egils saga in the series íslenzk fornrit. This introduction

set the standard for this admirable series of texts, and many of the

chief ideas characteristic of the so-called 'Icelandic school' have been

published there. In his introduction, Nordal reviewed (among other

things) the differing opinions held by older scholars on the part au-

thors took in the composition of sagas, and he added: 'It is generally

recognised that most of the material in all the older sagas comes from

oral accounts, yet many sagas clearly show that they were first formed

as a whole by their authors, not to mention those sagas that are entire-

ly or mostly fictitious.'2

Nordal next attacked the doctrine that the Sagas of Icelanders for

the most part reflect a fully-formed oral tradition, saying: '. . . my

own conclusion, after considering separate sagas and the development

of saga-writing in general, is briefly this; that no saga now before us

was written down in the form in which it was told. This is plainly true

of the Kings' Sagas, where in some passages we can follow the devel-

opment of the written text step by step. But the same rule applies to

the Sagas of Icelanders, though in a different way. They too are the

product of saga-writers, authors who have worked over the material

and set their own stamp on the narrative'.3

Nordal has this to say about the development of saga-writing in Ice-

A paper read at the University of Oxford November 18th 1985.

Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar (ÍF II, 1933), introduction, p. lix.

3 Op. cit., p. lx.