Gripla - 01.01.1975, Qupperneq 60

56
GRIPLA
Ragnarssona þáttr, while it does not mention the name Kráka, knows
of Áslaug, ‘er svm/r kalla Randalin, dottor Sigvrðar Fafnis bana ok
Brynilldar Bvdla dottor’.48 This need not mean, of course—in spite
of what A. Edzardi49 and Mundt50 seem to think—that the compiler
of Ragnarssona þáttr knew of a linking of Völsunga saga with Ragn-
ars saga; it only shows that he knew of the idea that Ragnarr became
the son-in-law, through marrying Áslaug, of Sigurðr Fáfnisbani, and
since he refers to a Ragnars saga in the þáttr, as we have seen,51 it is
possible that his source for this notion may have been that Ragnars
saga. More immediately relevant to Bjarni’s views on the relationship
of Ragnars saga to Völsunga saga, however, is de Vries’s doctoral
thesis on the Faroese ballads, published in 1915. de Vries devotes a
special section of his long chapter on the Faroese Ragnars táttur, or
ballad of Ragnarr, to a discussion of the relationship between Völs-
unga saga and Ragnars saga, and reaches conclusions quite different
from those of Bjarni.52 His starting-point is the view expressed by
Mogk in his literary history of 1904 that Völsunga saga was in all
Zeitsclirift fiir deutsche Philologie, LIII (1928), 257-302; see pp. 293-94. See also
p. 167 of Jan . . . de Vries, Studien over Fœrösche balladen (1915).
48 See Hauksbók, 459.
49 See Edzardi, XLIII-IV.
50 See Mundt, p. 123. de Vries (1928), 284-90, argues convincingly that the
genealogical linking of the family of Ragnarr with that of Sigurðr could well have
pre-dated the linking of Völsunga saga with Ragnars saga, and was assisted (a) by
the fact that Ragnarr, like Sigurðr, was regarded as a serpent-slayer, and (b) by the
name of Ragnarr’s son by Áslaug, Sigurðr ormr-í-auga. The similarity of Ragnarr’s
death in the serpent-pit to that of Gunnarr in chapter 39 of Völsunga saga, and the
presence of the motif of the jealous huntsman in Roger of Wendover’s version of
the Loðbrók-legend and in chapter I of Völsunga saga, are probably also to be
explained in terms of early interaction between legends about Ragnarr loðbrók
and legends about the Gjúkungar and Völsungar, rather than in terms of one
written work influencing another. On the former point, see Jan de Vries, ‘Die
historischen Grundlagen der Ragnarssaga Loðbrókar’, in Arkiv för nordisk filo-
logi, XXXIX (1923), 244-74, p.252; on the latter, see Grant Loomis, ‘The Growth
of the Saint Edmund Legend’, in Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and
Literature, XIV (1932), 83-113, pp. 92 ff, and Grant Loomis, ‘Saint Edmund and
the Lodbrok (Lothbroc) legend’, ibid. XV (1933), 1-23, pp. 1-6.
51 See p. 46 above.
62 See de Vries (1915), 188-206.