Gripla - 01.01.1975, Page 65

MANIFESTATIONS OF RAGNARS SAGA LOÐBRÓKAR 61
sented as allied with their father rather than opposed to him, a reason
must be found for Ragnarr’s friendship with Eysteinn breaking up.
This cannot be that Eysteinn refused him the hand of his daughter,
however, since the þáttr—and presumably the older Ragnars saga
from which it draws—is clear that Eysteinn was willing to offer her
in marriage. Hence arises the notion of Ragnarr’s plan to leave Kráka
for the seemingly more nobly-bom daughter of Eysteinn, and of the
insult done to Eysteinn and his daughter when he abandons this plan
as a result of finding out Kráka’s trae identity. de Vries also speaks
in this connection of the skill with which the author of Ragnars saga
adapts the Kráka-story to its new environment in Chapters 5 and 6
of the 1824 b text, and raises the question of whether the person
responsible for these various changes, most of which, it may be add-
ed, seem to be common to the 147 and 1824 b texts of the saga,67
was the same person as the one who linked Völsunga saga to Ragn-
ars saga. I hope to give a ‘yes-and-no’ answer to this question in the
remarks with which I shall now conclude the first part of this paper.
The conclusions of this part of the paper must be regarded as
highly tentative, not least because of the poorly preserved state of the
147 text of Ragnars saga.68 This text may be regarded as reflecting a
version of Ragnars saga older than the one reflected in 1824 b, as
Bjarni seems to hint; this version may be called X. The X-version
was linked to Völsunga saga, as we must surely conclude from Ás-
laug’s reference to the meeting of Sigurðr and Brynhildr in connection
with her birth, but not necessarily by means of an introductory chap-
ter about Heimir and Áslaug; at the X-stage of the descent, we may
suggest, Völsunga saga was brought to an end, as it is in 1824 b and
07 See Olsen, 177-82, and the footnotes pointing out the corresponding passages
in the 1824 b text. For the argument outlined in this paragraph, see de Vries
(1915), esp. 193 ff.
68 I am grateful to Dr. Jónas Kristjánsson of Stofnun Árna Magnússonar,
Reykjavík, and to Professor Jonna Louis-Jensen of Det Arnamagnæanske Institut,
Copenhagen, for informing me—the former on the basis of photographs, and the
latter on the basis of an inspection of the manuscript itself, that, in the part which
is primarily relevant to the argument outlined in this paragraph (Olsen, 179, 4r,
see under note 59, above), the 147 text is just as difficult to read now as when
Olsen edited it, if not more so.