Gripla - 01.01.1975, Page 70

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GRIPLA
has in some way departed, for conscious or unconscious reasons, from
the version which formed his written source—whether by conscious or
unconscious omission or alteration, or by conscious addition, or by a
combination of all or some of these. It is to the scribal interrelation-
ship of the variant written versions of a saga or story that the Ice-
landic word rittengsl often refers,5 though Mageröy in fact uses the
Norwegian term litterœr skyldskap, meaning ‘literary relationship’.
Mageröy compares with each other the two members of each of a
number of folktale variant pairs, that is, thirty-four pairs of Icelandic
folktale variants, and twenty pairs of Norwegian folktale variants.0 As
far as can be ascertained, the two variants in each pair are recorded
independently of each other from oral tradition. The purpose of the
comparison is to find out, initially, how many words the two variants
in each pair have in common, and then to calculate the percentage of
words in common in relation to the total number of words in each of
6 Special caution must be counselled here. The way Lönnroth, a Swede writing
in English, uses the Icelandic word rittengsl may suggest that it has acquired
something of the status of a technical term. It should be noted, however, that the
word is used in at least two rather different senses. In his Ritunartími íslendinga-
sagna (1965), 92, Einar Ól. Sveinsson writes: ‘Með orðinu rittengsl er átt við, að
söguritari sýni í riti sínu þekkingu á eldra rituðu verki. Vera má, að hann noti hið
fyrra verk vísvitandi, hitt má líka vera, að hann hafi orðið fyrir áhrifum þess án
þess að vita af. Verið getur, að hann hafi það liggjandi á borðinu hjá sér, en líka
getur verið, að hann hafi einhvern tíma áður lesið það eða heyrt það lesið. Enn
fremur er hugsanlegt, að hann hafi skráð inntak þess eða inntak kafla úr því, og
styðjist nú við það inntak, en ekki verkið sjálft. Allra þessara möguleika verður að
gæta, þegar reynt er að ákveða rittengsl.’ Bjarni Guðnason and Lars Lönnroth, on
the other hand, seem to be using the word in some such narrower sense as ‘the
scribal interconnection that exists between two or more works or versions of a
work or passages in those (versions of) works, when each link in the chain of
connection has involved a copyist, redactor or author having the older work or
version before him as he writes.’ It is in this latter sense that I have understood
their use of the word. This is not to say that Einar’s conception of rittengsl is not
a useful one (cf. his Um Njálu, 1933, 100 ff., 153-55); on the contrary, despite
T. Andersson’s strictures (op. cit., 95 ff.) it can be extremely helpful in a context
rather different from the present one, viz. in the study of borrowed elements in a
given saga. I owe this observation to Dr. R. M. Perkins.
6 The Icelandic variants are selected from among those listed by Einar Ólafur
Sveinsson in his Verzeichnis islándischer Márchenvarianten, Folklore Fellows
Communications No. 83 (1929), and the Norwegian ones from those listed by
Reidar Th. Christiansen in his Norske eventyr, Norske folkeminne II (1921).