Gripla - 01.01.1975, Page 81

ÍSLENDINGADRÁPA AND ORAL TRADITION 77
their roots lie in oral tradition, in the stories that were told of the
saga heroes. This can be seen both in the material of the sagas and in
their diction and narrative construction, all of which bear a strong
similarity to a style of oral delivery. There must have been a great
many unwritten stories in circulation in Iceland in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, and there were “sagnamenn” (experienced story tel-
lers) who took it upon themselves to entertain others with stories, as
for example the man who related the journeyings of Haraldr harðráði
and other stories at Haraldr’s court, and the priest Ingimundr Einars-
son, who together with Hrólfr af Skálmarnesi provided entertainment
with fornaldarsögur at the feast at Reykhólar in 1119.’1
Although Björn is eager to assert the importance of an oral tradi-
tion, he nonetheless recognizes that the written saga is specifically the
author’s own work. Here I quote: ‘The more fully we come to under-
stand our sagas, the further we take ourselves into them, and the
more carefully we investigate them, the more we come to recognize
the fact that they are creative works, and that it was an artist who
held the pen’; and he goes on to say, ‘sometimes there are also written
sources existing behind the sagas.’2
It may be said that Björn’s successors, the representatives of the
‘Icelandic School’ have continued along the same path, dividing re-
sponsibility for the íslendingasögur between the ‘tellers of tales’ and
the writers, those who finally committed the sagas to parchment. But
there are those who are not prepared to content themselves with this
uncertain division of labour. Some maintain that the sagas were tran-
scribed directly from an oral rendering, possibly taken unaltered from
the lips of the narrator, whereas others postulate pure deskwork which
made use of literary motifs and exemplar without any reference to an
original traditional story. Even the verses in the sagas are then to be
looked upon as the writer’s own falsifications, put together so as to
lend the saga an apparent authenticity, almost certainly in imitation of
the konungasögur where the verses are of genuine historical value.
There is a certain irony in the fact that Björn M. Ólsen, the great
disciple of the oral tradition, should actually find himself stimulating
extreme disbelievers by initiating this train of thought.
1 Um íslendingasögur, Safn til sögu íslands VI, 3, Reykjavík, 1937-39, p. 9.
2 Ibid, p. 11.