Gripla - 01.01.1975, Page 82

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GRIPLA
Those who wish to point to written sources for the sagas have an
easier task than those who would seek out a genesis based on oral
tradition. ‘I believe in oral tradition’, is sometimes heard, and the
choice of words is obviously revealing. Men of the ‘literary school’
can point to clear cases of similarity of matter and diction with earlier
writings, both native and foreign, whereas their opponents are in
extreme difficulty, since any traces of an oral tradition which may
have existed are now indiscernible from the rest of the written text.3
Some disputants are so heated in their belief in oral sources that
they consider themselves to be in no need of supporting evidence.
They rate it as self-evident that men in earlier times were constantly
retelling the stories of their forefathers, especially before the ‘literary
period’, and regard these versions as forming the main stem of the
written sagas. Others, not quite so heated, attempt to produce indirect
evidence for the existence in oral form of original models for the
sagas. In the contemporary sagas, there are references to public story-
tellings, and the two best known are those quoted by Björn Ólsen: the
wedding at Reykhólar in 1119, and the Þáttr of Þorsteinn the Story-
teller who gave an account of the travels of Haraldr harðráði. In the
íslendingasögur oral accounts are often referred to, and notice is
sometimes taken of the fact that these accounts do not agree, one
with the other (‘Menn segja . . .’; ‘Svá er sagt at . . .’; ‘Sumir segja
. . . en aðrir segja . . .’). In Droplaugarsona Saga a man is also named
as having recounted the whole saga. Events in the íslendingasögur are
often supported by verses attributed to the saga characters themselves.
Scholars in later times have pointed to the views of Árni Magnússon
who maintained that this type of poetry has only been preserved, ‘be-
cause people knew those sagas of which the poems gave short sum-
maries.’4 Sometimes the genealogies of men living in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries are traced back to leading saga figures and some
3 I deliberately avoid using the older terms ‘free prose’ and ‘book prose’. Few
scholars now uphold Heusler’s theory of a form of ‘free prose’, which was handed
down from generation to generation and finally committed to writing ‘mit der
Treue eines Phonographes’. Most scholars now agree that the íslendingasögur are
the works of specific writers and do not adopt any particular ‘Lehre’ or theory, but
attempt to approach the sagas frorn a variety of different view points, just as they
would other forms of literature.
4 Arni Magnússons levned og skrifter II, K0benhavn, 1930, pp. 139-40.