Gripla - 01.01.1975, Page 91

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ÍSLENDINGADRÁPA AND ORAL TRADITION
ally give cause for suspicion if one were to maintain that the poem
was built entirely on the sagas. One would need then to consider the
existence of written material which is now lost, or of different versions
of the sagas we do know, but which are nonetheless no longer extant.
We do in fact know of the existence of at least one saga which has
since been lost about a hero in íslendingadrápa, Gaukr Trandilsson.10
Had Haukr, however, composed the drápa from written sagas in the
late thirteenth century, it still seems unlikely that such a large number
of sagas should have been lost containing the variant elements which
he uses.
It is interesting at this point to look at other poems about early
heroes, despite the fact that they are all much younger than íslend-
ingadrápa. The oldest of this group is the so-called ‘Allra Kappa
Kvæði’, which is to be found in Pergament 4to no. 22, in the Royal
Library in Stockholm, a manuscript from the first half of the sixteenth
century.17 One ‘kappakvæði’ is attributed to Þórður Magnússon who
lived in the sixteenth century, and one to Bjöm Jónsson from Skarðsá,
who died in 1655.18 All these poems differ from íslendingadrápa in
two ways: They do not diverge in the slightest from the written sagas
or rímur, and therefore appear to be based on them. They concen-
trate on the leading figures in the sagas, whereas Haukr very often
restricts himself to what are in fact the secondary characters in the
now extant versions. If, for example, he had used Reykdæla Saga as
a source, he would have assuredly chosen to speak about either Vé-
mundr Kögurr or Víga-Skúta, or both, but not Glúmr Geirason.
Haukr’s choice of subjects explicitly suggests that he was using oral
sources. It also suggests that such oral forms of the stories did not
necessarily incorporate the material of the written sagas and that in
these oral accounts, some of the figures that receive little attention in
the written versions assumed an importance quite comparable to that
of their ‘literary’ counterparts.
10 See Jón Helgason, in Heidersskrift til Gustav Indreb0, Bergen, 1939.
17 Printed in Arkiv for nordisk filologi I, 1882.
18 A discussion of these poems is to be found in Kvteðabók úr Vigur, ed. Jón
Helgason, Kaupmannahöfn, 1955, inlrod. pp. 35-37. Incomplete editions in Arkiv
IV, and Tímarit hins íslenzka bókmenntafjelags VIII, 1887.