Gripla - 01.01.1975, Page 137

ANTIPAGAN SENTIMENT IN THE SAGAS
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concentrated on the texts themselves, quoting extensively and ex-
clusively from the sagas and disregarding the polemic literature about
them. For those of us who read and enjoy the sagas as serious fiction
created in Iceland for the most part in the thirteenth century, there is
nothing new or startling either in the quotations or in my comments
about them. For others, however, who may be more intimately ac-
quainted with romantic speculations about the sagas than with the
texts themselves, some of the quotations (and my commentary) may
have been just a bit annoying or disquieting, since they do not always
say what sagas are supposed to say.
There seems, for instance, to be far too much praise of Christians
and deprecation of pagans in these passages. Even if the adoption of
Christianity was such an important event in the history of Iceland,
was it really necessary for so many saga writers to make such a big
thing of it in stories that are, according to romantic doctrine, pre-
dominantly pagan? Even more disquieting questions are raised by the
statement in Sturlunga saga that Sturla Sighvatsson made a pilgrim-
age to Rome to receive absolution for his transgressions and those oj
his father, and by the various requests made by dying pagans that
their Christian conquerors name sons for them. Perhaps the numerous
accounts in saga literature of pilgrimages to Rome and the Holy Land
are more than a casual concession to the Church? And why did so
many writers of pagan sagas find it necessary to condemn so many
pagan practices? And why, if the sagas were written from the pagan
point of view, is the belief in pagan gods so consistently depicted as
baleful or ludicrous or both?
According to romantic saga doctrine the Christian element in the
sagas is slight and superficial, having little or nothing to do with their
essence or substance. If this were so, we should have to regard more
than half of Hallfreðar saga as a superfluous superimposition, and the
haunting dream verses in Gísla saga would have to be eliminated as
late emendations. And Njáls saga would no longer be the mightiest of
the Sagas of Icelanders, for we would have to regard some of the
most memorable and meaningful passages of this monumental repu-
diation of the old way of life as improper intrusions on the heathen
viewpoint that must, according to romantic doctrine, inform the ís-
lendingasögur. Njál’s adoption of Höskuldr, whose father was slain by