Gripla - 01.01.1975, Page 152

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dead (ÍF VI, pp. 45-46) and the seiðr (ÍF VI, p. 56). We should not
know anything about these pagan elements i£ we had only the sam-
tíðarsögur at our disposal.
Are we therefore to conclude that the three íslendingasögur just
mentioned, as well as the íslendingasögur as a group, reflect a delib-
erate attempt to reconstruct these pagan elements? Two possibilities
present themselves: Either (i) that the features listed above, that exist
in the íslendingasögur, but are missing in the samtíðarsögur, are more
or less genuine, and reflect an effort on the parts of the authors to
recreate a past in accordance with their ideas of what it should have
been like, or (ii) that these features were still social realities in the
thirteenth century, yet the authors of the samtíðarsögur wanted to
eliminate them from their texts so as to comply with the claims of the
Church. The second view is hardly tenable since many different writers
composed samtíðarsögur, and the same man may well have written
both an íslendingasaga and a samtíðarsaga, as is probably the case
with Sturla Þórðarson. We are very tempted to conclude that the
truth, the faithful reflection of reality, is rather to be found in the
samtíðarsögur, whereas the íslendingasögur are the works of anti-
quarians, the antiquities in question coming either from the Germanic
past, or even from quite different sources.
Let us now take three different features which seem quite clearly
to come from Europe and owe nothing to Northern or Germanic
ancestry.
The first regards the dansar. Familiar as the term is today, it has
never been studied in detail with the necessary distinctions. The word
itself, of French origin, is capable of expressing at least three separate
concepts which should be carefully distinguished. Dans may apply to:
leikr, spott (or flimtan) and mansöngr. Without giving too many de-
tails—for this is a subject that would deserve a special treatment—
let us say that all three types are present in the samtíðarsögur. In the
first meaning: dans = leikr, it is a kind of play, accompanied by danc-
ing and mimicking which may well have very ancient cultural roots.
The rock engravings of the Bronze Age throughout Scandinavia sug-
gest this at least. Into this group would come vísa 10 in íslendinga
Saga, ch. 33, where the quarrel between Víðidalr people and Mið-
fjörðr inhabitants is thus depicted, and also vísa 6 in the same text,