Gripla - 01.01.1975, Page 169

PAGANISM AND LITERATURE
165
Iceland, newly discovered and inhabited as it was, lacked very old
traditions and that it had to create its own history. As time goes by,
this mental habit or mentality grows and gathers force.
This is quite visible in the samtíðarsögur and could provide an ex-
planation of the evolution which gave birth to the íslendingasögur
proper. As I have suggested twice before, it is very interesting to see
that the text in Sturlunga which is the richest in survivals is also the
most recent of the collection, Geirmundar Þáttr Heljarskinns, prob-
ably written about 1300, to serve as a sort of introduction for the
whole series of sagas. In its six pages—it is a very short text—this
þáttr gives information (and in most cases, these details appear no-
where else) about the conditions of slaves, the scald Bragi, ways of
living typical of Vikings (herfang, skotpenningr, jriðland), a man who
was a great blótmaðr, another who was hamrammr, not to mention
the rowan-tree episode. More important, it is the only text where the
anger of the pagan gods is illustrated (and it is worth saying that this
point finds an exact parallel in Landnámabók). Now, such obvious
mistakes as the detail about the parity between gold and silver being
1 to 10 (instead of 1 to 8 as it must have been in the Viking Age)
show that the author has tried to reconstitute an image of the past,
probably using lost texts such as Hróks Saga Svarta and oral tradi-
tions associated with Skarð. Here, it seems quite clear that Þórðr
Narfason, if he is the author of this text, has endeavoured to recreate
a society and an atmosphere as he imagined that they should have
been. He is projecting onto a rather loose historical frame his read-
ings, his actual experiences or fancies.
And this is the final observation I should like to make. Through
their readings, either directly, or through the intermediary of the
Church, the authors of samtíðarsögur initiate in their works a process
of re-creation of the past. This movement reaches its high point in
the íslendingasögur and then enters an irreversible movement of de-
valuation and decay with the fornaldarsögur. It is remarking that the
more we follow this progression: samtíðarsögur—íslendingasögur—
jornaldarsögur, the greater is the pagan revival, the more numerous
are the so-called pagan survivals. A lover of Northern antiquities has,
on the whole, rather little to learn from íslendinga Saga, a deal more
from Eyrbyggja Saga or Fóstbrœðra Saga, and a great deal from let