Gripla - 01.01.1984, Síða 261

SAXO IN ICELAND
257
Some of the changes were doubtless made for aesthetic reasons. The
stories told by Saxo are usually anecdotes or series of anecdotes about
particular heroes. They do not usually contain details about the child-
hood of the heroes, nor necessarily about their deaths. The authors of
the sagas have provided a suitable background and an introduction
about the heroes’ families and their youth. Similarly, the endings of the
sagas have details about the deaths of the heroes and usually about their
descendants. In these they follow normal Icelandic literary conventions.
Saxo has no interest in material of this kind and his stories are seldom
as structured as are the sagas.
The number of sagas derived from Saxo is small, and as several of
them were apparently composed by the same person the number of
authors is even smaller. In addition, some sagas have been lost, and
others exist only in very few copies. The five preserved in Birgeta’s book
and copied by Magnús are not known elsewhere and hardly any of the
many copies that Magnús says he made have survived. On the other
hand, there are some forty manuscripts each of Starkaðar saga and
Ambáles saga, and fourteen of Sagan af Háljdáni Barkarsyni. In addi-
tion, these three sagas were printed, in the case of Ambáles saga in two
cheap Icelandic editions and in a scholarly edition. Ambáles saga also
serves to demonstrate how many manuscripts of the saga were circulat-
ing in Iceland in the late nineteenth century. While Gollancz was pre-
paring his edition he searched diligently for manuscripts of the saga and
rímur, and even advertised, offering to buy manuscripts.20 This was to
no avail and he published what he thought was a complete list of the
surviving manuscripts, but in fact a number of other manuscripts were
in circulation, and even being copied at this time, which later came into
the collections.
Saxo’s Gesta Danorum was deservedly popular in Iceland as it con-
tained material that could supplement Icelandic sources of Scandinavian
history and legend, and also provided new subject-matter similar to that
found in the Fornaldarsögur which could be reshaped in Iceland and
used in order to produce new sagas. Only the literary content of Saxo’s
work was considered important. The last seven books which are con-
cerned with the history of medieval Denmark rather than with legend-
ary history, were apparently of little concern to Icelanders, and even
Gísli Konráðsson did not translate them.
20 Hamlet in Iceland, viii, note.
Gripla VI — 17