Gripla - 01.01.1990, Page 309

OLD NORSE RELIGION IN THE SAGAS OF ICELANDERS
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arate saga is even more important: both to understand the work itself
and also to achieve a general view of this type of literature as a whole,
and to observe its variations. It would be altogether wide off the mark
to propose sweeping judgments on sagas after considering one of
them; and conversely, as has more often happened, to construct a gen-
eralized attitude to them and then impose it on the most diverse
works.’9
In 1953 Nordal published a chapter in Nordisk Kultur on the Sagas
of Icelanders. Here he divides the sagas into five groups, according to
period of composition. Most of them (12 in all) fall into the second
group, of which he says: ‘It can be assumed that all the sagas in this
group are to a more or less significant degree based on popular tradi-
tion.’w The same is of course even truer of the oldest sagas of all. The
third group of sagas contains only five, including Hrafnkels saga and
Njáls saga,u
I judged it necessary to make these points here about the ‘Icelandic
school’, and particularly about the work of Sigurður Nordal; for he
was the originator of this school, he first blazed the trail, and he it was
who took the main share in those studies that laid the foundations of
the school.
The ‘Icelandic school’ or the ‘Reykjavík school’, as it was sometimes
called, had an influence far beyond the borders of Iceland. Here I
should like to refer to two scholars who were outstanding in the field
about the middle of this century. Dag Strömbáck, in an article on the
Sagas of Icelanders published in 1943, had this to say: ‘To a great ex-
tent they are based on traditions and oral narrative; but their structure
and formation bear the imprint of nameless artists with a proper sense
of the mastery and imagination of their authorship.’12
Ten years later, Gabriel Turville-Petre published Origins of lce-
landic Literature, and he says this among other things about the Sagas
of Icelanders: ‘The researches of recent years seem to suggest that the
family sagas originated under the influence of the Kings’ sagas, just as
the Kings’ sagas originated under the influence of hagiography and of
9 Sigurður Nordal, Hrafnkatla, p. 70.
10 Sigurður Nordal, Sagalitteraturen (Nordisk Kultur VIII:B), Kbh. 1953, p. 249.
II Op. cit., p. 235 ff.; p. 254 ff.
u Dag Strömbáck, ‘Författarskap och tradition i den islandska áttesagan’, Folklore
och Filologi 1970, p. 252.