Gripla - 01.01.1990, Side 310

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GRIPLA
other learned writing. This suggests that the family sagas were based
on sources of many different kinds, on written records and geneal-
ogies, on the Landnámabók, works of Ari and other historical litera-
ture such as that discussed in earlier chapters of this book. It is widely
agreed that the authors also used oral records, preserved both in prose
and in verse.’13
On the part played by authors in the writing of sagas, Turville-Petre
has this to say: ‘Every family saga, if studied in detail, seems to bear
the individual stamp of an author; it shows something of the author’s
personal interests and of his artistic taste.’14
Much has been written on the Sagas of Icelanders in the last three
decades, and many theories have been put forward. In a recent gener-
al survey, Jónas Kristjánsson gives an appraisal of these investigations,
and he says: ‘Instead of regarding the Sagas of Icelanders as records of
ancient Iceland, people have increasingly come to look on them as re-
flecting the environment of the authors, the Icelandic community in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Some, on the other hand,
would regard them as the true-born offspring of medieval European
culture, would even suppose them written to convey definite Christian
ideas and a moral message. And finally there come literary historians
and critics whose one idea is to assess the sagas in terms of literary art,
with some attention to cultural trends at the time of writing.’15
Following up the words just quoted, Jónas Kristjánsson gives his
own estimate of the matter in hand:
There is something to be said for all of these views. But those
who look at the sagas blinkered by any of these aspects are on
the wrong track, no less than the others who hold a blind faith in
the truth of the sagas. The authors were not acting as independ-
ent moralists or artists. They were always tied by the leg to the
purpose of the stories and to their sources: oral traditions, verses
and poems, and older works.’16
The extracts I have quoted from criticism of the sagas in the last fifty
years, together with references to some leading scholars of the time,
13 G. Turville-Petre, Origins of Icelandic Literature, Oxford 1953, p. 231.
14 Op. cit., p. 233.
15 Jónas Kristjánsson, ‘íslendingasögur’, Rvík 1978, pp. 272-3.
16 Op. cit., p. 273.