Gripla - 20.12.2009, Síða 66

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egy and political manoeuvring in works like L’Histoire du Guillaume le
Maréchal and Froissart’s Chroniques.36 the actual “game of politics” need
not have been fundamentally different; similar conflicts and manoeuvring
can be detected in European vernacular as well as Latin historiography,
although it is less prominent there.
narrative and society
the saga style has been increasingly admired in modern times and has
made a great impact on european literature from the mid­19th century
onwards. There is no doubt about its difference to the style current in
intellectual circles in most of europe in the Middle Ages, but its origin and
development are open to discussion37 and deserve further examination.
Are we dealing with a genuinely popular style, based on oral narrative, or
with some kind of development from Latin prose?
We are certainly not dealing with a culture completely isolated from the
rest of europe, a kind of medieval Galapagos.38 Both Iceland and Norway
had early and regular contact with the rest of Europe, and some of the ear­
liest texts, such as Sæmundr’s lost history of the Norwegian kings and
Oddr Snorrason’s life of Óláfr Tryggvason, were in Latin. The Latin sermo
humilis, as used in the Bible, in saints’ lives and other religious texts,39 is
also a possible model for saga prose. Writing was, after all, introduced
from abroad through the conversion, and it seems likely that imported
texts may have had some influence on what was eventually written down.
Moreover, the classical saga style seems to be a late development,40 which
36 john Gillingham, Richard Coeur de Lion. Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century
(London: The Hambledon Press, 1994), 227–41, with criticism of Georges Duby, Guillaume
le Maréchal ou Le meilleur chevalier du monde (Paris: fayard, 1984); kristel Skorge, Ideals and
values in Jean Froissart’s Chroniques (Doctoral thesis, Bergen, 2006), 68–123.
37 frederic Amory, “Saga Style in some kings’ Sagas, and early Medieval Latin narrative,”
Acta Philologica Scandinavica 32 (1979), 67–86; Þórir óskarsson, „Rhetoric and Style,“ A
Companion to Old Norse­Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. by Rory Mcturk (oxford:
Blackwell, 2005), 354–71.
38 Gunnar karlsson, “Was Iceland the Galapagos of Germanic Political Culture,” here, 77.
39 Auerbach, Literatursprache und Publikum, 25–53.
40 on the development of the saga literature, see most recently theodore M. Andersson,
The Growth of the Medieval Icelandic Sagas (1180–1280) (Ithaca: Cornell university Press,
2006), 1–101.