Gripla - 20.12.2009, Page 175

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(9/6). However, as the poem’s editor, Ian McDougall, has indicated (2007,
866), “there seems to be no scriptural parallel”.
By far the most characteristic way in which Icelandic vernacular authors
use sources, most of which are of foreign origin, is in a free and independ­
ent way, so that their sources are often difficult or impossible to trace. This
suggests that they felt thoroughly at home with the literature that had
come to them from the world outside Iceland and felt little need to
acknowledge it directly in their own compositions. We can see such prac­
tices, though we can never pin down the sources with absolute certainty, in
many works where they are part of the literary whole being created as well
as in works of a more scholarly or religious nature. We see it in sagas, such
as Njáls saga, where likely influences from clerical and chivalric literature
have been studied particularly by Lars Lönnroth (1976, 107–164); we see it
also in works like Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, for which no specific written
sources have been identified.
Another important Icelandic strategy for the appropriation of non­
Scandinavian textuality lies in the various stylistic resources indigenous
authors used to assimilate foreign material. this matter cannot be divorced
from the paratextual observations made earlier about the kinds of texts
that Icelandic translators favoured, nor about their treatment of sources.
We have seen that they favoured historical texts above all, and after that
texts that gave information about the physical world, much of it exotic. On
the whole, Icelandic prose writers favoured a plain, though by no means an
artless style, which we tend to identify as typical of the native saga style
formed on the basis of oral tradition. translated texts or texts closely
indebted to them were also largely turned into the indigenous preferred
style, seemingly as a conscious choice (cf. Lönnroth 1976, 160–164). there
are exceptions, though, which show that Icelandic writers were perfectly
capable of turning their hands to elaborate, rhetorically complex styles or
to abbreviating material substantially; such practices are to be found in
some passages of riddarasögur, some saints’ lives and other prose writing
that ole Widding (1965, 1979) first characterised as den florissante stil, “the
florid style”. Many such florid works date from the fourteenth century.
Elaborate, rhetorically complex styles were traditionally also very much
characteristic of old norse poetry.
MeDIevAL ICeLAnDIC teXtuAL CuLtuRe