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tion.35 As Marianne E. Kalinke and torfi tulinius have noted, the generic
instability of late medieval sagas, i.e. fornaldarsögur, riddarasögur and late
Íslendingasögur such as Víglundar saga, entails that motifs and narrative
structures are found across traditional genre boundaries.36 For example,
female characters with maiden-king and/or shield-maiden type attributes
appear in Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar, Sigurðar saga þǫgla and Mágus saga,
while encounters with trolls in Grettis saga resemble those in Þorsteins
saga and others.37 Bridal-quests – a prominent narrative paradigm in late
medieval sagas – form the underlying narrative structures in several texts
(or episodes). Moreover, Flóvents saga is overtly religious in tone: its
main characters frequently pause to pray and ask God to bless them, and
the narrator regularly interjects moralising comments. this is a jarring
rhetoric when regarded against the usual style of riddarasögur, but perhaps
less so for an audience that would likely also have consumed the legendar-
ies of Reykjahólabók, some of which follow a bridal-quest paradigm, and
heard saints’ lives and didactic exempla in church.38 thus, although sagas
traditionally ascribed to differing literary genres were often separated in
35 for example, there are similarities between AM 152 fol. and AM 556 a–b 4to (Eggertsbók)
also likely produced in northwest Iceland: both preserve Grettis saga, Þorsteins saga
Víkingssonar and Mágus saga among others. For detailed discussion about Eggertsbók, see
Lethbridge, ‘the Place of Þorsteins saga,’ 375–403; Lethbridge, ‘Authors and Anonymity,’
343–364.
36 See e.g. Marianne E. Kalinke, ‘textual Instability, generic Hybridity, and the Development
of some Fornaldarsögur,’ in Lassen et al., eds., The Legendary Sagas, 201–227; Bridal-Quest
Romance in Medieval Iceland, Islandica, vol. 46 (Ithaca: Cornell university Press, 1990);
‘Víglundar saga: An Icelandic Bridal-Quest romance,’ Skáldskaparmál 3 (1994): 119–43;
Reykjahólabók, ch. 7. see also torfi H. tulinius, ‘kynjasögur úr fortíð og framandi löndum,’
in Íslensk bókmenntasaga, vol.2, ed. Vésteinn Ólason (reykjavík: Mál og menning, 2006),
167–168 and 218–244.
37 For discussion about the maiden-king figure, see jóhanna katrín Friðriksdóttir, ‘From
Heroic Legend to ‘Medieval Screwball Comedy’? the Development and Interpretation of
the meykongr Motif,’ in Lassen et al., eds., The Legendary Sagas, 229–49.
38 Marianne E. Kalinke, ‘Marital Consent in the Legend of Henry and Cunegund,’ in Sanctity
in the North. Saints, Lives, and Cults in Medieval Scandinavia, ed. thomas A. DuBois
(toronto: university of toronto Press, 2008), 310. Mírmanns saga, a riddarasaga with
hagiographical features, and Clári saga, essentially an exemplum, furnish good examples of
the generic crossovers between romance and Christian material; for discussion, see Sverrir
tómasson, ‘Mírmanns saga: the first old norse-Icelandic Hagiographical romance?,’
in Romance and Love in Late Medieval and Early Modern Iceland. Essays in Honor of
Marianne Kalinke, Islandica, vol. 54, ed. Kirsten Wolf and Johanna Denzin (Ithaca: Cornell
university Library, 2008), 319–335.