Gripla - 20.12.2005, Page 13

STYLISTICS AND SOURCES OF THE POSTOLA SÖGUR 11
style’ of the family sagas, especially in terms of the weight the narratives give
to dialogue and direct reporting of action.6
Most saga studies that attempt to bridge the gap between native story-
telling sentiments and motifs and ‘learned’ hagiographical and/or historio-
graphical texts tend to go no further than to find in the Icelandic sagas motifs
derived from popular hagiographical legends, rather than to try to show how
sagas of Icelanders and saints possibly shared certain rhetorical schemes. Un-
fortunately it is precisely the rhetoric of hagiography that has contributed to
the longstanding and still prevalent scholarly attitude that translated foreign
literature existed in a separate realm than the literary genius that gave the world
the Icelandic family sagas: that is, that the sparse, dramatic, and masterful Ís-
lendingasögur could scarcely have had anything to do with the sensa-
tionalistic, rhetoric-drenched hagiographical narratives that have often been
considered by scholars as ‘less-than-literary’ or as ‘machine-turned’ monastic
by-products.7 Latter-day statements made concerning the postola sögur tend at
times to reinforce stereotypes, even when prompting further detailed or
comparative studies: their sensationalistic qualities align them more with the
fornaldarsögur and foreign romances, sharing with the other two genres their
6 Further work on the sources of Iceland’s medieval hagiographical literature has been
published in the ‘Handlist’ 1963 and Kirby 1980. These latter works are essential for anyone
doing work on Icelandic ecclesiastical literature, although their information on sources has
been expanded and in some cases revised by the findings of Collings 1969 and Roughton
2002; see the section on Sources below.
The present author’s doctoral thesis (Roughton 2002), provides detailed study of the sources
and literary and linguistic characteristics of the lives in the two manuscripts, in comparison
with their Latin counterparts, seeking to show adaptations made by Icelandic translators to
their sources and to establish a firmer basis for the comparative study of the genres of
hagiography and family saga in medieval Iceland. This thesis also provides English
translations of all of the lives in the two manuscripts.
An additional detailed study of early Icelandic religious literature, including several of the
postola sögur in AM 645 4to, is to be found in Steinunn Le Breton-Filippusdóttir 1997.
7 See Collings 1969:139. The Icelandic scholar Stefán Einarsson is particulary critical of the
literary merits of saints’ lives; in a reference to the creative talent of Snorri Sturluson in his
book Icelandic Literature: An Introduction, he writes: ‘[...] in Snorri’s study in Borgarfjör›ur
the gullibility and the hagiographic invention of the fiingeyrar monks were replaced by
skepticism and aristocratic dignity, and true poetical creativeness’ (1957:138).
For a discussion of earlier scholarly misconceptions regarding the earliest translated hagio-
graphical literature in Iceland, among them the assumption made by Marius Nygaard that the
earliest Icelandic saints’ lives were written in a learned or „florid style“ (with rhetorical de-
vices matching those of Latin models), see Jónas Kristjánsson 1981 and 1985 and Collings
1969:139-148.