Gripla - 20.12.2006, Page 128

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acters of the sagas use to represent themselves and their world and the literary
and historical aims of the saga authors, a link I call secondary authorship and
which I will explain in detail in this essay. We will see that, while there may
be a lack of Old Icelandic works dealing directly with the principles of literary
and historical writing, there are nevertheless clues to be found in the way saga
characters represent themselves and the situations in which they find them-
selves.
Despite the sagas’ sophistication, scholars have tended to classify them
either as highly creative works or as unconscious ethnographies of medieval
Icelandic social norms. Neither approach is satisfactory, as each relies on an
argument for artistic or non-artistic intention that is difficult to reconcile with
the sagas themselves, which tend to manifest a range of aims, from creative to
documentary, didactic to historical. The division between historical and lite-
rary approaches to the sagas has generally been unhelpful. One instance of
this was that both book-prose and free-prose approaches failed to adequately
recognise the fact that sagas are often episodic or by nature compilations, that,
while episodes may have an integrity in terms of their historical outlook and
fictiveness, the narrative voice of a saga as a whole is often more complex.3 In
this respect, saga writers may be viewed as expert weavers of tales, some in-
herited, some no doubt invented with the author’s immediate audience in
mind.4
The book-prose/free-prose divide should be more or less obsolete today,
although recent sociological approaches to the literary aspects of the sagas
have de-emphazised the question of authorship in a rather free-prose way, and
literary anthropology of the sagas, originating with Turner’s essay, has at-
tempted to shift attention back to the sagas’ historicity and credibility as pro-
ducts of thirteenth century cultural norms.5 However, literary scholars may
take some comfort in that Miller’s, Jochens’, Bagge’s, and Byock’s detailed
accounts of early and medieval Iceland help to show that the case against the
sagas’ historical reliability has sometimes missed the point:6 the family sagas
3 On the ‘integrity’ of saga episodes, see Maxwell 1957-1961.
4 See, for example, Clover 1984 and Úlfar Bragason 1986.
5 Credibility in this respect is closely tied to the sagas’ appearance as traditional narratives. See
the recent discussion by Quinn (2000: esp. 32-37); and Gísli Sigurðsson (2000), who dis-
cusses the evolution of the debate about oral tradition and ‘where the oral and written meet in
a written text’ (183).
6 These scholars have been influenced by socio-anthropological approaches to the text. In this
regard, see also Bauman’s 1986 argument about the application to Old Icelandic literature of