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colour to the portrayal of the central character. The point it makes is that
Snorri’s ability to deceive is remarkable.
A significant factor in such issues of authorship and interpretation is the
relative paucity of information from the medieval period dealing directly with
the nature of creative and historical composition. Just as A. J. Minnis took as
his starting point in the discussion of prologues in Medieval Theory of Au-
thorship (1984) the absence of medieval documents directly concerned with
the principles of literature, so too in Old Icelandic studies we are required to
make up for a lack of explicit direction, for the most part taking the sagas’ in-
ternal literary logic and implied ethical norms as the basis of discussions of
authorial aims and likely audience responses. While this brings with it the
dangers of over-interpreting the sagas and of imposing onto them modern, at
times ill-fitting critical concerns, the lack of contextual materials has had its
advantages, particularly in producing a field that was if not comfortable at
least well familiar with authorial absences long before Barthes declared au-
thors to be dead, and a field whose history of close reading meant that it was
in a position to benefit from new critical and structural approaches to literature
more generally (cf. Sverrir Tómasson 2002: esp. 202-03 and Torfi Tulinius
2004:159-165).
Neither are scholars of Old Icelandic new to the fraught nature of attempt-
ing to divide history from fiction, as the family sagas in particular integrate
material held by the author and audience to be truthful with fictive elements
borne out of generic conceits and individual imagination. Naturally, the family
sagas are not post-modern texts, but post-modernism, with its emphasis on the
uncertainty of authorial voice and meaning and textuality, has developed a set
of critical tools that may help us to reassess equally modern assumptions
about divisions of history and fiction, or at least support a less rigid approach
to medieval Icelandic conceptions of the historical.
It is the case that in medieval studies more generally, the boundaries be-
tween literary-critical and historical scholarship have become less distinguish-
able:
Literary scholars must now engage some of the fundamental questions
to which social and cultural historians have led them, while attempting
to understand why the latter have fallen short of providing sufficiently
nuanced answers – questions such as Foucault’s in “What Is an Au-
thor”: “How, under what conditions, and in what forms can something
like a subject appear in the order of discourse?” … As long as inquiry
into specifically literary operations and conflicts is construed as a flight