Gripla - 20.12.2006, Page 131

READING FOR SAGA AUTHORSHIP 129
from the socially and historically “real,” rather than the critical pursuit
of distinctive medieval modes for shaping it, literary historians can
have nothing of substance to offer to a cultural criticism that has for the
most part been strangely obtuse about the formal properties and social
dispositions of the medium in which its objects are given to inquiry – a
medium of almost infinite variety before the age of print. (Middleton
1992:27)
So, too, saga authorship need not be viewed as a fixed category but rather
a variable function of the text, one which saga authors do not appear to have
limited to one or other rhetorical mode, be that the objective receptiveness of
a scribe, the persuasiveness of a cleric who collects narratives and comments
on them, or the creativity of an author who has been influenced by exotic lit-
erature (variations with parallels in Minnis’ division in terms of scriptor,
compilator and commentator, and auctor; 1984: esp. 94-95 and 100-01).9 For
example, episodes which involve negotiation and persuasion in Eyrbyggja
saga are narrated with great sophistication, each character, or side of the ex-
change, being given ample opportunity to make himself look good or bad. In
a sense, it is this objective distance which makes the narration of Snorri’s
Helgafell purchase a bitter one for Bƒrkr. The author purports simply to watch
him make a fool of himself in front of Snorri, and the lack of overt narrative
sympathy or antipathy, whereby the exchange seems to create its own moral
discourse, has the effect of mocking Bƒrkr without the author having to cast
him as internally immoral or, perhaps more importantly, having to justify
Snorri’s moral nature. The author maintains a scribe’s position at the side of
the action in order to allow the morality of the incident to be borne by the
events themselves.
The author of Vatnsdæla saga sets himself a different task, certainly in terms
of the rhetoric of the saga. He helps the narrative to reach fully into the mind
of his characters and audience members. Situations are not given the chance to
9 Chaucer’s self-conscious use of a compiler’s voice as a literary mode in The Canterbury Tales
makes a useful comparison here: ‘… for the most part, Chaucer was content to assume the
role of compiler and to exploit the literary form of compilatio. Indeed, so deliberate was he in
presenting himself as a compiler that one is led to suspect the presence of a very self-
conscious author who was concerned to manipulate the conventions of compilatio for his own
literary ends… Chaucer was an author who hid behind the ‘shield and defence’ of the
compiler.’ (Minnis 1984:210) Amongst the range of authorial voices adopted in the family
sagas, one is a analogous to the role Chaucer adopts, in which the saga author presents his
creativity as a collection of pre-existing narratives.