Gripla - 20.12.2006, Blaðsíða 143

READING FOR SAGA AUTHORSHIP 141
dom, and secondly, there are discernible character types in the sagas, suggest-
ing that conventions or patterns governed the representation of some events
(for example, the reception of Icelanders abroad). This objection is part of a
larger methodological divide in literary studies between unifying approaches
to literature and readings that concentrate on difference.28 My position is that
the identification of character types is a fair caveat to place on reading for
character and difference in conceptions of authorship, but I would also stress
that although some characters are portrayed in a way consistent with similar
figures in other sagas, the author still has scope to offer his own understanding
of that character. It is these instances of understanding, often expressed through
secondary authorship, that are of most interest here.
A third objection, at the other extreme, is that to look for reflections of
medieval authorship in the way characters represent themselves is to down-
play the authors’ creative abilities, that is, their sophistication in creating
highly differentiated characters who have their own integrity. We must accept
that medieval authors’ creativity, in some instances, restricts our study of au-
thorial connection with characters, and my tendency is to presume a high level
of literary competence. Of course, I am here concerned with just this type of
variation in saga characters’ self-conception, and it is of equal interest when
authors create characters who are portrayed as different to them or when
authors suggest that characters belong to another world or ethical era.
As well as connecting with work by scholars on characterisation, secon-
dary authorship also has the benefit of tying in with readings of the sagas in
terms of the mentalité that is represented in both the act of saga composition
and the worlds which the sagas portray.29 This has been a particularly useful
approach in relation to mythical aspects of the Icelandic literary imagination
(for example, Gurevich; Clunies Ross; Sørensen), and has come to be part of a
broadly accepted philological apparatus which also blends historical linguistics,
28 We might follow Harris’s observation and suggestion that ‘one of the sacred paradoxes of
literature, or at least of narrative literature, is that of multiformity within uniformity, and
properly understood uniformity is not a criticism but a tool of criticism for coming to terms
with conflicting claims of the Many and the One’ (1972: 27).
29 Mentalité describes the existence, or retrospective abstraction, of a common intellect at a
given time; its proponents seek out ‘evidence of collective intellectual purpose’ (Gurevich
1992b:4). That is, ‘a chaotic and heterogeneous stream of perceptions and impressions is
converted by consciousness into a more or less ordered picture of the world which sets its
seal on all human behaviour. The subjective side of the historical process, the manner of
thinking and feeling particular to people of a given social and cultural community, thus
becomes part of the objective process of history’ (8).