Gripla - 20.12.2006, Blaðsíða 145

READING FOR SAGA AUTHORSHIP 143
recovery through poetic composing from the death of his son. Whatever medi-
eval audiences might have thought of the plausibility of the incident, the Sona-
torrek is consistent with both Egill’s earlier characterisation and the saga as a
whole, a biography of an egoist who can drink from the cup of Óðinn and
fight like the greatest of Vikings. This blend of mythic and heroic narratives
makes Egill’s response to his son’s death a credible one, even if no-one in
medieval Iceland had ever seen a large, ugly, and violent fellow like Egill
commemorate the death of a son in verse.
Saga authorship and the medieval reception of saga narratives are highly
accommodating – the saga form permits a wide range of material and modes
of narration to be included. Saga authors deploy a mix of narrative voices in
order to produce a literature that is sophisticated in its conception of historical
figures but which is also sensitive to a social need to preserve and perform
traditional modes of narration. The idea of secondary authorship supports a
complex conception of saga authorship by linking the variety in characters’ re-
presentations to saga authors’ aims: Saga authorship is multi-functional, these
functions sometimes seemingly at odds.
Partly concealed by the sagas’ narrative objectivity, an ‘argument’ about
the function of authorship can nevertheless be identified, as we saw above in
Gísla saga Súrssonar and Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar. The argument, a
tension between the authorial functions of preserving and interpreting poems,
is less self-consciously incorporated in this writing than in other literatures,30
but as I noted before it is evident enough for many scholars to have argued that
the free-prose/book-prose debate is simplistic. For example, in a series of in-
fluential articles and a major treatment of Brennu-Njáls saga, Lars Lönnroth
showed that, in the hands of a skilled saga author, it was possible to adapt oral
traditions to serve as allegory and even political rhetoric.
Tradition and the demands of the public largely determine what should
be in the house, and certain sections leave very little room for innova-
tion. Other sections, however, and the overall design are left to the archi-
tect, even though he may often have to compromise his basic vision to
make room for all the things which are felt to ‘belong’. (Lönnroth
1976:39)
30 See Andersson’s position in Icelandic Family Saga, in which he writes that ‘the saga comes
very close to pure narrative without ulterior motive of any kind, much closer, for example,
than the modern practitioners of objectivity, whose work is, after all, socially and philo-
sophically loaded’ (1967:32). Compare more recent scholarship by Andersson (for example,
1989: esp. 40, and 1994).