Gripla - 20.12.2006, Side 146

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The architect is constrained by conventions and expectations, but liberated by
counter-balancing functions: to be inventive and instructive. Set ideas about
famous characters will limit creativity, as will traditions of form and style, not
least the saga conceit of exteriority of narrative point of view. Sometimes,
sagas even seem to be truthful in a “syncretic” way, the text apparently intend-
ed as a transparent document of past reality.31 In this sense, the sagas are docu-
ments of reality, the authorial functions chiefly those of recording and pre-
serving historical material, including narratives, laws, genealogies, and poetry.
Thus, while we might say that the first function of saga authorship was to
preserve information of the past, whereby the text has a quasi-legal, even con-
stitutional character, this function was compatible with others with more open-
ly interpretive elements. The settlement, the introduction of Christianity, and
“the Icelanders’ self-identification as the custodians of their own and all
Scandinavia’s traditional history and culture” (Clunies Ross 2000:117) moti-
vated Icelanders to produce a large amount of literature with what appears to
have had “an ordering, authoritative aim, one in which the country is viewed
as an independent entity, a kingdom without a king” (Sørensen 2000:14). His-
torical writing was the means by which Iceland, in its religious and culturally
self-conscious projects of preservation, came to be expressed and incorporated
into useful narratives. Yet preservation coalesced with interpretive and edu-
cative aims — placing Icelandic history in the context of the Christianisation
of Northern Europe, understanding the motivations of complex characters, and
discerning changes in Icelandic society since its formation in the ninth cen-
tury. Such aims often come to the fore during moments of secondary author-
ship.
31 Steblin-Kamenskij writes that ‘whoever reported syncretic truth about the past strove simul-
taneously for accuracy and for reproduction of reality in all its living fullness’ (1993:24). At-
tributing this approach to the past means looking beyond modern distinctions of fiction and
truth. He writes that a ‘literary work is not something in and by itself, but something in which
a certain interpretation is implicit. A work of conscious artistic invention is as a rule intended
to be understood as artistic invention. But the family sagas obviously do not belong among
such works.…Fiction in the sagas is, so to speak, ‘latent’ fiction, fiction which the saga crea-
tors regarded as permissible, remaining within the limits of truth.’(31)