Gripla - 20.12.2007, Qupperneq 9

1 Based on a lecture given at the XIIIth International Saga Conference, Durham 6th-12th
August 2006, which had the themes: “The Fantastic in Old Norse / Icelandic Literature” and
“Sagas and the British Isles”. This article can be seen as supplementing my attempt at a
general description of the genre of Íslendingasögur in my book from 1998, as well as an
article of mine from 2007.
MUCH has been written about the concept of the fantastic in literature (Todo-
rov 1970/1975, Hume 1984, Jackson 1986). I shall use the word in a broad
and – for me – conveniently vague sense in this attempt to survey a section of
this field. Fantasy is indeed a necessary precondition for the creation and en-
joyment of fiction, but it is also an intrinsic feature of all historical narrative
and its interpretation. Nevertheless we tend to make a distinction between
narratives characterized by fantasy and those supposed to be a ‘true’ imitation
of the ‘real’ world. Obviously, images created by fantasy bear some relation to
reality, that is to say, to experience, but they exaggerate, reverse and transform
experience to such a degree that it may be hard to recognize for other people
than their creators. However, since the basic conditions of human life and the
workings of the human mind seem to be very deeply rooted in our culture,
fantastic images are similar in different cultures, and within each culture cer-
tain conventions are formed that help people to express their own fantasies and
interpret the ones of others. Thus a certain kind of belief is created, belief in
phenomena that cannot be experienced in the same concrete way as everyday
experiences: belief in ghosts or revenants, giants or magicians, dwarfes and
elves, in the ability of certain parts or aspects of the individual to leave the
body and travel long distances, etc. For the present generation (most of its
academics, anyway) such phenomena are easy to distinguish from our own
experiences because we have not had them and do not believe in them, we
consider them to be creations of the mind, fantasies or fantastic. It is or was
more complicated to identify the fantastic in times when most people believed
VÉSTEINN ÓLASON
THE FANTASTIC ELEMENT IN
FOURTEENTH CENTURY ÍSLENDINGASÖGUR
A SURVEY1
Gripla XVIII (2007): 7–22.