Gripla - 20.12.2007, Page 10

GRIPLA
in supernatural beings, in miracles and in an afterlife. Although all this may
seem trivial or obvious, it may be useful to be reminded of it when taking part
in discussions of the element of the fantastic in literature created many
hundred years ago by people who had widely different beliefs from ours.
In a previous study I have looked at the appearances of revenants in a few
sagas in connection with medieval Icelanders’ ideas about the dead (Vésteinn
Ólason 2003). The examples I discussed demonstrate, I believe, that although
people believed such fantastic phenomena as revenants to be real in a concrete
and physical sense, they feared them or marvelled at them, thinking that they
did not properly belong in their world; they felt that such beings should be
avoided and got rid of, especially if they were becoming aggressive or dis-
turbing. Therefore they were a different category than human beings, be-
longing to the category of the Other, even at that time. It was a different ex-
perience to hear and see your father or your neighbour recite a verse or wander
around while he was alive than doing so when he was dead and buried. Such
occurences can be placed in the realm of the fantastic. The same would apply
to black magic of swift and immediate effect, of shape-changing and certain
kinds of visions. The category is not easy to define, however, and I shall, for
instance, make no attempt to draw a line between the supernatural and the
imaginary.
There are also in narrative literature works that use such exaggeration in
the description of human characters and their actions that they may well be
called fantastic. In that case it is even more difficult to define what is fantastic
and what not. We know that some men are stronger and better fighters than
others, but how great does the difference have to be to put tales about them in
the category of the fantastic? That a hero conquers three of his peers in a fight
is possible and can be made plausible, but what about eleven as Egill Skalla-
grímsson did according to his saga, or several hundreds as may occur in a ro-
mance? Saga heroes sometimes defeat great champions, notorious vikings,
berserks and blámenn, ghosts and giants, and great numbers of them at that;
some of them also wrestle with bears or other fierce animals and kill them
with their bare hands. I shall look upon such motifs as fantastic, although my
feeling is that moderate exaggeration is part and parcel of narrative art and
cannot qualify as a fantastic element; the line goes somewhere between un-
likely and impossible.
Exaggerations may be entertaining and even plausible if stories are well
told, and many in an audience may believe that such stories are true, that
things were indeed of greater dimensions in the past or in places far away, etc.;
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