Gripla - 20.12.2007, Blaðsíða 13

THE FANTASTIC ELEMENT
sagas will be discussed that make little or limited use of fantastic elements and
then those where such elements play a significant role.
Looking at the sagas from the fourteenth century we find the same mixture
of modes as in the earlier sagas, but with some important differences: Þórðar
saga hreðu has no fantastic elements to speak of; it tells tales of a great
champion, many of whose victories are unlikely but hardly fantastic. He is a
great and brave fighter and often victorious against odds; and he also has other
qualifications, as a craftsman, but neither he nor his adversaries fall in the
category of the fantastic. The bulk of Finnboga saga is of a similar kind, but
its first part has many folktale elements. His bare-handed fight with a bull,
whose head he rips off, while he is still a youth, and shortly after that the kill-
ing of a bear that seems to understand human language, are definitely fan-
tastic. Typically, such deeds are done in youth while the hero is proving him-
self, while the feuds and conflicts Finnbogi gets involved in as a grown up
farmer in Iceland are more of a kind well known from thirteenth century sagas.
Similarly, Fljótsdæla saga begins with a folktale about how the hero frees his
future wife, an earl’s daughter, from a giant living in a cave – an obvious
folktale motif – but the continuation in Iceland is in no significant way dif-
ferent from older Íslendingasögur and contains no fantastic elements. At the
very end of the text – the end of the saga is missing, if it ever was finished –
there is a scene of a legendary kind where the protagonist breaks images of
heathen gods blaming them for doing him harm, but where the story breaks
off nothing has yet happened that qualifies as a fantastic element.
In Harðar saga the protagonist is an outstanding fighter, but the only
really fantastic accounts of his feats are limited to the introductory section tak-
ing place abroad; he enters a grave, wrestles with a ghost, wins over him and
takes his treasures. However, after inconclusive skirmishes and a life as an
outlaw Hƒrðr’s last defence is heroic and exaggerated: he jumps over a three-
fold circle of men, and when he is beaten a herfjƒtr has fallen on him, that is,
he is paralysed, probably by magic. In the end his great valour cannot save his
life, and this gives the saga a tragic tone. The saga of Hƒrðr’s family with its
many internal conflicts contains material for a great tragic drama, but the
author does not succeed in exploiting its potentialities. It is as if the episodic
folktale-like narrative structure of the saga does not allow the development of
its interesting psychological aspects.
Króka-Refs saga and Víglundar saga differ each in its own way from other
fourteenth century sagas. Víglundar saga is a pure romance about lovers mark-
ed out for each other whose union is opposed with dirty means and black
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