Gripla - 20.12.2007, Side 49

1 Part of this article was delivered as a paper at the twenty-fifth annual meeting of the Associa-
tion for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies in Canada at York University in Toronto,
May 2006.
2 Characteristic moments occur when individuals in heroic works engage in self-conscious
dialogues with the past in order to transcend it, that is, in order to mark their own spots in
time. See Waugh 1997a:249, 253.
3 Translations are my own. For discussion of Grettis saga and its readers, see Cook 1984-85.
Although I discuss fame in the sagas of Icelanders primarily, I refer also to Old Icelandic
works outside of this genre, because many of them share fame-values with the family sagas.
A FEW YEARS ago I proposed ‘the characteristic moment’ as a motif in North-
ern heroic literature (Waugh 1997a),2 and I have since found a further aspect
of this motif that I believe adds to its importance: the potential transfer of such
a moment from one character to another. Analysis of this transfer-idea has in
turn suggested a theory concerning the persistence and placement of descrip-
tions of fame by word of mouth in the Icelandic family sagas. These descrip-
tions occur and recur due to strategic attitudes toward oral tradition that the
saga writers betray, as I shall show through analysis of a characteristic mo-
ment in its process of transfer in Njáls saga — a transfer that sparks the career
of a skald — and through analysis of rare episodes from Old Norse com-
positions where conflicts between oral and literate traditions are described
openly.
No doubt, many readers are puzzled by the unrelenting occurrence of pas-
sages, such as the following ones, throughout the Icelandic family sagas and
related Old Norse works:
En er þat fréttisk, at Grettir hafði lagzk viku sjávar, þótti ƒllum frábærr
fræknleikr hans bæði á sjá ok landi. (Grettis saga:241)
‘When it was learned that Grettir had swum a sea-mile, everyone
thought that his prowess was surpassing on both land and sea.’3
ROBIN WAUGH
ANTIQUARIANISM,
POETRY, AND WORD-OF-MOUTH FAME
IN THE ICELANDIC FAMILY SAGAS1
Gripla XVIII (2007): 47–66.