Gripla - 20.12.2007, Page 52

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sees doubts concerning the traditional connection between immortality and
fame, as when Þorkell Eyjólfsson in Laxdœla saga fails to complete a church
that he wanted to build as an expression of his glory (Laxdœla saga:217-222).
One sees questioning of the heroic ideal, as when Hallr of Síða disagrees with
his kinsmen over the fame-worthiness of certain accomplishments and de-
clares himself to be lítilmenni, ‘a person of little account’ in Njáls saga (361-
362, 405, 408, 412). One even sees parody of renown and of the fame-tradi-
tion, as when the battle-deeds of Bjƒrn hvíti, a kind of comic foil to Kári
Sƒlmundarson in the same saga, never live up to Bjƒrn’s fulsome boasts (424-
435).6 Although several varieties of fame might appear for purposes of jux-
taposition in a saga, the many examples of simple word-of-mouth praise make
an unexpected counterpoise to the more sophisticated attitudes toward the
fame ideal that the sagas also relate. So, readers might well conclude that there
is a hitherto unrecognised motive for the typical medieval saga-writer to per-
sist in providing so many examples of spontaneous judgements of reputations,
and I wish to propose such a motive.7
One of the reasons that these instances occur and recur is the retrospective
points of view of the sagas. Most of the kings’ and family sagas were written
hundreds of years after the action that they purport to describe. Between the
settlement-period of Icelandic history when the action of most of the family
sagas occurs and the writing of these works, Iceland underwent major social,
political, and cultural changes. It accepted Christianity and contacted many
ideas, artworks, and other cultural materials from Britain and the continent
(Gade 2000:75; Glauser 2000:214-215; Foote 1963:93-99, 116; Clover 1982:
16, 203-204). Therefore, most saga-writers cannot help but take an antiquarian
attitude toward their subject matter, even if they perhaps did not do so con-
6 Although I concentrate here on Njáls saga, the pattern of the development of more complex
attitudes toward fame applies to many Old Norse works, including almost all of the family
sagas, and much study of each ‘stage’ of fame in these remains to be done. For instance, one
might look at skaldic praise-poetry of kings and earls as examples of ritualistic fame. See
Orkneyinga saga:42, 49, 53, 66-69, 204 and Whaley 2001. For more on self-consciousness
with regard to reputation, see Margaret Cormack (1994:188). The most famous example of
this kind of self-consciousness is Roland’s. See Le Chanson de Roland (1980, lines 1013-16).
For parody of fame in one of the sagas, see Waugh 2003, which examines Saint Magnús’s
reputation in Orkneyinga saga.
7 Of course I realize that attributing motives is always speculative and that a variety of motives
could exist. It is certainly possible that saga-writers included these kinds of passages because
they felt they had to, or, on the other hand, unconsciously, with no thoughts about justification
whatsoever.