Gripla - 20.12.2007, Qupperneq 53

ANTIQUARIANISM, POETRY, AND WORD-OF-MOUTH FAME 51
sciously (Byock 1982:8).8 In fact the writer of Grettis saga is one of the most
openly antiquarian: Þat var háttr í þann tíma, at eldaskálar váru stórir á bœj-
um (38), ‘It was the custom in those days that the fire-halls on farms were
large;’ Þat var þá háttr, at menn vistuðu sik sjálfr til þings (45-46), ‘It was the
custom at that time for people to provide their own meals at the thing;’ Þá var
ekki dæluaustr á hafskipum (55; see also 236), ‘Back then, there were no
pumps on ships.’ Snorri Sturluson is another obvious example of an Icelandic
prose writer with specifically antiquarian concerns, and his compositions de-
monstrate the particular kind of antiquarianism that Icelandic writers tend to
display. His inventory of oral poetic techniques in the prose Edda, for instance
(Snorri Sturluson 1991; Beck 2000:61-71), strongly suggests that Icelandic
writers often assumed that the societies that they depicted in their composi-
tions were more conversant with oral than with written traditions (Cursch-
mann 1984:140-151; Gísli Sigurðsson 2004:32-35, 253, 301), as one also sees
when the sagas typically record such inherently traditional material as genea-
logies and settlement stories. Moreover, much of this traditional material asso-
ciates directly with fame. In both Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar and Grettis
saga, characters explicitly mention that they will construct memorials to the
dead by carving praise-poems onto rune-sticks (Egils saga:245-257; Grettis
saga:203-205; 216-17).9 This retrospective viewpoint, I believe, motivated
writers in Old Norse to see certain means of expression as oral, to try to depict
them that way, and thus to create a precise context for the ideas and ex-
periences of presumably pre-literate characters.10 This context may have simply
been supplied from the saga-writers’ sources, either oral or written, and it may
have been (re)produced without much consciousness about it, but there are
obvious indications of it nevertheless. First, the sagas’ tendency to include
word-of-mouth reactions to events shows that their authors believed, or knew, or
decided to argue that many episodes in these works were ‘oral’ in that they
simply would not exist were it not for the witnesses who could repeat accounts
8 Perhaps saga-writers included nostalgic passages because they were part of the stock-in-trade
of their mode of composition. Byock argues that the typical saga is a ‘rich exploration of
sociohistorical memory . . . a well-developed animation of the past’ (2004:314, 299).
9 The sagas suggest that these poems were orally composed, but they may not have been
circulated orally before being carved.
10 The study of oral traditions now forms a vast and growing discussion. See the book edited by
Mark C. Amodio (2005). For the Norse tradition in particular, see Preben Meulengracht
Sørensen’s Fortælling og ære, where he suggests that the sagas create an illusion of an oral
tradition behind them (1995).