Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1994, Page 122

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Marianne Kalinke
will concur that the work is but a “pale imitation of the stirring thirteenth-century
Islendingasögur (Schach, p. 417).
If Víglundar saga is “pure fiction” — and this can hardly be disputed — then
it was composed by an author who wittingly set about contriving his literary
construct. Consequently, one asks what kind of a text the author intended to
produce, and, in the spirit of Paul Schach, whether he meant to imitate the
thirteenth-century íslendingasögur. Ifhe did, then Víglundar saga is a failure. But
what if the author did not wish to follow the model of the íslendinga sögur, but
instead chose as his paradigm a quite different genre, on which he nevertheless
bestowed the temporal and geographical backdrop of the íslendinga söguri In such
a case, to speak of the degeneration of genre is quite inappropriate.
The thesis proposed here is that Víglundar saga is a bridal-quest romance rather
than an Islendinga saga;5 it is a narrative in which the plot is generated and
governed by the hero’s explicit and implicit quest for a wife. In Víglundar saga,
bridal-quest romance underwent such thorough acculturation, however, as to
mimic some of the characteristic features of the íslendinga sögur, both in matter,
primarily in the conflict section, and in form, mainly through the inclusion of
occasional stanzas. For this reason, modern readers have been misled into
considering the work an Islendinga saga gone awry, and therefore they have
rejected the saga as decadent. The argument to be pursued here is related to, yet
somewhat different and more extended than that developed by Torfi H. Tulinius
in his article “Landafræði og flokkun fornsagna.”6 He remarked on the unique
position of Víglundar saga among the Islendinga sögur by virtue of its narrative
pattern, which mimics that of romance (p. 154), and he proposed to investigate
what happens to romance when it is set in Iceland (p. 143). In the following,
similar concerns are taken up, but, unlike Tulinius, an attempt will be made to
present Víglundar saga in the context of bridal-quest narratives.
Analysis of Víglundar saga reveals that the author was literarily well-informed.
He knew his íslendinga sögur and he knew the Icelandic romances, imported as
well as indigenous — among the latter I include some fomaldarsögur. The author’s
acquaintance with romance is indisputable, and the saga’s sources and analogues
have been repeatedly noted.7 Nonetheless, despite a farreaching exploitation of
5 Indeed, Víglundar saga should have been included in the corpus of romances considered in tny
monograph Bridal-Quest Romance in Medieval Iceland, Islandica, XLVI (Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1990).
6 SkáldskaparmáL, 1 (1990), 142-56.
7 For example, Jónas Kristjánsson comments on “the palpable influence of other kinds ofyounger
literature, fomaldarsögur, riddarasögur and íslendinga sögur. The most obviously influential of
all was Friöþjófs saga, from which the author adopted the whole framework of his narrative”
(Eddas and Sagas. Iceland’s Medieval Literature, tr. by Peter Foote [Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka
bókmenntafélag, 1988], p. 289). Inhiseditionofthesaga.Jóhannes Halldórsson similarly noted
several works that must have been known to the author of Víglundar saga, primarily Friðþjófi
saga, but also other sagas, such as Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar, Hjálmþés saga ok ölvis, Flóvents
saga, Mágus saga, Hrings saga ok Tryggva, and Barðar saga Snœfellsás (pp. XXV-XXXII). In a
footnote Jóhannes Halldórsson points out that he is partly indebted in his discussion of sources