Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1994, Qupperneq 122

Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1994, Qupperneq 122
120 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
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