Gripla - 01.01.2003, Síða 64

62
GRIPLA
among the youngest, and questions the reliability of the methodology
underpinning this change of perception.
Alluding in a review to Bjami Guðnason’s studies of the lost or frag-
mentary kings’ sagas Skjöldunga saga and Hryggjarstykki, David Evans
commented that ‘Bjami Guðnason has made himself something of a specialist
in works that no longer exist’. In the book which is the subject of Evans’s re-
view, Túlkun Heiðarvígasögu (Bjami Guðnason 1993), Bjami tumed his
attention to the Islendingasögur, more particularly Heiðarvíga saga — a work
which in Evans’s words, ‘is not actually lost, but came as close to being so as
any work that exists at all can have done’ (Evans 1997, 361). The book radi-
cally revises the received view, based on its apparently primitive style and ab-
sence of influence from other sagas, of the antiquity of Heiðarvíga saga.
Bjami does not dissent from the criteria on which the standard dating was
based, but develops a new, and in my view questionable, approach to the
identification of literary influence, and also imposes a semi-allegorical reading
on the text to propose a later date on ideological grounds. In his view the saga
is derivative of other texts, most notably Laxdœla saga, and hence should be
dated from the middle of the thirteenth century or later. In an article published
the following year Bjami extended his investigation to another supposedly
primitive, and again fragmentary saga, Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa, whose
dating he revised even more radically. He detected in it influence from a wide
range of texts including Njáls saga\ consequently he repositioned the saga at
the end, rather than in the early part of the thirteenth century (Bjami Guðna-
son 1994).
The textual incompleteness of Bjarnar saga is of a different kind from that
of Heiðarvíga saga. It is preserved only in seventeenth-century and later
manuscripts, from which the fírst five chapters are missing and have been
supplied, in many of the surviving copies as well as in modem editions, from
a summary preserved in versions of Snorri Sturluson’s Oláfs saga helga.
Heiðarvíga saga is preserved in part in a medieval manuscript, which Bjami
believes to date from c. 1300 rather than the traditional estimate of c. 1250
(Bjarni Guðnason 1993, 187), and in part in a transcript made from memory
by Ámi Magnússon’s scribe, Jón Ólafsson frá Grunnavík, of the first part of
this manuscript after this first part had been destroyed by fire in Copenhagen
thirteenth-century product, and more or less independent of other Sagas of Icelanders, others
as late thirteenth-century, and highly dependent; some reckon with later revision of an early
saga’ (Whaley 2002, xl).