Gripla - 01.01.2003, Page 66

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GRIPLA
Dating the Icelandic Sagas
The problem of the inconclusive re-dating of sagas is, of course, not new.
Jónas Kristjánsson’s relocation of Fóstbrœðra saga towards the end rather than
the beginning of the thirteenth century, proposed in 1972, is still neither
universally accepted nor dismissed;3 nor has the argument of Dietrich Hof-
mann in the same year for an early date for Reykdœla saga been scrutinized in
detail. At the other end of the spectrum, Stefán Karlsson (1994) has argued
that Fljótsdœla saga, conventionally held to be the latest of the Islendinga-
sögur and to date from the end of the 15th century, is in fact contemporaneous
with Hrafnkels saga, of which it is a continuation, and dates from c.1300.
In a comprehensive review of the conventions of dating established by the
so-called ‘Icelandic School’, Ömólfur Thorsson has argued that the locating of
the ‘golden age’ of saga writing in the period before the annexation of Iceland
by the Norwegian crown in 1262 had an ideological basis in the movement for
Icelandic independence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
and urged a reconsideration of the dating of these texts that would diminish
the gap between their estimated time of writing and the age of surviving
manuscripts:
Ef aðeins er tekið mið af varðveislunni virðist blómaskeið íslendinga
sagna miklu fremur vera á fjórtándu öld og fyrsta fjórðungi þeirrar
fimmtándu en í umróti Sturlungaaldar á 13. öld — og þar með er ekki
fullyrt að varðveisla sé ávitull um aldur. Það hentaði hins vegar ágæt-
lega í sjálfstæðisbaráttunni á síðari hluta 19. aldar og fyrstu áratugum
þessarar að bestu bókmenntir okkar hefðu verið saman settar meðan
við enn vorum frjálsir menn í frjálsu landi, fyrir 1262: þaðan em
kannski komnar lífseigar hugmyndir um blómlegt rithöfundarstarf ‘um
miðja 13. öld’, ‘á þriðja fjórðungi þrettándu aldar’, o.s.frv.?4
3 Jónas Kristjánsson 1972. Preben Meulengracht Serensen (1999, 160-62) argues that a ver-
sion of the saga was written early in the thirteenth century, ‘snarest i det andet eller tredie
tiár’; see also von See 1976.
4 ‘If only the manuscript preservation is used as the frame of reference, it appears much more
likely that the heyday of the Sagas of Icelanders was in the fourteenth century and the first
quarter of the fifteenth than in the uppheaval of the Age of the Sturlungs in the thirteenth
century — although it is not asserted that preservation is an indication af age. On the other
hand it was very convenient in the straggle for independence in the latter part of the