Gripla - 01.01.2003, Page 67

INTERPRETATION OR OVER-INTERPRETATION
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This view informs Ömólfur’s argument for a re-dating of Grettis saga to
around 1500, rather than the traditional date of 1310-29 (1994, especially
915-19; see also 1994b). But while this theory is based on sceptical scrutiny
of the saga’s reference to Sturla Þórðarson, which, it is argued, could be a later
addition to the text, as well as statistical analysis of the vocabulary of the
surviving manuscripts, Ömólfur’s passing reference to other proposed later
datings, including those of Bjami Guðnason, implies that these form part of
the same project (Ömólfur Thorsson 1994a, 915 n. 3);
Varðveisla íslenskra miðaldabóka er þó með þeim alkunnu ósköpum að
handrit geta aldrei vitnisburður um aldur þeirra. Það er þó umhugs-
unarvert að þrjár sögur sem lengi voru taldar gamlar hafa yngst mikið
undanfama áratugi og færst nær elstu handritum sínum: Fóstbræðra
saga (sbr. Jónas Kristjánsson 1972), Heiðarvíga saga (sbr. Bjama
Guðnason 1993) og Bjamar saga (sbr. Bjama Guðnason 1994).5
— this despite the fact that the earliest manuscript of Bjarnar saga, as noted
above, is no earlier than the seventeenth century, and that Bjami’s methodo-
logy follows firmly in the tradition established by the ‘Icelandic school’
(Heinemann 1994, 100).
It is significant that all the sagas mentioned here as candidates for revised
dating are to some degree oddities among the Islendingasögur: their eccent-
ricity or ineptitude of narrative style has allowed them to be labelled as primi-
tive and archaic, seemingly predating the conventions established in what has
been constructed as the communal activity of saga production. Proposals for
the later dating of such texts reveal a paradox at the heart of the methodology
evolved for the dating of sagas by writers of the so-called ‘Icelandic school’.
On the one hand it is taken for granted that saga-writers worked in the full
nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth that our best literature should have
been composed while we were still free men in a free land, before 1262: perhaps this is where
the persistent ideas about flourishing literary activity “around the middle of the thirteenth
century”, “in the third quarter of the thirteenth century”, etc, came from?’
5 ‘The preservation of medieval Icelandic works, however, suffers from the well-known
disadvantage that the manuscripts never bear testimony to their ages. It is however worth
consideration that three sagas that for a long time were considered old have become much
younger in the past few decades and moved closer to their oldest manuscripts: Fóslbræðra
saga (cf. Jónas Kristjánsson 1972), Heiðarvíga saga (cf. Bjami Guðnason 1993) and Bjarnar
saga (cf. Bjami Guðnason 1994).’