Gripla - 01.01.2003, Page 68

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GRIPLA
awareness of the achievements of their predecessors and contemporaries, so
that sagas are fitted into a typology of increasing stylistic sophistication,
backed by a network of perceived literary relations between their texts. On the
other, the increasing primacy awarded to the individual author in the creation
of saga texts has led to a tendency to assert idiosyncracies — individuality of
style and taste, a particular authorial point of view, variations in the literary
accomplishment of authors — that sit uneasily with the conception of saga
writing as to some extent a communal endeavour.
Bjami Guðnason’s methodology exemplifies these conflicting tendencies.
While arguing for literary influences on the supposedly early texts he dis-
cusses, he also establishes his dedication to what has been called ‘the fiction
theory’6 7 by implicitly rejecting the general assumption that the sagas draw on
a body of broadly accurate historical material, legitimized by communal
memory. The English summary of Túlkun Heiðarvígasögu ends with a call for
a reconsideration of some old ideas about saga criticism. This involves,
for instance, reexamining the relationship between the predominant
theory of saga evolution and the dating of the sagas, reconsidering
ideas about the objectivity of the saga style, the realism of the oldest
sagas and, last but not least, the regard for the historical veracity of the
sagas that has obstructed the vision of many a scholar ... the Icelandic
sagas ... must be studied as literature with a sharper focus on the
author, his way of thinking and his intentions (Bjami Guðnason 1993,
284).
The standard criteria for the relative dating of the Islendingasögur were
laid down in 1958 by Einar Ól. Sveinsson in his handbook Dating the Ice-
landic Sagas.1 Although described by its editor as ‘a pioneer work, for no
general treatment of the subject has been published since modern methods of
criticism have been applied’ (Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1958, vii), it consists of an
exposition, both cautious and critical, of the techniques for dating evolved
over the preceding decades, in particular in the writings of Bjöm M. Ólsen
and the editors of the íslenzk fornrit series (1933-), as ‘modem methods of
6 See Mundal 1993,53.
7 A revised and expanded version was published in Icelandic in 1965 (Einar Ól. Sveinsson
1965). For a full and critical account of the origins and development of the ‘Icelandic school’,
see Ömólfur Thorsson 1990, 36-46.