Gripla - 01.01.2003, Page 69

INTERPRETATION OR OVER-INTERPRETATION
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criticism’ began to shake themselves free of the ‘regard for the historical vera-
city of the sagas’ still criticized by Bjami Guðnason, but which was most
characteristic of the time when ‘scholars used to regard the Icelandic Family
Sagas as true pictures of events’ (Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1958, 1).
A central premise of Einar Ólafur’s book and of the technique of relative
dating of the sagas in general is the assumption that every saga writer would
have known every saga that had been written before his own, and that there-
fore a saga lacking allusions to, or less overt influence from, other texts could
be assumed to be early. This assumption surfaces not only in the chapter on
‘Literary Relations’ — in the words of Einar Ól. Sveinsson, ‘Of all the means
of deciding the ages of sagas, it is their literary relations which are the most
fruitful’ (76) — but also in that on ‘Artistry’, which deals with
the skill displayed in the sagas, the ability of their authors in con-
structing them, their control of the material, their narrative methods
and literary artistry. We might well suppose that such accomplishments
developed gradually; at the beginning authors had less control over
their material, but this developed as more sagas were written ... It is
reasonable to expect that the sagas which were written first would
show certain marks of the primitive, if only we can detect them (115).
Still invoked by Andersson in his scepticism about a late date for Heiðar-
víga saga (see above, p. 63), this view presupposes an environment in which
saga writing is a communal endeavour, with writers not only scanning their
predecessors’ works for useful source information but participating in the
continuing development of a shared convention of form and style. And of
course this can be demonstrated in many instances of clear literary influence,
though it is not always so clear in which direction the influence has gone —
witness the continuing debate over the relative ages of Laxdœla saga and
Eyrbyggja saga, reopened by Bjami Guðnason (1993, 221-22). It is also
evidenced in the use made of the Islendingasögur by compilers of successive
versions of Landnámabók and the poetic treatises that include citations of saga
lausavísur. But Gísli Sigurðsson’s recent analysis of the works which served
Óláfr Þórðarson hvítaskáld as sources for The Third Grammatical Treatise
suggests that the range of reading of even a leamed writer in the thirteenth
century was likely to be circumscribed to his own region: ‘Óláfr had ... read
all the most recent literature in Borgarfjörður, but he does not seem to have