Gripla - 01.01.2003, Síða 70

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GRIPLA
known much from other parts of the country’ (Gísli Sigurðsson 2000, 102).8
Gísli also, with some caution, raises the possibility that recognizable versions
of the sagas as we know them may have existed in oral form: ‘we could use
the opportunity to reconsider the commonly held idea that a saga did not exist
unless it was written’ (102). The practice of dating the sagas according to their
literary relations also fails to take account of the possibility that a less leamed
saga writer in one part of the country — especially one whose style showed
signs of amateurishness or eccentricity — might have known little and cared
less about literary developments elsewhere, or that, as Einar Olafur goes on to
acknowledge, ‘an unskilful author of later times might perhaps show a simil-
ar clumsiness in his fírst work’.
The methodology of dating largely on the grounds of literary relations was
derived from works that were in contact with the leamed main stream, and is
not adapted to more individualistic or amateurish endeavours that may have
flourished alongside it. It is revealing that, after asserting the primacy of
literary relations as a dating criterion, Einar Olafur continues, ‘It is well
known that this is the case with the Kings’ Sagas, but the same conditions
apply to the Family Sagas, although research is not so far advanced’ (77).
Here he acknowledges that, in the development of a methodology for dating
the Islendingasögur, certain criteria were transferred from similar investiga-
tions into historical texts. But the analogy may rest on a false assumption. As
Theodore M. Andersson has said, ‘Unlike the family sagas, which almost
never tell the same story twice, the kings’ sagas tell the same story, especially
the biographies of the Norwegian kings, many times’ (Andersson 1985, 197).
The analogy with the konungasögur works to some extent where sagas do
share the same or related material, but largely fails to account for the anoma-
lous texts discussed here.
As Ömólfur Thorsson points out, the problem is exacerbated since most of
the Islendingasögur do not exist in manuscripts from the thirteenth century. As
we have no access to their texts in their early stages, we are forced to base our
conclusions on the versions we have even where the manuscripts are no earlier
than the seventeenth century. The writers of konungasögur, by contrast, be-
cause of their constant sharing of material, were participating in a continuing
process of cross-reference, and we often have a glimpse of earlier versions of
existing works through those that made use of them.
8 Cited here from the article which is a version in English of a chapter from the author’s doc-
toral thesis, more recently published in Icelandic (Gísli Sigurðsson 2002).