Gripla - 01.01.2003, Blaðsíða 104

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GRIPLA
Scandinavian adventure, it is probably more accurate to say that Þorsteins
þáttr bæjarmagns is a secondary development of thefornaldarsögur, in that it
deploys the interaction between a Christian retainer and the pagan world de-
veloped in the didactic Olaf-þættir with a structure that entered Old Norse
literature with the translated romances. Here it is the temporal setting that has
lost its generic significance. Rather than associating the fantastic with a period
of history (i.e., the story has to take place long ago because that was when
strange beings and magical occurrences were commonplace), the fantastic is
associated with a contemporary geographical location. This change —
perhaps borrowed from romance itself — opens up the genre to the narrative
possibilities offered by heroes who are Christian or Icelandic or both.
A text such as Þorsteins þáttr bæjarmagns, which populates an Arthurian
narrative structure with Scandinavian characters from the Christian era,
shows the difficulty of applying the standard generic distinctions. Although I
have argued in the past that some texts are deliberate hybrids of different
genres (Rowe 1993), here we have an author who simply seems to have con-
sidered that a fairly wide range of structures, characters, and settings were
potential material for an entertaining story. To say this is merely to echo
scholars such as Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards (1971) and Marianne
Kalinke (1982) who have long urged that we consider a larger category of
“legendary fiction” rather than trying to separate the fornaldarsögur from the
riddarasögur. Similarly, if I suggest that Þorsteins þáttr bæjarmagns takes the
didactic Olaf-þættir as one of its points of departure, and I mean that
suggestion as a reminder that genres evolve (emerging, merging, diverging,
and disappearing) over time, that, too, is old news.13 What I believe is a new
insight is what the Flateyjarbók texts illustrate: the complex intertextual con-
struction of the themes of dependent þættir. Theme and narrative structure are
the two most important elements of the generic repertory, but in the case of the
þættir in the Olaf-sagas, theme emerges not only from the relationship
between the embedded text and its matrix text but also from the relationship
between the embedded text and any other embedded texts to which the editor
of the manuscript has linked it. Here editorial intention must take precedence
over audience reception. It is certainly valid to analyze the compilation that
results from a series of scribes copying and expanding the Olaf sagas, as most
audiences will neither know nor care which redactor added which þáttr. How-
ever, when an individual þáttr, rather than the compilation as a whole, is being
13 See, for example, Kalinke (1985:345) and Weber (1986:432).