Gripla - 01.01.2003, Page 248

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Finally, the introduction of all this modem theory, which has focussed our
attention especially on the transition from oral to literate societies, should not
make us forget that the old ideas of Freeprose had never completely dis-
appeared from the scene — in fact they had been revitalized in 1964 in a
doctoral dissertation by Theodore M. Andersson, a young American who had
been taught at Yale by a German refugee, Konstantin Reichardt, who in his
tum was a pupil of the great Germanist Andreas Heusler, one of the leading
proponents of Freeprose before the Second World War. It was Andersson who
first systematically attacked the concept of rittengsl as developed by the
Icelandic Bookprose school, and he did so long before he himself or any other
saga scholar had become influenced by the new theories of Parry and Lord.
I think it is important to point this out, because Gísli in his introductory
chapter to some extent exaggerates the historical importance of Lord’s Singer
ofTales and his method of formula-counting as THE Great Event that revived
the intemational interest in oral tradition. I think other contributions, for
example Clanchy’s, would have been worth mentioning. At the same time
Gísli also to some extent makes too little of The Singer of Tales when he
suggests that Lord’s methodology has now become more or less obsolete,
since later studies have shown that formulas could be of literary just as well as
oral origin, and that formula-counting therefore cannot prove that a text is
oral. Although I share Gísli’s sceptical attitude to formula-counting, I think it
would be fairer to say that Lord’s approach is still partly valid, in that
formulaic composition could indeed, under the right circumstances, be a very
strong indication of orality, but it is certainly not an infallible method, and I
think most scholars would nowadays agree that it must be supplemented with
other methods. This is also exactly what Gísli tries to do in his dissertation,
but he is certainly not the first to do so, as he himself is quite willing to admit.
A lot of research on the oral roots of the sagas has in fact recently been carried
out by other saga scholars such as Theodore Andersson, Dietrich Hofmann,
Carol Clover, Óskar Halldórsson, Vésteinn Ólason, and others.
It should also be pointed out, that although Gísli is searching for oral
tradition he does not really believe in a purely oral saga as some Freeprose
advocates did. He is quite willing to accept the fact that the sagas were
influenced by literary texts such as saints’ lives or foreign riddarasögur, and
he is also willing to accept the fact that sagas influenced each other through
literary borrowing, rittengsl. What he himself wants to establish is not the oral
Urgestalt of any saga but rather its oral roots.