Gripla - 01.01.2003, Síða 250

248
GRIPLA
Finally, I shall have just a few things to say about Part IV, where Gísli
compares Finnboga saga and Vatnsdæla saga, discusses mythical patterns in
Hænsna-Þóris saga, and, towards the end, attempts to draw some general
conclusions from all his studies about oral tradition in the sagas. Here again,
the second opponent will have more things to say than I have, but I will to
some extent comment on the general conclusions.
III
In the section about the Eastfjord sagas, Gísli makes use of a concept that was
first introduced by Carol Clover and later taken over by John Miles Foley,
namely that of “immanent narrative”. An “immanent narrative” or an ”im-
manent saga” is one that is not explicitly told in the text but assumed to be
known by the audience or the reader. The narrator or some character in the
story may, for example, refer in passing to some event that has never been told
or some hero that has never been introduced but is still considered well known
by everybody. When this happens in a saga text, it usually indicates that the
saga was told for people who were already well informed about at least some
of the characters and events, and this information is likely to have come
through oral tradition. One of the things that Gísli thus tries to do in his com-
parative study of the Eastfjord sagas is to find traces of immanent Eastfjord
sagas that were probably never written but still somehow part of common
knowledge.
Although I would tend to agree with Carol Clover, John Miles Foley and
Gísli Sigurðsson that this is an interesting and potentially fruitful approach to
the problem of oral tradition, I think it should be pointed out that a purely
literary tradition could also sometimes give rise to an immanent saga or an
immanent narrative. In Conan Doyle’s well-known detective stories about
Sherlock Holmes, for example, there are many references to mysteries that
Holmes has solved in the past or criminals that he has brought to justice, even
though the stories of these mysteries and criminals are never told by Doctor
Watson. At one occasion, for example, Sherlock Holmes, in a conversation
with Watson, makes a passing reference to some crook who once knocked out
one of his teeth in Charing Cross Station, but the story of this remarkable
incident is never told, and there is no indication that it ever existed on paper,
perhaps not even in the mind of Conan Doyle. Such references may in fact
function as a very effective but purely literary device to whet the reader’s