Gripla - 01.01.2003, Page 252

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GRIPLA
on the same oral tradition. This conclusion is strengthened whenever the
character or event mentioned is presented in a way which presupposes that the
audience is already familiar with the person or event in question. If, for
example, a saga says “At this time Bjami lived at Hof ’ without ever intro-
ducing Bjami, one may conclude that Bjami was a well-known character in
the tradition. It also appears likely that many different stories were told about
Bjami in the oral tradition, if his living at Hof is described in several sagas but
in widely different ways. We may, on the other hand, safely conclude that two
sagas are connected through literary influence, rittengsl, if both texts portray
Bjami in exactly the same way with the same words and expressions in the
same order, particularly if the words are not formulaic phrases (like the ones
studied by Parry and Lord) but fairly unusual literary expressions.
So far I tend to agree wholeheartedly with Gísli. The problem with the
method, however, is that you cannot completely exclude the possibility of
rittengsl in the wider sense even when there is no exact similarity of wording.
A saga-writer may well have heard some written saga being read aloud and
become influenced by it, even though he may have forgotten the wording, so
that he renders it in a completely different manner. Or he may have decided
that he wanted to tell a different story altogether, even though the story he
does tell is ultimately derived from the older text. A literary analysis of the
text could sometimes reveal that such a revision has taken place, but this may
not always be possible.
Yet Gísli’s method appears to work very well when he compares what the
various Eastfjord sagas tell about four famous saga characters from the same
period: Brodd-Helgi Þorgilsson, Víga-Bjami Brodd-Helgason, Geitir Lýtings-
son and Þorkell Geitisson. All four of them play important roles in Vápn-
firðinga saga, but they are mentioned as important people in other texts, al-
though they usually appear in the background as subordinate characters. Víga-
Bjami appears in several texts, including the poem Islendingadrápa, and he is
in some of these texts pictured as an aggressive warrior-type, while other texts
picture him as a peaceloving and very fair chieftain; Gísli argues that both
opinions probably existed in the oral tradition. Geitir Lýtingsson does not
seem to have been talked about quite as much, since his name does not appear
as often in the texts, but the story of his death in Vápnfirðinga saga has so
many close similarities with the story of Kjartan’s death in Laxdæla saga that
Gísli fínds it reasonable to suppose some kind of literary influence, rittengsl.
In the case of Þorkell Geitisson, whose full biography is never told in any