Gripla - 01.01.2003, Qupperneq 255

ANDMÆLARÆÐUR
253
later. The two Vínland sagas, Grænlendinga saga and Eiríks saga rauða, were
both written in the 13th century, both describing roughly the same series of
events and the same characters — Eiríkr the Red, Leifr Eiríksson, Guðríðr
Þorbjamardóttir and several others — but with considerable variation in a
large number of details, suggesting that the two sagas are at least partly based
on different oral traditions. We can also, in this particular case, compare the
testimony of the sagas with geographical facts and with modem archeological
fmdings from the newly excavated Norse settlement L’Anse aux Meadows in
Newfoundland. All this should give us at least some possibility to check the
truth of the sagas and thus to some extent their use of oral tradition. That is
why Gísli calls this part of his thesis “Sögur og sannleikur”, in spite of the fact
that he has previously wamed his readers that one should not believe that a
saga tells the truth just because it is based on oral tradition. The oral tradition
may very well lie and often does. On the other hand, a saga that tells the truth
is likely to be based on some kind of reliable source, which may be either oral
or written.
It has, as Gísli points out, been argued by Jón Jóhannesson, that Græn-
lendinga saga was older and more reliable than Eiríks saga rauða, which had,
according to Jón, used the former work as a source. In the 1980s, however,
Ólafur Halldórsson compared the two sagas very carefully and came to the
conclusion that one cannot prove rittengsl between them. Gísli, in his tum,
concludes from Ólafur Halldórsson’s investigation that Grænlendinga saga
and Eiríks saga rauða were written down independently from oral tradition.
On the basis of this conclusion, Gísli then assumes that whatever the two
sagas have in common probably belongs to a very old oral tradition and may
even be reliable as a testimony about what actually happened in Vínland,
where the travellers landed, where they set up their camp, and so on.
This assumption, however, is in my view, unfounded and in fact rather
dubious. There is at least one incident which is found in both sagas but could
not very well have been part of any tradition, either literary or oral, before the
latter half of the 12th century. I am referring to prophecies that appear in both
sagas to the effect that the heroine of the Vínland voyages, Guðríðr, will one
day retum to Iceland and have very great and prominent descendants, who
according to Eiríks saga will “shine with a bright light” (“yfir þínum kyn-
kvíslum skína bjartari geislar en ek hafa megin til at geta slíkt vandliga sét”)
And according to Grænlendinga saga these same remarkable people will be
“shining and fine, sweet and sweet-smelling” (“bjart ok ágætt, sætt ok ilmat