Gripla - 20.12.2016, Qupperneq 8

GRIPLA8
the manuscript contains seven sagas, for the most part fornaldarsögur,
but what is particularly interesting is that Halldór has prefaced the work
with a five page preface (2r–4r) or Formáli which addresses the problem
of to what extent can the texts he has collected be considered as reliable
historical documents since all except one of them identify themselves as a
saga, that is, a history.4 In this Formáli Halldór states that he has written
the manuscript in his spare time for people’s amusement and pleasure. He
is not himself opposed to riddarasögur or fornaldarsögur and was in fact
responsible for writing and publishing one such saga and bringing another
one into print for the first time.5 What concerns him then are not the sto-
ries, but rather that their contents might be misinterpreted as being true,
that is, being history. to this end he attempts a taxonomy of saga-texts
based on what he perceives as the degree to which the content presented is
historically accurate or not. the stories he has included in his manuscript
are old, although he avoids tackling the issue of dating (a contentious one
over which there is scarcely more agreement now than there was in the
eighteenth century) and he classifies them into three groups. first there
are those composed by the learned for pleasure or stories translated from
foreign languages. these are fiction. then there those that are partly true
but which have become hopelessly mixed up with fables and fairy-tales so
that it is impossible to know what is true and what is not. nor are the events
mentioned corroborated by Latin chronicles and other reliable sources.
thirdly, there are those which are for the most part true. the events are cor-
roborated in the chronicles although here and there fantastic elements have
been admitted in to the narratives. the sagas included in these three groups
4 the one exception is the story of rósanía, a translation via Danish of “ricdin-ricdon,
Conte” and “Suite du Conte de ricdin-ricdon,” from Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier de Villandon
(1664–1734), La Tour Ténébreuse: Et Les Jours Lumineux, Contes Anglois, Accompagnez d’His-
toriettes et tires d’une ancienne Chronique composée par Richard surnommé Coeur de Lion, Roy
d’Angleterre. Avec le Récit de diverses Avantures de ce Roy (Paris: Veuve de Claude Barbin,
1705), 44–143 and 144–230. this is identified as a söguþáttur (historical narrative or epi-
sode) but this may be more a comment on its length than its historicity.
5 Ármanns saga (Hrappsey, n.p., 1782), 2nd ed. (akureyri: Hallgrímur Þorsteinsson, 1858),
3rd ed: Guðni Jónsson, ed., Íslendinga sögur, 13 vols. (reykjavík: Íslendingasagnaútgáfan,
1953), 12: 415–68. In his introduction to the saga Guðni says: “almennt er talið að Halldór
sýslumaður Jakobsson … sé höfundur sögunnar” (It is the common opinion that Halldór
sýslumaður Jakobsson is the author of the saga), Guðni Jónsson, Íslendinga sögur, 12: xiii–
xiv. The other saga is Sagan af Gaungu-Hrólfi sem inntók Nordmandiid (Leirárgarðir við
Leirá: Magnús Móberg, 1804), 2nd ed. (reykjavík: Einar Þórðarson, 1884).