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are what we would call riddarasögur and fornaldarsögur, with the more fan-
tastic of the latter such as Örvar-Odds saga or Egils saga einhenda belonging
to group two, and the more sober such as Ragnars saga loðbrókar or Áns saga
bogsveigis belonging to group three. He then turns to a general consideration
of the Íslendingasögur, samtíðarsögur, and konungasögur and finds them all
to be clearly members of group three. next he briefly classifies the sagas
according to where they take place without going into any detail, following
this with a list of all those sagas referred to in reliable texts that have not
survived down to the present. He then returns to his previous subject and
says that it is a desideratum that the sagas be classified according to their
date of composition and their truthfulness, challenging scholars, especially
those in Copenhagen, with their unrivaled access to manuscripts and other
resources, to make an such an inventory of all the sagas in Icelandic. this is
probably a dig at his friend Jón Ólafsson frá Grunnavík (1705–1769) with
whom Halldór had been in frequent contact during his stay in Copenhagen
in the winter of 1764–1765.6 He then he returns to evaluating the truthful-
ness of Áns saga bogsveigis and it cannot be said that the discussion comes to
any conclusion, because at this point it just breaks off.
2. History and fiction in Written texts
the tension between fiction and history is hardly a recent phenomenon.7
It was a matter which exercised the ancients as they tried to separate out
historia from fabula and to determine whether or not the Homeric epics
6 See Jón Helgason, Jón Ólafsson frá Grunnavík, Safn fræðafjelagsins um ísland og íslendinga
5 (Copenhagen: S. L. Möller, 1926), 49. Halldór implies that Copenhagen is the obvious
place where this kind of research into the sagas should be taking place, except that it is not.
Jón Ólafsson had the potential to accomplish a great deal and indeed he began many projects.
However, he found it impossible in almost every case to bring any of his work to a close.
7 for the purposes of this paper the following working definition of “history” and of “fiction”
is relevant: “History is a narrative discourse with different rules than those that govern
fiction. the producer of a historical text affirms that the events entextualized did indeed
occur prior to the entextualization. thus it is quite proper to bring extratextual inform-
ation to bear on those events when interpreting and evaluating an historical narrative. … It
is certainly otherwise with fiction, for in fiction the events may be said to be created by and
with the text. they have no prior temporal existence, even if they are presented as if they
did.” robert Scholes, “Language, narrative, and anti-narrative,” in On Narrative, ed. W.
J. t. Mitchell (Chicago: university of Chicago Press, 1981), 200–08 at 207.
HALLDóR JAKOBSSON ON TRUTH AND FICTION