Gripla - 20.12.2016, Síða 11

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with sources – and in fact ari goes out of his way to identify the oral
sources of his information when needed. In this he differs significantly
from predecessors such as the Venerable Bede, who in the introduction
to his Ecclesiastical History of the English People blamed any errors not on
himself but on the sources he was using.11 ari leaves it up to the reader to
decide what is true and what is not, and this approach was to characterize
Icelandic approaches to “saga” for many centuries afterwards.12
3. History out of fiction
During the seventeenth century the kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden13
began to expand in terms of territory, wealth, power and prestige.
Whenever such a phenomenon occurs, new histories need to be written,
Thirteenth-Century Latin Poetics of Fiction, Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 108
(Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum fennica, 1996); ruth Morse, Truth and Convention in
the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Representation, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge university
Press, 1991); Monika Otter, Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English
Historical Writing (Chapel Hill: university of north Carolina Press, 1996); nancy f.
Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago:
university of Chicago Press, 1977). While “truth” and “fiction” are constant themes in
the essays collected in Walter Haug, Die Wahrheit der Fiktion: Studien zur weltlichen und
geistlichen Literatur des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (tübingen: niemeyer, 2003), no
single essay directly addresses these topics.
11 Bertram Colgrave and R .A. B. Mynors, eds., Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People,
oxford Medieval texts (oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 6–7. Jakob Benediktsson, in the
Introduction to his edition of Íslendingabók, discusses the possibility that ari was influenced
by Bede, and certainly both emphasize their reliance on named oral sources (xxii–xxiv). But
ari’s attitude to truth claims is not the same as Bede’s.
12 Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical
Approach (oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) argue that “history” and “fiction” are distinct
categories. for fiction they present “a ‘no truth’ theory of literature,” arguing that “inter
alia the concept of truth has no central or ineliminable role in critical practice” (1) and
they argue against post-modern readings of history as a variety of fiction: “the historian
does not create the past but only a verbal expression, an account of the past. Both activities
[history and fiction] make demands on the human imagination and intelligence. But while
fiction is construction, history is reconstruction … the problem of the post-modern view of
history is that it is without a concept of the past” (310). If post-modernists in line with their
world-view read history and fiction as fiction, Icelandic audiences because of their world
view read saga (almost always anonymous) whether history or fiction as history. neither
position is ultimately satisfactory.
13 In 1523 Gustav Vasa (1496–1560) entered Stockholm, declaring himself King of Sweden
and effectively ending the Kalmar union.
HALLDóR JAKOBSSON ON TRUTH AND FICTION