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the Sturlungar family who managed, after two other prominent family
members were killed in Skagafjörður in earlier attempts, to subjugate
Skagafjörður to the power of the Sturlungar.32 As Axel Kristinsson argues,
it is likely that those aristocrats who commissioned sagas “used a popular
hero of his principality to strengthen his own position.”33 By creating a
genealogical link between the two Þórðurs, one a popular and likeable local
saga hero and the other a political interloper, Jón Hákonarson is legitimiz-
ing not only his family’s importance but also the political structure that
forced Skagafjörður, a final hold-out of the traditional chieftaincies, to fall
in line with the new post-Commonwealth political order.
the Complete version lacks a genealogy of the family at either the
beginning or ending of the saga, which may have added to the scholarly
perception of a shallow, fictional generic mode for the Complete version;
genealogy adds historical weight to a saga. It is extremely difficult to iden-
tify political links in the Complete version of the saga through traditional
saga analysis, leaving Vésteinn Ólason to hypothesize that the Complete
saga was written so long after the traumatic events of the Sturlungaöld that
residents of the area had simply ceased to care.34
5. Preferencing the Spatial over the Chronological:
Regional Sagas
rather than considering Þórðar saga hreðu as a pure literary fabrication
unaware of the politics of the area, I propose quite the opposite: that the
saga was intimately engaged with its local milieu and political situation.
However, the nexus by which the Complete version expresses it is not
32 Árni Daníel Júlíusson and Jón Ólafur Ísberg, eds. Íslandssagan í máli og myndum (reykjavík:
Mál og menning, 2005).
33 axel Kristinsson, “Lords and Literature: the Icelandic Sagas as Political and Social
Instruments,” Scandinavian Journal of History 28 (2003): 11. axel does not discuss Jón
Hákonarsson because his primary interest was in finding what inspired saga writing to
begin with, rather than manuscript production. He also limited his thesis to Classical sagas,
and his introductory argument depends on excluding Þórðar saga hreðu. This is unfortunate,
since the “happy ending” of the saga might well have fit into his hypothesis that a saga com-
posed in a traditional chieftaincy would be less critical of that structure, see “Lords,” 9.
34 Vésteinn ólason, Dialogue, 217.
COMPLETING Þ Ó R Ð A R S A G A H R E Ð U