Gripla - 20.12.2017, Page 42

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to a scribe with parchment to hand), the components of the story could
have been maintained orally. The existence of an immanent saga meant,
simply, that there was the potential to tell a full-length saga narrative about
a person, region, event or family, and that episodes could be recounted to
an audience already familiar with the immanent whole. thus, immanence
links the story being told not only to the expertise of the teller, but also to
the knowledge of the audience.9 Clover’s idea was further developed with
a specific eye to approaching the immanence of the Íslendingasögur by Gísli
Sigurðsson, whose methodology has been invaluable to this article.10
assuming the existence of immanent tales allows us to account for in-
consistencies in the portrayal of recurring saga characters. Gísli Sigurðsson
has demonstrated this in the case of Guðmundr ríki, where the chieftain
is depicted by different sagas in varying ways that are at times unflatter-
ing.11 the differences between the narratives do not indicate that one is
the “right” portrayal of Guðmundr, and another therefore “wrong” in its
depiction. rather, the differences can be accounted for through the inher-
ently local, variable nature of oral traditions. as Gísli states: “Guðmundr
… comes across as a multifaceted personality, though always with certain
underlying traits that help to mark him out”.12
on the other hand, with regard to another postulated “immanent saga”
about Síðu-Hallr Þorsteinsson and his family, extant sources are more
consistent in their portrayal of these characters and even of the overarch-
ing themes that dominated their story. According to Jamie Cochrane, the
conception of an immanent story of Hallr’s life is indicated rather by the
9 this idea was expanded upon by John foley in his Immanent Art: from Structure to Meaning
in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington, In: Indiana university Press, 1991), see esp. 42–
45.
10 Gísli Sigurðsson, The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method,
trans. Nicholas Jones, Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature
2 (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard university Press, 2004). originally published as Túlkun
Íslendingasagna í ljósi munnlegrar hefðar: Tilgáta um aðferð, rit 56 (reykjavík: Stofnun
Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi, 2002). Gísli in fact states explicitly: “one clear advantage of
assuming an oral tradition in the background is that it frees us from the need to assume the
existence of hypothetical lost written sources”, Medieval Icelandic Saga, 309.
11 Gísli Sigurðsson, “*the Immanent Saga of Guðmundr ríki,” trans. nicholas Jones, Learning
and Understanding in the Old Norse World: Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross, eds.
Kate Heslop, Judy Quinn, et al., Medieval texts and Cultures of northern Europe, vol. 18
(turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 201–18.
12 Ibid., 218.