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Íslendingasögur. Jesch has compared Þorsteinn to figures such as Gestr
oddleifsson and Ásgrímr Elliða-Grímsson, explaining that as a familiar
character, he was useful to the compilers of sagas.75 Unlike Gestr, he is not
associated with prophecy or foresight, however, nor is he a chieftain, like
Ásgrímr. So what was so useful about Þorsteinn Kuggason that an author
might “invent” his role in Grettis saga or Laxdœla saga? Broadly speaking,
his usefulness to a narrator appears to come from his kinship with more
renowned men, and his role in significant legal cases.
this idea of narrative usefulness applies to the sheen of compilation,
or composition, that makes the written sagas what they are, but could have
applied to oral narratives as well. However, to be effective – for an audi-
ence to establish which details of the story were important and which were
not – and in order to account for the vast quantity of shared material across
the sagas, and the amount of unexplained references and unaccounted for
details – the usefulness of a character like Þorsteinn had to be based on im-
manent ideas of their character and actions. the scenes in which Þorsteinn
appears are too consistent in their characterisation, too bound up with sig-
nificant moments (like the deaths of Bjǫrn and Þorkell), and they all edge
too conspicuously around the subject of his death to be dismissed as the
product of an imaginative glance at the annals and a genealogy or two.
The fact that none of the sagas gives us clear-cut information about
Þorsteinn’s death may suggest that it was not a well-known story at the
time they were written down, but on the other hand, its presence in the
earliest annals (which simultaneously neglect to mention the death of
his contemporary, Þorgils Hǫlluson, for instance), would suggest other-
wise. the original manuscript of resensannáll was a victim of the fire of
Copenhagen in 1728, but Árni Magnússon’s own copy notes that the hand
changed from 1283 onwards; this puts a clear terminus ante quem on the
composition of the saga-age sections.76 few would suggest that the surviv-
ing version of Grettis saga pre-dates these annals, so they are the earliest
reference that we have to Þorsteinn’s killing.
75 Jesch, “Lost Literature,” 269.
76 Elizabeth rowe, The Medieval Annals of Iceland, 2 vols. (forthcoming); pers. comm.,
Elizabeth rowe.
THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF ÞORSTEINN KUGGASON