Gripla - 20.12.2017, Side 232

GRIPLA232
about Icelanders who travel to norway, particularly skalds. Sagas located
exclusively in Iceland have no royal words to report.
royal words were clearly considered to be weighty and worth re-
cording, but they raise questions about transmission. Whereas the day -
to-day transactional conversations are so richly represented in the Ís-
lendinga sögur that they can easily be imagined to be part and parcel of
the oral transmissions that anticipated the written sagas, we might ques-
tion whether royal words had a similar currency. Meetings with kings
and queens were no doubt part of the transmission, but we may wonder
whether the words spoken actually go back to the first-hand reports of
Icelandic travelers. It seems more likely that the words were devised by
later tellers on the basis of what might be reasonably guessed at under the
circumstances. Such words are well represented in the Íslendingasögur, but
the amount of discourse naturally shrinks in comparison to what we find
in the konungasögur.
the authors of the early monographs on dialogue elected to omit the
konungasögur from consideration, but their inclusion may offer additional
insights. I have surveyed seven of these sagas, including two of the north
atlantic island sagas, and arrive at the following figures comparable to the
listing of Íslendingasögur above:
It will be immediately apparent that the conversations in the konunga-
sögur are both less frequent and largely shorter than what we find in the
Íslendingasögur. The outlier in this listing is Morkinskinna with 98 conver-
sations, but we must bear in mind that a disproportionate number of these
conversations is found in the þættir, which are more readily classed with
the Íslendingasögur than with the konungasögur. The þættir constitute about
Sagas Conversations Utterances
Orkneyinga saga 9 4 to 9
oddr’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar 13 4 to 18
Færeyinga saga 19 4 to 8
Morkinskinna 98 4 to 39/40
Fagrskinna 22 5 to 10
Heimskringla 56 4 to 20
Knýtlinga saga 15 4 to 7