Gripla - 2020, Blaðsíða 83

GRIPLA82
Andersson discusses the similarities between Fóstbrœðra saga and
Heimskringla, and his explanation of them is fully convincing. There
are too many textual convergences between them to be coincidental, but
their number is still quite limited, and if the author of Fóstbrœðra saga had
used Heimskringla, one would have expected many more. If the author of
Heimskringla used Fóstbrœðra saga as one of his many sources, however,
the moderate number of convergences makes sense. This is by far the most
plausible scenario, and it would place Fóstbrœðra saga before 1225 or so.
As for the Oldest saga, the Legendary saga and ‘Styrmir’s book’, only
the Legendary saga is preserved intact, so that it may be compared with
Fóstbrœðra saga, and the wording is almost never close enough to suggest
direct influence. The most noteworthy convergence is that the order of
Þormóðr’s last is the same.42 As Andersson notes, there is one exception
to the lack of lexical overlap between Fóstbrœðra saga and the Legendary
saga:
Ǫnnur ráð munu vér nú verða taka heldr en brenna lǫnd sjálfra vára.
(Legendary saga)
Annat ráð munu vér taka en brenna land várt sjálfra. (Fóstbrœðra
saga)43
We will now [Legendary saga: have to] adopt another plan than to
burn our own land [Legendary saga: lands]
This clause occurs at different places in the narrative, and because of the
lack of other verbal correspondences, Andersson concludes that the match-
ing order of the stanzas but almost complete lack of overlap in the prose
suggests descent from a written exemplar for the stanzas, but from oral
versions for the prose.
There is, however, one important factor which Andersson does not
take into account. The fragments of the Oldest Saga are extensive enough
to verify that the style is the full-blown prosimetrum of the somewhat later
42 Theodore Andersson, ‘Redating Fóstbrœðra saga’, Dating the sagas: Reviews and Revisions,
ed. by Else Mundal (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013), 55–76 (at 60–61).
Andersson counts eight stanzas, but after the first of these, Fóstbrœðra saga does not have
stanzas 53–55 of the Legendary saga.
43 Quotations following Andersson, ‘Redating Fóstbrœðra saga’, 60.