Gripla - 2020, Page 87

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among his examples.51 With regard to courtly sagas (riddarasögur), Jónas
presents no likely instances of influence in either direction.52 He sug-
gests that the author was familiar with the concept of courtly love, but
admits that the taxonomy of love and depictions of women is an inexact
science.53 In any event, Rǫgnvaldr jarl’s lausavísur and Bjarni Kolbeinsson’s
jómsvíkingadrápa suggest that aspects of courtly love entered the literature
more than half a century before the royal commission to translate French
romances from 1226 onwards.
With regard to stylistics, Jónas’s empirical evidence is weak. For in-
stance, he states that Fóstbrœðra saga uses kennings in prose, and that other
instances of this are not found until around 1300 or later. He only presents
examples from Karlamagnúss saga, however: hildarleikr (game of battle),
hildarvǫndr (battle-rod; sword), hjartaborg (heart-castle; breast). To this
may be added a few similar instances discussed by Einar ól. Sveinsson,
dating from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries.54 These kennings are
all intuitively comprehensible and appear as embellishments with some
poetic inspiration. Fóstbrœðra saga, by contrast, has Ránar dœtr (daughters
of Rán; waves) and elris hundr (the hound of the elder-tree; wind), which
require knowledge of skaldic diction.55 Such kennings are otherwise never
found in saga prose, but only in poetry and in prose treating kennings.
Fóstbrœðra saga thus represents an approach to how poetic resources may
be used in prose that is not found in any other saga (see further below).
Jónas classifies the style of Fóstbrœðra saga as ‘florid’ or ‘learned’ and
uses this as an argument for a late date. Jónas does not correlate these
features with developments among sagas of Icelanders or kings’ sagas, but
compares them only to courtly sagas, which draw on conventions estab-
lished by the early translations (from 1226 on). But why, then, are there
no clear analogues? Later in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, many
authors were certainly familiar with the conventions of courtly literature,
but these were nonetheless kept apart from the established conventions of
sagas of Icelanders. Thus, for instance, the ‘courtly’ Laxdœla saga is courtly
only in relation to other sagas of Icelanders, since it features a lion on a
51 Jónas Kristjánsson, Um ‘Fóstbræðrasögu’, 224–49.
52 Jónas Kristjánsson, Um ‘Fóstbræðrasögu’, 249–51.
53 Jónas Kristjánsson, Um ‘Fóstbræðrasögu’, 251.
54 Einar ól. Sveinsson, Ritunartími íslendingasagna, 137–39.
55 Jónas Kristjánsson, Um ‘Fóstbræðrasögu’, 268.