Gripla - 2020, Síða 88

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shield and a few other relevant details; in general, it has little in common
with other courtly literature. Einar ól. Sveinsson gives a list of courtly
features that may be used to date sagas after c. 1240, but none of these ap-
ply to Fóstbrœðra saga.56
Furthermore, many of the relevant features are also found in early
homilies. Indeed, the religious, hyperbolical and learned character of the
‘digressions’ sounds more homiletic than anything else, and this is precisely
what makes them so unusual in a saga context. While homilies and sagas
serve very different purposes, it would perhaps not be strange if some of
the rhetorical conventions of homiletic discourse spilled over into the saga
text of an author who is accustomed to them, and I would argue that this
is a likely explanation of some of the unusual features in Fóstbrœðra saga.
I turn now to the features that Jónas sees as indicative of a late date, and
I use the Icelandic Homily Book (below IHB) as a point of comparison,
because of its early date and relatively varied content.
The most compelling feature, in so far as it is linguistic and probably
not exclusively the product of an active choice on the author’s behalf, is
the use of the indefinite article einn (‘a man’, ‘a boat’, etc.). Over time, it
became more common to write ‘maðr einn hét Mǫrðr’ (a man was named
Mǫrðr), rather than ‘maðr hét Mǫrðr’ ([a] man was named Mǫrðr), and
we find relatively numerous examples of such use of the indefinite article
in Fóstbrœðra saga.
It is somewhat unclear exactly what Jónas is referring to when count-
ing the occurrences of the indefinite article in Fóstbrœðra saga, given that
the number varies between different versions. I have read the text of M
as printed in Björn K. Þórólfsson’s edition, as well as Hb after M’s text
stops.57 While I come up with the same number of occurrences of einn as
a numeral with temporal expressions (einn dag, einn vetr, etc.), namely 16,
I find only 22 instances of unequivocal use of einn as indefinite article (up
to 25 if three doubtful cases are included), against Jónas’s 50. Given that
our numbers for the use of einn as a numeral in temporal expressions are
identical, I suspect that in order to reach so high a number, Jónas may have
included instances of einn where it is not used as indefinite article.58
56 Einar ól. Sveinsson, Ritunartími Íslendingasagna, 141.
57 See Fóstbrœðra saga, ed. Björn K. Þórólfsson, vii, xvii.
58 There are some borderline cases. Thus, for instance, ‘einn ungr maðr’ (one young man)
Fó STBRœÐ RA SAGA: A MISSING LINK?