Gripla - 2020, Qupperneq 95

GRIPLA94
geirsdrápa, stanzas of which have been distributed across the narrative. This
is a common technique in kings’ sagas, but it is rare in sagas of Icelanders:
the only other saga of Icelanders that does it to any considerable extent is
Eyrbyggja saga. There, Oddr’s Illugadrápa is quoted twice in the beginning,
and Þormóðr Trefilsson’s Hrafnsmál five times towards the end.81 With
roughly half of its stanzas being authenticating, Fóstbrœðra saga has far
more authenticating quotations than any other saga of Icelanders.
Fóstbrœðra saga is therefore a generic hybrid with regard to its quota-
tion of poetry, being more reminiscent of kings’ sagas than of other sagas
of Icelanders. In Egils saga, for instance, long poems are not used in this
way, even though the author clearly had access to them. Fóstbrœðra saga’s
technique thus appears to have been carried over from the kings’ sagas
without the interference of established conventions for how to quote
poetry in sagas of Icelanders. This makes it likely that it belongs to the
beginning of the tradition of sagas of Icelanders. It should be noted, how-
ever, that authenticating quotations are absent in the last part of the saga,
which overlaps in content with the sagas of óláfr Haraldsson. It would
appear that the technique of constructing a back-bone of authenticating
quotations has been carried over from the kings’ sagas to the part of the
saga which was not already in existence, whereas the situational quotations
that are common in sagas about óláfr Haraldsson in particular have been
retained in Fóstbrœðra saga.
In two instances, we find traditional, poetic diction in the flowery lan-
guage of the digressions. Thus, we read: ‘Reyndu Ránar dœtr drengina ok
buðu þeim sín faðmlǫg’82 (the daughters of Rán tested the men and offered
them their embraces). In skaldic diction, the daughters of the goddess Rán
are the waves, and their embraces appear to be borrowed from another
mythological topos, namely the embraces of the goddess of death, Hel.
Indeed, this topos appears somewhat later, where we read: ‘[…] ok mun
Hel, húsfreyja þín, leggja þik sér í faðm […]’83 (and Hel, your lady of the
house, will take you in her embrace). In another instance, we read:
81 As Russell Poole has shown, it is also likely that the stanzas by Þórarinn Máhlíðingr be-
longed to one poem (or to a ‘frame of transmission’ as outlined above), but these are all
situational quotations (Russell Poole, ‘The Origins of the Máhlíðingavísur’, scandinavian
studies 57 (1985): 244–85).
82 Fóstbrœðra saga, ed. Björn K. Þórólfsson, 20.
83 Fóstbrœðra saga, ed. Björn K. Þórólfsson, 26.