Gripla - 2020, Page 101

GRIPLA100
down into sagas. If it had been, Íslendingadrápa would probably have been
in better factual agreement with the saga accounts, and sagas composed in
this early period would have reflected the prevailing prose format of the
twelfth century, rather than the prosimetrum of the thirteenth.107
If we attempt to answer what Fóstbrœðra saga was to its author, then,
it was a saga about local heroes, drawing on the lore of Icelandic heroes
that had accumulated a degree of canonicity during the twelfth century. In
order to produce such a text, the author drew on known poetry, some of
it transmitted as a long poem, some of it perhaps as part of the situational
setting of Þormóðr-at-Stiklarstaðir. As written models, he looked to kings’
sagas, where the authenticating mode of quotation of poetry dominates
(though not for Þormóðr-at-Stiklarstaðir specifically). For rhetorical em-
bellishment, he drew on homiletic models, but he also explored the poten-
tial of skaldic diction. All of these factors suggest a tentative approach, and
several of them – such as authenticating quotation, skaldic diction in prose
and hyperbolic rhetoric – would be rejected by later authors as the genre
began to find its own peculiar register. The experiment undertaken by the
author of Fóstbrœðra saga, however, was all-important for later authors to
have something to emulate and partly reject, and in order for the genre to
reach the perfection of Egils saga, Gísla saga, njáls saga and others.
M A N U S C R I P T S
stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum, Reykjavík
AM 566 a 4to
AM 544 4to (Hauksbók)
AM 73 a fol. (Bæjarbók)
AM 73 b fol. (Bæjarbók)
Den Arnamagnæanske samling,
AM 73 a fol.
AM 73 b fol.
AM 76 a fol.
107 On a famous passage in Þorgils saga ok Hafliða and why it cannot be used to reconstruct
twelfth-century literary forms, see Males, the Poetic Genesis, 201–05.
AM 76 a fol. (Bæjarbók)
AM 132 fol. (Möðruvallabók)
AM 142 fol.
GKS 1005 fol. (Flateyjarbók)