Studia Islandica - 01.07.1966, Page 64

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neither are likely to have been any fuller, although Styrmir
evidently had Þórir’s name.1 It is probable that Snorri, find-
ing the episode rather bare in his sources, wished to provide
details of the discovery of Þórir’s guilt. Knowing the story
of Rauðúlfr, he evidently decided to make Dagr the agent
of the discovery, and based the episode on the discovery of
Bjprn the Steward’s guilt. In order to introduce Dagr and
his special gift convincingly, he would then have needed to
include the story of Rauðúlfr in his saga, or at least a sum-
mary of it. This would explain why he included only the
“frame” story, and omitted the central episodes of the boast-
ing and the dream: he needed the story only to introduce
Dagr, whom he needed for the following episode, and so the
rest of the story was, for his purposes, superfluous. Snorri
was not necessarily blind to the qualities of the þáttr as
literature, but he had no room for it in his saga.
This, therefore, must be why Snorri thought it worth
while to include the story of Rauðúlfr in his Óláfs saga at all
in such a mutilated form: Rauðúlfr and Bjprn the Steward
are not important in the story of St Óláfr, hut Þórir Qlvisson
(or at least his death) was. To make Þórir’s death convinc-
ing, Snorri needed Dagr, and so he needed a summary of
Rauðúlfs þáttr.
There are some verbal borrowings from Rauðúlfs þáttr
in Snorri’s account of Þórir’s discovery which confirm both
that the Þórir episode is secondary to the þáttr, and that it
can never have heen part of it. The account of King Óláfr’s
testing of Dagr’s wisdom in the Þórir episode (ÓH 463/1-5)
is clearly adapted from the account of his testing of Rauðúlfr’s
wisdom in the þáttr (ÓH 659/2—7). Similarly the words
Dagr uses to reveal Þórir’s treachery (ÓH 463/16-464/2)
echo his words in the þáttr of the king’s one failing (ÓH
671/8-9). The two passages in the þáttr are of course among
those that are omitted in Snorri’s shortened version of it.
1 It occurs in an extract from Styrmir’s saga in Flateyjarbók (arti-
culus 16), see ÖH 692.