Studia Islandica - 01.07.1966, Blaðsíða 68

66
In RauSúlfs þáttr Dagr finds as king Óláfr’s chief vice the
love of women (kvennanna ást), and the king admits that
this is correct. This seems to he the invention of the author
of the þáttr, and need have no specific source. But among
the fragments surviving from Styrmir’s Óláfs saga1 there
are some stories told about the king’s temptations in this
direction, and Styrmir includes some verses supposed to
have been composed by the king in which he confesses to
desire for various women.1 2 Styrmir says that óláfr “fought
daily against the ancient fiend”, and conquered his desire
for one of his mistresses because “he counted the will of God
in heaven more important than his own personal desire”.
Some of these stories Styrmir may have taken from the older
versions of Óláfs saga, but some he probably collected and
wrote down for the first time himself:3 evidently he was
interested in this sort of story, and his saga seems to have
included more of them than any of the other sagas of the
saint. Here again, therefore, there are indications of a parti-
cularly close affinity between Rauðúlfs þáttr and Styrmir’s
version of Óláfs saga. Snorri, besides omitting the reference
to the king’s vice in the story of Rauðúlfr, also did not in-
clude any of Styrmir’s stories about the king’s amorous ad-
ventures, either because he did not agree with Styrmir’s
interpretation of the king’s character or because he found
the stories uninteresting or irrelevant. At any rate, if his
intention was to suppress them, he failed, for later redactors
of his work have added them to the saga again, making sure
that they were not forgotten. The picture of the king given
in the þáttr is much more like that of the older sagas, which
1 Flb III 237—248; ÓH 683—687, 771, 820. Cf. ÓH 1127 ff.; Sig-
urður Nordal, Om Olaf den helliges saga (Kobenhavn 1914), pp. 69 ff.
2 ÓH 683, 686, 687, 771, 820; Skj A I 220—222.
3 The verse about Ingibjgrg Finnsdóttir, ÓH 687, is also in the
Legendary saga (p. 57), and so must have been also in the Middle
saga, from which both the Legendary saga and Styrmir’s saga were
derived.