Studia Islandica - 01.07.1966, Síða 86

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learned ideas, without any unevenness of texture. Rauðúlfr’s
sleeping chamber, based as it is on the palace of the emperor
of Constantinople, is still a Norwegian huilding, its roof
shingled and tarred, its ceilings decorated with Norse stories,
its walls panelled in Scandinavian style. King Óláfr dreams
a dream similar to Nebuchadnezzar’s, but the vision is a
Christian vision, and the kings he dreams are Norse, not
Babylonian kings: they have Norse virtues and vices.
The boasts of King Óláfr and his men may have been sug-
gested by the “gabs” of Charlemagne and his twelve peers,
but they boast not of ridiculous and impossible feats of
strength like French and Celtic heroes, but of their loyalty
and courage, their skill in viking sports and activities. The
atmosphere of Rauðúlfs þáttr has something of the glitter of
Romance with its rich descriptions and strong visual ima-
gination, and the roughness of viking manners on this Nor-
wegian farm is softened by more than a hint of the gentle-
ness of kurteisi, but the characters are still vikings rather
than knights, and the story as a whole fits better into the
context of the Sagas of the Kings than into that of the Ro-
mance Sagas.
In its context in the history of Icelandic prose Rauðúlfs
þáttr illustrates one fact that is still not always recognised.
The appearance in a medieval Icelandic text of ideas and
story material from foreign literature such as the Romances
is not in itself a criterion of age and cannot be taken as evi-
dence that the text is late or “post-classical” — only that it
is later than its source. Iceland was by no means isolated
from the cultural activities of the rest of Europe in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and Icelandic writers were
not slow to assimilate the influence of foreign works. There
are many texts written in Iceland in the early thirteenth
century that show the influence of foreign literature, al-
though none perhaps so clearly or to such an extent as Rauð-
úlfs þáttr. The stories, for instance, told of Haraldr Harð-
ráði’s adventures in the east in Morkinskinna (probably first