Studia Islandica - 01.06.1993, Blaðsíða 279

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writer, as is now generally accepted, one must also accept the
consequences and attribute to these writers some real share in
their works, even though they may have relied on a prolific
oral tradition or some written sources.
The sagas have mostly been regarded as feud reports with-
out a literary theme and thus not susceptible to literary inter-
pretion. None of the sagas has been seen as a better example
of this characteristic of the genre than Heiðarvígasaga. It has
been considered a true representative of the uncontaminated
outlook of the Nordic heroic age, or more specifically the
Saga Age (930-1030).
Heiðarvígasaga is generally believed to be the oldest of all
the sagas, dating from about 1200. Thus it has become the crit-
erion for dating other sagas and scholars have used it as a basis
for their understanding of the sagas in their formative stage and
have drawn conclusions from it about the nature and origin of
the sagas as a genre. At the same time, most scholars believe
that Heiðarvígasaga is chiefly based on oral tradition and they
have attributed as little as possible of the story-matter to the
writer. My own research does not support these time-honoured
ideas about the age and characteristics of Heiðarvígasaga.
Heiðarvígasaga has been poorly preserved. The first part of
it, or the whole account of Víga-Styrr, which is without pro-
per beginning, has not been preserved except in an 18th-cen-
tury manuscript written from memory, mostly by Jón Ólafs-
son of Grunnavík. Every scholar who has examined Jón’s re-
produced version has agreed that in spite of obvious errors,
chiefly in the names of people and places, it still provides a
surprisingly reliable representation of the original story. The
second part of Heiðarvígasaga, however, or nearly the whole
of the story about Barði Guðmundarson, has been preserved
in an old vellum manuscript, Sth. 18, 4to, to which Jón Ólafs-
son’s version can be traced. Although the preserved text of
the saga is incomplete and faulty and this admittedly casts
some doubt on its source value, I have, with due reservation
and after careful study of the text, concluded that it is reliable,
as have earlier scholars.