Gripla - 2021, Page 260

GRIPLA258
is well known to literary historians of Iceland, but perhaps escapes the
attention of non-specialised audiences, is that these two forms, sagas and
rímur, coexisted in the literary landscape of Iceland for many centuries, and
various stories travelled freely between them, changing forms from prose
to verse and back.3
The phenomenon of poetry-based prose and prose-based poetry existed
in medieval and early modern Iceland across all genres of Icelandic litera-
ture, but when it comes to certain genres, such as, for example, legendary
sagas (fornaldarsögur), the fact that many sagas have poetic counterparts
can be considered a key characteristic. At the same time, the number of
studies devoted to this phenomenon has traditionally been relatively low.
Researchers tended to focus either on the prose manifestation of the story
or on its metric manifestations, rarely engaging in a discussion of the re-
lationship between subsequent literary manifestations of the same story
or the process of adaptation per se. Similarly, younger adaptations of older
narratives were usually ignored, due to their secondary position in relation
to their older and more original counterparts. Luckily, our understanding
of Icelandic literary production from a diachronic perspective is expanding,
as this attitude has been changing in the past few decades, with studies by,
among others, Peter Jorgensen (1990; 1997), Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir
(2001), and Philip Lavender (2020).
Among the narratives that have an extremely rich transmission and
adaptation history is a story of Hrómundur, son of Gripur (or Greipur),
which exists in many literary manifestations created at different periods of
time, in different styles and genres, and in different languages. The story
of Hrómundur used to exist in one form or another in the Middle Ages,
as according to Þorgils saga og Hafliða – a part of the thirteenth-century
Sturlunga compilation – Hrómundar saga was recited at the wedding feast
in Reykhólar in the year 1119 to entertain the wedding guests (Brown, ed.
1952, 17–18; Brown 1946–53; Foote 1953–57). The contents of that story
may have been to a certain extent different from what we know from ex-
tant adaptations dealing with the same material, since some of the episodes
(1938; 1949; 1952), and Stefán Einarsson (1955), as well as more recent works by Davíð
Erlingsson (1987; 1989), Vésteinn Ólason (1993), Hughes (1980; 1982; 2005), and Sverrir
Tómasson (2005; 2012).
3 As an introduction to the subject of coexistence of the saga and rímur forms – with focus
on rímur-based sagas, see Jorgensen (1990).