Gripla - 2021, Blaðsíða 266

GRIPLA264
safe to agree with previous scholarship that 17HsG is based on the medi-
eval rímur.
The Relationship between 17HsG and 19HsG
The hitherto unknown Hrómundar saga Greipssonar (19HsG) is four times
longer than the seventeenth-century saga (17HsG) and contains a number
of motifs and episodes which lie outside the Hrómundar saga tradition.7
Since these episodes, often originating in the romance tradition, do not
help to establish whether 19HsG uses 17HsG, they will not be discussed
here. Instead, this section focuses on some differences in the structure,
style, and contents of these two narratives in order to illustrate how they
treat the same material.
Already at the very beginning of the story, clear differences in the
structure and style of 19HsG can be observed in comparison to 17HsG.
The two sentences that open the saga in AM 601 b 4to (henceforth A601),
the best-text manuscript of 17HsG, correspond to a whole paragraph in
British Library Add 11,109 (henceforth B11109), the oldest manuscript of
the younger saga known to date.8 The difference lies not only in the length
of the introduction but also in its style and structure, especially regarding
the details concerning particular characters.
From the opening of A601, we learn that there was a king in Denmark
named Ólafur, who was the son of Gnoðar-Ásmundur, and that there were
two retainers in Ólafur’s army, the brothers Kári and Örnúlfur, who were
great warriors. The introduction in B11109 is much more verbose, and
from it we learn that Ólafur was one of the petty kings in Norway, not
Denmark, and that he was generous and brave; that Ólafur had two sisters,
Dagný and Svanhvít, who were exceptional women; and that there were
two retainers in Ólafur’s army, the brothers Bildur and Vóli, who were
deceitful and evil.
The only thing these two passages have in common is the name of
the king, Ólafur, who in A601 is the son of Gnoðar-Ásmundur, while
in B11109 his father is not mentioned at all. In B11109 the evil brothers
7 An introductory study to the nineteenth-century saga and its multiple innovations has been
presented elsewhere, see Kapitan 2021.
8 All references to 17HsG use loci from A601, while all references to 19HsG use loci from
B11109.