Gripla - 2021, Blaðsíða 283

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an innovation in Rafn’s edition and is preserved only in the edition-derived
manuscripts. No relationship between Griplur and RHG, nor between
the younger saga and RHG, can be proven based on the verbal similarities
and the contents of the subsequent adaptations. Therefore, they must be
independent of each other.
The sources of 19HsG appear to be more complicated to reveal. Despite
the extensive amplifications in 19HsG whose sources lie outside of the
Hrómundar saga tradition and the numerous changes on the level of the
style, structure, and content, in many cases, 19HsG is a better saga than
17HsG in terms of its narrative coherence. The present study has shown
that the materials originating from both Griplur and 17HsG are present
in 19HsG, but it is uncertain whether the saga-writer of 19HsG based the
story on a written account (or accounts) of Griplur and 17HsG, or whether
they committed the story to writing from memory. The saga-writer seems
to have consciously used both sources and in some cases provided addi-
tional details originating from Griplur which are omitted in 17HsG, as for
example an additional dream of Blindur based on stanza VI:25. In other
cases, they chose to follow 17HsG against the rímur, as for example in the
occurrence of the place name Úlfasker in both sagas but not in Griplur. It
is equally possible, however, that the saga-writer had a written account of
only one manifestation of the story and supplied additional information
from another manifestation from memory. Finally, we cannot exclude
the possibility that 19HsG is actually based on the lost rímur by Benedikt
Jónsson Gröndal (1762–1825), meaning that the merger of Griplur and
17HsG would have taken place before 19HsG was committed to writing;
nevertheless, we do not have any means to prove or disprove this hypoth-
esis as this intermediate text is lost.
This scenario, involving an intermediate step in the tradition in the
form of the lost rímur, could explain some of the corruptions present in
19HsG that we are unable to explain using the evidence at hand. An exam-
ple of this is the number of years of military experience that Hröngviður
or Kári had. It is somewhat easier to imagine that the saga-writer of 19HsG
used as the basis for the story a set of rímur in which the information
from 17HsG and from Griplur was already merged, rather than imagin-
ing that they sat with two competing accounts of the story, one in verse
and the other in prose, and created a hybrid of the two. The intermediate
HRÓ MUNDUR IN PROSE AND VERSE