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from the Arthurian riddarasogur,3 Nonetheless, the Matter of Britain
rarely appears in unadulterated form in the indigenous romances. They
contain an admixture of elements borrowed from disconcertingly diverse
sources. Arthurian motifs take on a new and different life in the late
medieval romances, the authors of which did not hesitate to blend native
and foreign themes. Icelandic authors blended apparently disparate ele-
ments culled from a variety of contemporary and older, native and for-
eign works, to arrive at a new synthesis: the indigenous romance. In an
effort to be cosmopolitan and to appeal to their audience’s interest in the
foreign and exotic, Icelandic authors sent the characters peopling the
romances to the far reaches of the earth in search of adventure. The
introduction to Vilhjålms saga sjods presents an extreme but not atypical
synopsis of the geographical setting of more than one romance:
Saga fressi hefsk fyrst i Englandi, ok ferr siban ut til Saxlands,
ok jjå til Grikklands, ok {}vi næst vestr i Afrika allt ut undir
solarsetrit, ok Jraban i subrhålfu heimsins til hinnar miklu
borgar Ninive, ok |raban ut at heims enda til hinna miklu
fjalla Kakausi.4
(This story begins in England, passes on to Saxland, and then to
Greece, proceeds to Africa right out to where the sun goes down,
thence to the great city of Ninive in the Southern hemisphere, and
thence to the mighty Kakausi mountains at the end of the world.)
When in 1934 Margaret Schlauch surveyed the vast expanse of motifs in
the Icelandic romances, she pointed out how formidable an undertaking
a study of the indigenous romances is:
To give an account of every one of these plots, together with an array of its
sources and analogues, would be to cover almost the world’s fiction from very
early times to the end of the Middle Ages. The Icelanders were bafflingly eclec-
3 Einar 6l. Sveinsson underestimates the impact of the Arthurian matter on the indige-
nous Icelandic romances, and ignores the occurrence of the several motifs and episodes
borrowed from the Arthurian riddarasogur. See Viktors saga ok Blåvus, ed. Jonas
Kristjånsson, Riddarasogur, II (Reykjavik: Handritastofnun Islands, 1964), pp. CCVII-
CCVIII.
4 Agnete Loth, ed. LMIR, IV, Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, Ser. B, vol. 23 (Copenhagen:
Munksgaard, 1964), 3:1-6.
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