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returns to his tent to fetch a rope - and to take another meal. Thereupon
he returns to the cliff, ties the rope around the lion, who climbs to the top
and hauls Sigurdr behind him. Finally, the hero kills the young dragons
and with the lion’s assistance removes the gold. Once again the compan-
ions enjoy a common meal and then recline for the night.
The succinct account of the rescue of a lion, as we know it from Ivens
saga, has developed - through the accretion of details borrowed from a
variety of sources, and augmented with matter supplied by the author’s
own imagination - into an expansive, leisurely narrative. A single event,
the rescue of a lion, to which one unit of time is devoted in the sagas
previously discussed, has evolved in Sigurdar saga pogla into a series of
scenes stretching over several days and locations. The stereotypes of the
knight as rescuer and of the grateful lion have become transformed into
plastic characters: the hero who does not rush precipitously into action,
who is concerned with the practical details of everyday existence; the
anthropomorphized lion who demonstrates in deed his complementarity
as companion to his rescuer.26
That the Arthurian matter should have contributed to the repertoire of
themes and motifs of the indigenous Icelandic romances is not surprising
when one recalls that these later compositions are imitative. One is not
quite as prepared to come upon echoes of the matiére de Bretagne in
Icelandic folk tales. For example, the Tristan legend reappears in various
versions of the Saga af Tristram ok Isdi, that contains a conglomeration
of elements drawn from the Tristan story as well as from other sources.27
The grateful-lion motif from Ivens saga also recurs in a work which Einar
Ol. Sveinsson has categorized as “reines Marchen,”28 Vigkæns saga kua-
hirdis.29 The tale is preserved only in a late nineteenth-century manu-
script, IB 774 8vo, and dates from post-Reformation Iceland.30 The saga
relates how Vigkænn, a farmer’s son and the king’s cowherd for three
years, finally obtains both princess and kingdom after having demonstra-
26 For further discussion of the grateful lion motif in Icelandic narrative - especially in
regard to German analogues- and art, see Richard L. Harris, “The Lion-Knight Legend in
Iceland and the ValJjjofsstadir Door,” Vialor, I (1970), 125-45.
27 See Paul Schach, “Tristan and Isolde in Scandinavian Ballad and Folktale,” SS, 36
(1964), pp. 289-95.
28 Einar Ol. Sveinsson, Verzeichnis islåndischer Marchenvarianten mit einer einleitenden
Untersuchung, FF Communications, 83 (Helsinki: Academica Scientiarum Fennica, 1929),
p. LVII.
29 Einar Pordarson, ed. Sagan afVigkæni kuahirdi (Reykjavik, 1886).
30 Einar Ol. Sveinsson, Verzeichnis islåndischer Marchenvarianten, p. LVII.
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