Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.10.2003, Blaðsíða 37

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2. Date and background of Eyrbyggja saga
This edition, which concentrates on the evidence the surviving vellum
manuscripts of Eyrbyggja saga provide towards establishing its text,
cannot be concerned profoundly with its general literary and historical
nature. An excellent overview of these questions is, moreover, given by
Richard M. Perkins in his article “Eyrbyggja saga” in Reallexikon der
Germanischen Altertumskunde. Nevertheless, it seems desirable not to
neglect here an outline of its characteristics, a sketch of which follows,
with special reference to the ways in which Eyrbyggja saga tends to differ
from other Icelandic Family Sagas (to use the customary English term for
Islendingasögur). The various topics are interrelated and cannot easily be
dealt with one at a time.
The age of E, which is among the oldest surviving fragments of a Family
Saga, must of course be taken into account.45 Intemal evidence, however,
for the date of Eyrbyggja saga comes in the last chapter, where several
thirteenth-century Icelanders are named, and where the author remarks of
Snorri goði that (W text) ‘kemr hann ok uiða uið aðrar sogur en þessa bæði
uið Laxdæla saugu ... ok uið Heiþaruigs sðgu ... ’ (50.4-7). Earlier scholars
assumed that parts of this chapter, along with others, had been interpolated,
even, at one time, the whole of it. Some later scholars, though not sub-
scribing to such a complete intrusion - for the chapter as a whole brings the.
saga to an artistically satisfactory conclusion, describing, as it does, how
the bones of some of the participants are exhumed and commented on -
have felt that the reference to Laxdœla saga, at any rate, is untrustworthy.
Einar Ól. Sveinsson, in his edition of the saga, preferred a relatively
early date, that is to say that the statement that “hann kemr við Laxdœla
SQgu, sem mprgum er kunnigt” is an interpolation or refers to a Laxdœla of
a different form than that which is now known by that name.46 That
Eyrbyggja saga should be later than Laxdœla saga with its more emotional,
‘romantic’ atmosphere seems unlikely, yet there is no ascertainable break
in the text; moreover the reference to the latter is present in all the older
manuscripts. Einar Ólafur, later, in “Eyrbyggja sagas kilder” remarks that
he had once suspected the references to Laxdœla and Heiðarvíga saga
came from an interpolation but is now convinced that there are other
possibilities “som jeg ikke skal komme nærmere ind pá her.”47 Relatively
45 C/Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1958, p. 12.
46 Einar Ól. Sveinsson in ÍFIV, pp. xlv-lii, especially p. xlvii.
47 Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1968, p. 12; here he discusses the question anew. When in conversation in
1956 I (present editor) hesitatingly said to Einar Ólafur that Eyrbyggja saga felt to me like an old
text, he replied, “It feels old but” (not exact words from here) “I am now not so sure of that opinion.”