Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 349
Gripla XXXIV (2023): 347–373
JÓ N KARL HELGASON
“SHOULD SHE TELL A STORY …”
In Quest of Eiríkur Laxdal’s Poetics
I
in 1987, a 200-year-old work of fiction by Icelandic author Eiríkur
Laxdal Eiríksson (1743–1816) was published for the first time. Titled Saga
Ólafs Þórhallasonar (The Story of Ólafur Þórhallason, hereafter referred to
as Ólafssaga) it had previously been available only in manuscripts. It is the
story of a young man who grows up in the northern part of Iceland but
travels far and wide around the country, encountering outlaws and elves,
among others, along the way. Tales of varying length told by some of the
individuals Ólafur meets, primarily women, interrupt the story of his own
travels. The result is an intricately layered tale, with many of the stories-
within-the-story woven into the overarching narrative and affecting the
reader’s understanding of it. Another prose work by Eiríkur, Ólandssaga
(Utopia) preserved in a single manuscript and first made available in print
in 2006, has a similarly complex structure.1
Scholars placing Eiríkur’s writing within the context of literary his-
tory have generally taken one of three viewpoints. Some who encountered
Ólafssaga in the nineteenth century and even later seem to have regarded it
as a (rather poor) collection of Icelandic folk tales.2 This view can be rep-
1 Þorsteinn Antonsson and María Anna Þorsteinsdóttir prepared both stories for publica-
tion. Þorsteinn’s afterwords to Ólafssaga and María Anna’s MA thesis about the book
are the most thorough discussions of Eiríkur’s life and work, but they have also written
extensively on Ólandssaga. See Þorsteinn Antonsson, “Höfundurinn og sagan,” in Eiríkur
Laxdal, Saga Ólafs Þórhallasonar. Álfasagan mikla, eds. Þorsteinn Antonsson and María
Anna Þorsteinsdóttir (Reykjavík: Þjóðsaga, 1987), 373−427; María Anna Þorsteinsdóttir,
Tveggja heima sýn. Saga Ólafs Þórhallasonar og þjóðsögurnar, Studia Islandica 53 (Reykjavík:
Bókmenntafræðistofnun, Háskóli Íslands, 1996); Þorsteinn Antonsson and María Anna
Þorsteinsdóttir. Útsýni til Ólands. Um uppruna, hugmyndir, viðhorf og samhengi Ólandssögu
eftir Eirík Laxdal (Reykjavík: Sagnasmiðjan, 2018).
2 See Þorsteinn Antonsson, “Höfundurinn og sagan,” 418−25; Steingrímur J. Þorsteinsson,
Skáldsögur Jóns Thoroddsens, vol. 1 (Reykjavík: Helgafellsútgáfan, 1942), 18.