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resented by Guðbrandur Vigfússon’s comments about Eiríkur’s authorship
in a foreword to Jón Árnason’s 1861 folk tale collection:
He [Eiríkur] wrote down all the tales, both those he himself knew
and those he was told, and gathered them into a large collection.
But because the fellow was called a poet and said to be intelligent,
even eccentric, he compiled all these stories together into one as he
wished, inserting verses here and there, so that it is impossible to
know what his own contribution is and what is folklore.3
Since the mid-twentieth century, however, Eiríkur’s writing has generally
been considered to mark the advent of the novel in Iceland.4 Ólafssaga has
been viewed in this respect more positively than Ólandssaga and compared
to various eighteenth-century European novels that describe intrepid trave-
lers in unfamiliar lands. These include Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel
Defoe, Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, Nicolai Klimii Iter
Subterraneum (Niels Klim’s Underground Travels, 1741) by Ludvig Holberg,
and Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, 1796)
by Denis Diderot.5 The third approach views Ólafssaga as a product of an
3 Guðbrandur Vigfússon, “Formáli að 1. útgáfu,” Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og ævintýri. Safnað
hefur Jón Árnason, vol. 2, eds. Árni Böðvarsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson (Reykjavík:
Bókaútgáfan Þjóðsaga, 1954), xxxi. For an overview of the scholarly reception of Eiríkur
Laxdal’s life and works, in particular Ólandssaga, see Madita Knöpfle, “Conceptions of
Authorship. The Case of Ármanns rímur and Their Reworkings in Early Modern Iceland,”
In Search for the Culprit. Aspects of Medieval Authorship, eds. Stefanie Gropper and Lukas
Rösli (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2021), 252−60.
4 Steingrímur J. Þorsteinsson laid the foundation for this view and claimed Ólafssaga and
Ólandssaga marked “the advent of the Icelandic novel.” He believed the former to be supe-
rior both in terms of structure and style. See Steingrímur J. Þorsteinsson, Skáldsögur Jóns
Thoroddsens, 186.
5 See María Anna Þorsteinsdóttir, Tveggja heima sýn, 63, 137 and 239 and Matthías Viðar
Sæmundsson, “Sagnagerð frá upplýsingu til raunsæis,” Íslensk bókmenntasaga, vol. 3, ed.
Halldór Guðmundsson (Reykjavík: Mál og menning, 1996), 184−88. María Anna and
Matthías also mention a few older novels such as Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Miguel
de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605−1615). See also Örn Ólafsson, “Upplýsing í gegnum
þjóðsögur. Um Ólafs sögu Þórhallasonar eftir Eirík Laxdal,” Tímarit Máls og menningar
60/2 (1999): 95−104. These scholars also mention an older Icelandic “novel,” Sagan af
Parmes Loðinbirni (The Story of Parmes Polar Bear), thought to have been written by Jón
Bjarnason between 1756 and 1775 and inspired by the literary tradition associated with
Robinson Crusoe.