Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 351

“SHOULD SHE TELL A STORY …” 349
ancient narrative tradition that falls somewhere between traditional folk
tales and novels. The earliest adherent of this view is Einar Ól. Sveinsson,
who pointed out in 1940 that foreign folk tale collections like ʾAlf Laylah
wa-Laylah (The Thousand and One Nights, also known as One Thousand
and One Nights and Arabian Nights) had probably shaped Eiríkur’s writ-
ing.6 It is important to note that any one of these views does not neces-
sarily exclude the others. But although many scholars have concurred with
Einar Ólafur, there has been little direct comparison of Ólafssaga to such
classic works of literature.
Einar Ólafur explains that the narrative of Ólafssaga can be divided
“into two parts, the frame [Ice. umgerðir] and the insertions [Ice. ífellur].
The latter are narratives about men and women who cross Ólafur’s path.”7
The two Icelandic literary concepts in the quotation correspond to various
English terms describing layered narrative structures. These include em-
bedding/embedded narrative and nesting/nested narrative, but narratologists
also commonly refer to Chinese boxes and Russian dolls to explain this
sort of storytelling technique. Such pieces reveal that the two literary terms
do not describe opposite phenomena but rather two sides of the same phe-
nomenon; each nested object, tucked inside a larger one, can serve as a nest
for another object, and so on. Nested narratives can be found in the ancient
Greek epic Odysseús (The Odyssey) but are also considered a conventional
feature of postmodern literature.8 Furthermore, they are characteristic
6 Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Um íslenzkar þjóðsögur (Reykjavík: Sjóður Margrétar Lehmann-
Filhés, 1940), 103. See also Stefán Einarsson, Íslensk bókmenntasaga 874−1960 (Reykjavík:
Snæbjörn Jónsson, 1962), 269; Matthías Viðar Sæmundsson, “Sagnagerð frá upplýsingu til
raunsæis,” 184; Rósa Þorsteinsdóttir, “Íslensk og ólensk ævintýri,” Tímarit Máls og menn-
ingar 69/1 (2008): 131−35; Romina Werth, “Inngangur,” Andlit á glugga. Úrval íslenskra
þjóðsagna og ævintýra, eds. Romina Werth and Jón Karl Helgason (Reykjavík: Mál og
menn ing, 2021), 30. Some of these scholars also mention the influence of the story collec-
tion Les mille et un jours (The Thousand and One Days, 1710−1712), compiled by François
Pétis de la Croix in the style of The Thousand and One Nights. Several Icelandic translations
from The Thousand and One Days are preserved in eighteenth-century manuscripts. Cf.
Sigurgeir Steingrímsson, “Þúsund og einn dagur: Íslenzkar þýðingar og varðveizla þeirra,”
(cand. mag. thesis, University of Iceland, 1972).
7 Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Um íslenzkar þjóðsögur, 108. The quotation is taken from the English
translation of the study: Einar Ól. Sveinsson, The Folk-Stories of Iceland, trans. Benedikt S.
Benedikz (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2003), 128.
8 Numerous scholarly works address this narrative technique, including Gérard Genette,
Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980),
223−37; Lucien Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text, trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma