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of various early Oriental narratives, including Sindbād-nāmah (The Seven
Sages), a story cycle which was originally written in Persian, Sanskrit, or
Hebrew and reached Europe through Arabic, Greek, Latin, and finally
French translations and rewritings. The Seven Sages became a widely popu-
lar text during the Middle Ages, influencing for example the legendary
Icelandic saga Egils saga einhenda og Ásmundar berserkjabana (The Story of
Egil One-Hand and Asmund Berserkers-Slayer, 1300s).9
This article is devoted to the structure of Ólafssaga. The discussion
is largely built around Tzvetan Todorov’s writings on nested narratives
in his collection of essays Poétique de la prose (The Poetics of Prose, 1971).
In one of its early chapters, Todorov explains his approach by consider-
ing the difference between literary criticism and poetics, with regards to
modern linguistics. The linguist’s task, he explains, is not to interpret
the meaning of individual sentences but rather to discover the rules and
customs underlying the language system. Similarly, poetics as an academic
discipline should not seek to judge or interpret individual works but rather
to understand and explain literature as a form of expression and shed light
on the structures and customs of literary creation. Todorov, who was
influenced by Russian Formalists, admits that the danger with poetics is
that its conclusions will be too general. On the other hand, he places little
stock in literary criticism that merely aims to rearrange the text or restate
the meaning of a particular literary work. Such an interpretation can dis-
solve “into the work-as-object to such a degree that it risks vanishing into
it altogether.”10 He believes it is best to find a happy medium between
these two extremes so that the specific illuminates the general and vice
versa. In most of the chapters in The Poetics of Prose, Todorov focuses on
Hughes (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989); Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel,
Escher, Bach. An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Brian McHale,
Postmodernist Fiction (London, New York: Routledge, 1987), 112−30.
9 See Gottskálk Þór Jensson, “‘Hvat líðr nú grautnum, genta?’ Greek Storytelling in
Jötunheimar,” Fornaldarsagornas Struktur och Ideologi. Handlingar från ett symposium
i Uppsala 31.8−2.9 2001, eds. Ármann Jakobsson, Annette Lassen, and Agneta Ney
(Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2003), 193. Lena Rohrbach points out that the embed-
ded narratives in Ólafssaga are called “þættir” and compares them to “þættir” in medieval
Icelandic manuscripts, such as Flateyjarbók. See Lena Rohrbach, “Subversive Inscriptions.
The Narrative Power of the Paratext in Saga Ólafs Þórhallasonar,” forthcoming in
Scandinavian Studies.
10 Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1977), 35.