Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 353
“SHOULD SHE TELL A STORY …” 351
one or two literary works. Among these are The Odyssey, The Thousand and
One Nights, and the medieval French story cycle La Queste del Saint Graal
(The Quest of the Holy Grail), each of which shares common features with
Ólafssaga and can shed light on Eiríkur Laxdal’s poetics.
II
In a chapter titled “Primitive Narrative,” Todorov critiques the widely held
belief that traditional narrative literature is characterized by a simple style
and structure that was tainted by later writers who succumbed to modern-
ist trends and a growing demand for originality. Such a view assumes that
a “natural” narrative is cohesive, serious, psychologically realistic, and free
from contradiction, repetition, and digressions. Todorov struggles to see
which older literary works this view is built upon and cites examples of
contradictions, repetition, and digressions in Homer’s The Odyssey. This
classical narrative is thought to have been composed in Greece in the
eighth century BCE and was translated into Latin in 1510, into French
a few decades later, and into English in the early seventeenth century.
According to Todorov, The Odyssey has a dual narrative structure, with the
hero having adventures and then telling people he encounters along his
journey about those adventures. This aspect is so prominent that Todorov
is uncertain “which of the two is the main character,” the hero Odysseus
or the narrator Odysseus.11
To give an idea of the structure of The Odyssey we can consider three of
its early chapters. In Book VII, Odysseus arrives at the palace of Alcinous
on the island of Scheria and begins to recount the treacherous voyage he
undertook to get there from Ogygja. In Book VIII, an unnamed bard in the
king’s court entertains Odysseus by singing “the famous deeds of fighting
heroes – the song whose fame had reached the skies those days: The Strife
Between Odysseus and Achilles, Peleus’ Son.”12 The song affects Odysseus
so deeply that he sheds tears. He regains the role of narrator in Book IX,
when he begins telling the king about his travels from Troy to Ogygja:
11 Ibid., 62.
12 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Roger Fagles (New York, London, Victoria, Toronto,
Auckland: Viking, 1996), 193−94.