Gripla - 2023, Page 355
“SHOULD SHE TELL A STORY …” 353
starts telling Ólafur where her people come from and later of her parents’
courtship, her own birth, the loss of her mother, and her father’s mad-
ness, which is the result of a curse. After listening to the tale, Ólafur helps
Þórhildur break that curse. She thanks him and offers him her assistance
should he ever find himself in trouble. After that, Ólafur heads home with
the sheep. Numerous other nested stories interrupt the primary storyline
in subsequent chapters.
Unlike Odysseus, Ólafur seldom takes on the role of narrator, but it is
sometimes noted that he tells others what has happened to him in previ-
ous chapters. A good example is from Ólafur’s first encounter with the
elf woman Álfhildur who asks him “að segja sér allt af högum hans síðan
hann tók að leita fjár föður síns. Tók hann til frá upphafi og sagði söguna
þar sem hér var komið, snjallt og áheyrilega, og undraði flesta.” (“to tell her
all that has befallen him since he began searching for his father’s sheep.
He started at the beginning and recounted the story up to the present mo-
ment, with great skill, to the wonder of many.”)16 Furthermore, the third-
person narrator of Ólafssaga occasionally implies that the work is based on
Ólafur’s own account. Describing his departure, the narrator explains, for
instance: “Litast þá Ólafur um og sá að sól skein í heiði, og hefir hann svo
síðan sagt að hann hafi þá tvo hluti fegursta séð: plássið, í hverju hann var
staddur, og Álfhildi, er stóð fyrir framan hann.” (“Ólafur looked around
and saw that the sun shone in a cloudless sky, and he has since said that
he saw then two of the most beautiful things: the place where he stood,
and Álfhildur, who stood before him”, 48) Considering these examples,
Ólafssaga, just like The Odyssey, can be described as a narrative of narra-
tives, a work of fiction that “speaks its own creation.”17
III
Todorov continues discussing nested narratives in the chapter “Narrative-
Men.” At the outset, he explains how characterization in classic works
of literature is a-psychological. In The Odyssey and The Thousand and One
16 Eiríkur Laxdal, Saga Ólafs Þórhallasonar. Álfasagan mikla, eds. Þorsteinn Antonsson and
María Anna Þorsteinsdóttir (Reykjavík: Þjóðsaga, 1987), 41. All quotations from Ólafssaga
are translated by Julie Summers. For the rest of the article, I will refer to this source in the
main text with page numbers within brackets.
17 Ibid., 61.