Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 364
362 GRIPLA
story is given in the very first pages, but it is incomprehensible. A
crime is committed almost before our eyes, but we do not know
its true agents nor the real motives. The investigation consists in
returning to the same events over and over, checking and correct-
ing the slightest details, until at the end the truth breaks out with
regard to this same initial history. In the second case there is no
mystery, no backward turn. Each event provokes another, and the
interest we take in the story does not come from our expectations
of a revelation as to the initial données; it is the expectation of their
consequences which sustains the suspense.31
Ólafssaga contains quite a few instances of the same events being de-
scribed more than once and from different points of view. Lena Rohrbach
has specifically addressed this feature in an article about paratextual ele-
ments of Ólafssaga, but she finds few examples of it in early Icelandic
literature.32 However, various classic works present multiple points of
view. We need only recall “The Little Hunchback” from The Thousand
and One Nights, where the lame man and the barber describe their con-
flict in different ways. But if we stay with The Quest of the Holy Grail, we
can see that Ólafur, just like the knights of the round table, takes part in
a series of events of which he himself has only a limited understanding.
The elf women in the story must repeatedly explain to him what has
really taken place.33 They also predict what will happen to him in the
future, and it sometimes becomes clear later that at the root of what has
happened is an enchantment or curse of which Ólafur himself was una-
ware. Consequently, there are many places in the narrative where one can
identify the tug-of-war between the two questions Todorov discusses; the
story variably focuses on the road ahead and on the road already traveled.
This is clearly illustrated by a trial scene of Ólafssaga in which Ólafur finds
himself facing a possible death sentence. The court case evokes some of
31 Ibid., 136.
32 Rohrbach mentions Sálus saga ok Nikanórs as one of few exceptions. Lena Rohrbach.
“Subversive Inscriptions.”
33 Cf. Lena Rohrbach, “Weibliche Stimmen – männliche Sicht. Rekalibrierungen von Gender
und Genre in der Ólafs saga Þórhallasonar,” Þáttasyrpa. Studien zu Literatur, Kultur und
Sprache in Nordeuropa. Festschrift for Stefanie Gropper, eds. Anna Katharina Heiniger,
Rebecca Merkelbach, and Alexander Wilson, Beiträge zur Nordischen Philologie 72
(Tübingen: Francke 2022), 257−65.