Gripla - 2023, Síða 368

366 GRIPLA
second for foolishly taking her at her word and believing Álfhildur’s slan-
der. Just as in the medieval French legends, or a typical detective mystery,
additional information is revealed throughout the narrative, forcing read-
ers to continually reevaluate how they perceive individual characters and
events.
V
In her fundamental 2006 study, Tveggja heima sýn (View of Two Worlds),
María Anna Þor steins dóttir examines how Eiríkur Laxdal recycles various
Icelandic folk tales in Ólafssaga.36 She highlights, however, that while the
work is “firmly rooted in the oral storytelling tradition, it concurrently
bears clear marks of the author distancing himself from that tradition.”37
That same year, Matthías Viðar Sæmundsson writes in a history of
Icelandic literature that while Ólafssaga is “on the border between oral
and written narrative techniques,” the author manages to “weave a co-
hesive story out of the contradictions of his own day and age.”38 Sveinn
Yngvi Egilsson makes a similar claim in a recent history of Icelandic
literature, as does Lena Rohrbach in her article about paratextual ele-
ments of Ólafssaga.39 Margrét Eggertsdóttir makes even a stronger claim
in A History of Icelandic Literature, also from 2006, when she argues that
Eiríkur Laxdal was not only an original writer but in fact “far ahead of his
contemporaries […]. The character of Ólafur is like characters in modern
or postmodern literature [...] fractured and self-contradictory.”40
In this article, Ólafssaga has been analyzed from a different point
of view. When the content, structure, and characterization of the work
36 María Anna Þorsteinsdóttir Tveggja heima sýn, 143−234.
37 Ibid., 242.
38 Matthías Viðar Sæmundsson, “Sagnagerð frá upplýsingu til raunsæis,” 184.
39 Sveinn Yngvi Egilsson, “Leiðin til nútímans,” Íslenskar bókmenntir. Saga og samhengi, vol.
2 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag, 2022), 452; Lena Rohrbach, “Subversive
Inscriptions.”
40 Margrét Eggertsdóttir, “From Reformation to Enlightenment,” A History of Icelandic
Literature, ed. Daisy Neijmann, Histories of Scandinavian Literature, vol. 5. (Lincoln and
London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 249−50. María Anna Þorsteinsdóttir simi-
larly compares Eiríkur’s work to twentieth-century modern and post-modern novels by
Thor Vilhjálmsson and Lawrence Durrell. See María Anna Þorsteinsdóttir, Tveggja heima
sýn, 42 and 53.