While the Icelanders were immersed in their literary activities, the Norwegians appear to have been content to confine themselves largely to religious writings and courtly romances based on southern models, chiefly translations of foreign originals. Exceptions include some 12th-century works in Latin on the history of Norway, and the 13th-century manual of courtly advice Konungsskuggsjá (‘King’s Mirror’). Even the early Old Norse historical works that were written in Norway—Ágrip probably by a native Norwegian but Fagrskinna conceivably by an Icelander (see Einarsson, B. 1985:cxxxi)—appear to have been better known and to have excited more interest in Iceland than in Norway, judging from the preservation of the manuscripts in Iceland and the impetus they gave to the creation of later kings’ sagas. The kings of Norway themselves tended to look to Icelanders for the writing of histories of this kind, as in the cases of Sverris saga and Hákonar saga, the biographical sagas of kings Sverrir (d. 1202) and Hákon (d. 1263), both of which were commissioned by their respective monarchs from the pens of Icelandic saga-men.

Some continental Scandinavian scholars have sought to minimize the literary uniqueness of the Icelanders. For instance, the Norwegian Knut Liestøl (1929:7-28) maintained that oral family sagas of some kind had existed in Norway from ancient times, basing his view on the curiosity that stories of this type aroused among Norwegians in the 19th century and on folktales written down at this time and resembling the Icelandic sagas in their genealogical interests. To explain why the Norwegians failed to commit these stories to parchment in the 13th century as the Icelanders had done, Liestøl appealed to specific external conditions in Iceland that he claimed had been exceptionally conducive to literary creation of all kinds.

It is undoubtedly true that the Norwegians would always have told stories for their own and other people’s amusement: this practice appears, to varying extents, to be common to all peoples. However, it remains the case that saga writing achieved a far greater impetus and breadth among the Icelanders than the Norwegians, and this may in large part have been due to the special nature of their settlement society (see Schier 1975).

Other explanations for this difference between Iceland and Norway have been suggested by the Dane Hans Bekker-Nielsen and others (1965:135 ff). Most of these ideas center around the belief that the Norwegians did indeed produce a fair amount of writing but that it has simply not survived. Such theories, however, must be treated with skepticism, since a reasonable number of old manuscripts have been preserved from Norway, only many of them were written by Icelanders, either working at the Norwegian court or produced in Iceland with a view to export (see Karlsson, S. 1978, 1979). The Norwegian manuscripts we have contain nothing to suggest that anything like the same kind of historiographical tradition existed in Norway as we find in the sagas of Icelanders.

There thus seems little reason not to take the testimony of Theodoricus and Saxo at face value and accept that the Icelanders were, to an appreciable extent, set apart from the other peoples of Scandinavia in the world of letters of the 12th and 13th centuries. To explain this distinctive position, various factors can be adduced: one, as mentioned, is the generally conservative nature of settlement societies in matters such as customs, traditions, and stories, but it is also worth bearing in mind that Iceland was not, originally at least, a purely Scandinavian country but had, at the time of the settlements, been a cultural and ethnic melting pot of people from both Norway and the Gaelic British Isles (see Sigurðsson, G. 1988).

In the works produced by Icelanders we find a world view that reflects a very different culture from the ‘Mediterranean’ culture that came to the North with the Church, and we may suppose that the roots of this culture lie in the lands of the North and stretch back long before the coming of Christianity, before eventually flourishing in Iceland. In the writings of the 13th-century Icelander Snorri Sturluson—his Edda, a handbook for poets based on myths, edda poems, and dróttkvætt verses by himself and others; his Heimskringla, the fullest and most systematic saga of the kings of Norway from earliest times down to his own day (which in passing preserved about a seventh of all the dróttkvætt verse we still possess: see Frank 1985:162); and perhaps the first of the sagas of Icelanders, the life of the poet, farmer, and viking Egill Skallagrímsson (see Hafstað 1990; Kristjánsson 1990; Ólason, V. 1991)—the author shows little sign of having assimilated large amounts of the Latin learning of the Middle Ages (see Faulkes 1993). We can assume that Snorri learned to read and write at Oddi while still young, and he was later elected to the highest secular position in the country, that of lawspeaker. He ought thus to have had ready access to all the available sources of medieval Latin learning. But Snorri’s learning as it appears to us in the writings attributed to him bears witness first and foremost to a man highly educated in the oral culture and lore of his own people, in knowledge that was passed on from man to man and added to and changed by each generation, and that constantly took on the shape of the present while preserving material that went back to the mists of antiquity. Snorri was so fully at home in this learning, the laws, genealogies, stories, and poems, that it must have taken him all his ‘school years’ to build up the fund of knowledge he needed to write the books he left behind—while still leaving him time to become a highly regarded chieftain of national standing by the age at which youngsters nowadays are just finishing junior high school. To say the least, Snorri’s works show lit- tle sign of an author fired with spiritual devotion, immersing himself in the scholastic and religious literature of the medieval Church.

An upsurge in research into learned influences on the Prologue to the Edda followed the work of Ursula and Peter Dronke (1977), who attempted to account for Snorri’s positive attitude toward the heathen past in light of various scholastic writings by the Christian neo-Platonists of the 12th century—an attitude for which they say he could have found learned support among a number of Christian authorities. This approach was taken up by others and has led to a deeper understanding of the Edda, especially particular aspects of the Prologue and its ideological connections with learned works that Snorri may have been familiar with (see Faulkes 1979, 1983; Frank 1981), and Snorri’s treatment of the poems upon which he based Gylfaginning and Skáldskaparmál (Schier 1981). The theological context underlying the work as a whole has been studied by Heinrich Beck (1993), building largely upon Baetke, and by Gerd Wolfgang Weber (1986a; 1987), though Weber is in no doubt that Snorri knew both poems and prose narratives about the gods and stories that he integrated into the Edda (see Weber 1993:197; see also Tómasson 1996:10-13). The most thorough treatment along these lines in recent years is that of Margaret Clunies Ross (1987), who examines Snorri’s conceptual framework and presentation of material in light of Latin scholastic works on language and poetics.

Putting all the evidence together, the story of Þórr’s fishing expedition emerges as one of the best known and best attested myths of the Scandinavian heathendom. The sheer variety of the sources that refer to it provide an unambiguous indication that the myth rests on ancient roots and almost certainly, in some form, constituted an element in the belief system of the peoples of the North prior to the arrival of Christianity. It is rare to be able to provide such strong grounds for believing in the existence of a Scandinavian myth as in this instance. The case thus serves to increase our general faith that the extant written sources for Scandinavian heathendom must be in some way linked to a living oral tradition going back to ancient times. This in turn acts as a powerful counterargument to all notions that Snorri and his contemporaries were in the habit of ‘making up’ their myths themselves.

Snorri’s account of the meeting of Þórr and Hymir and the preparations for the fishing differ substantially from the one given in Hymiskviða, but when it comes to the fishing expedition itself the two coincide on a number of points. It is therefore instructive to compare the two versions. It seems universally agreed that Snorri did not use Hymiskviða when writing Gylfaginning; the poem thus has independent value as a source, and in fact the account in the poem is in other respects so unlike Snorri’s that there is no way of conflating the two. The poem thus provides confirmation that the story was widely known in differing versions.

It is also notable that Snorri only rarely follows the wording of the poems, though there are many correspondences in individual words with both Hymiskviða and the skaldic verses. This might be seen as evidence both of a formalized tradition of poetic diction and of an intentional independence on Snorri’s part in his use of the poems. We might even question whether it is justifiable to speak of the skaldic verses as being ‘sources’ at all; the independent selection of material and the personal choice of diction might rather be taken to suggest that Snorri was familiar with the story on its own, in prose form, and so did not need to piece it together out of skaldic stanzas he knew from elsewhere.

The existence of an independent narrative of this sort is further supported by the fact that none of the poems makes mention of Þórr’s feet going through the bottom of the boat. There are two main possible explanations: either Snorri simply failed to record any verse or verses that included this detail (the poems in question are known only in extremely fragmentary form), or he knew the story divorced from any poems, i.e. the story formed a part of a living prose tradition in Snorri’s times.

But which of these two possible explanations is the more likely? It is a priori extremely improbable that Snorri included all the poems he knew in his Edda. The fragments he quotes bear witness to a much greater body of material in the background; for instance, it is his general practice to quote only half stanzas, of which he in most cases would presumably have known the other halves. And it is also highly improbable that a man with such a vast fund of ancient poetry at his command would have been unable to recount the stories on which the poems were based without needing to rely specifically on these same poems as a kind of source. This kind of piecemeal reconstruction of stories is the province of scholars who come across fragments of a lost culture and try to fit them back together again in a kind of academic jigsaw puzzle. In addition, working practices of this sort are inconceivable unless the fragments have a fixed form, either iconographic or in writing, which enables them to outlive the culture that produced them; when the fragments are all preserved orally, out of context and misunderstood, they are unlikely to survive for long. And in an oral culture, once something has been forgotten it can never be recovered.

It therefore seems reasonable to assume that Snorri knew both poems and stories, and thus that his prose retellings can stand as original sources every bit as much as the poems he quotes from. If this is the case, we need hardly be surprised if there is not always complete agreement between the versions of stories reflected in the prose and in the verse. If both poems and prose accounts of the gods were still current in Snorri’s day, we also have cause to doubt the value of research aimed at classifying the multiforms of the stories by their age; for instance, in this case according to whether Þórr kills the serpent or not in a particular poem and whether this is then the original version of the story, though, as noted above (p. 11), scholars discussing this myth have generally permitted themselves to indulge in speculation of this sort without comment. It would be closer to the mark to assume that at any given time there would have been various versions of the story in circulation, without any one of them precluding any other. Looked at this way, arguments based on the form of the sources—that the intricate and fixed form of skaldic verse ensured a stricter word-for-word preservation at the oral stage than was possible with prose accounts—hold considerably less weight. With myths, the elements are usually so fully formalized and conventionalized that they can survive for long periods in oral transmission, in either prose or verse, and there is no reason to expect word-for-word preservation other than in the case of specific and universally familiar formulas.

Applied to our research, this conclusion can change the ways in which we handle and interpret multiforms of myths, while also having a broader affect on how we evaluate the sources of Scandinavian mythology and the strength of oral tradition in the 13th century. For instance, it lends support to the belief that Snorri was writing from a living tradition that was familiar to him and his contemporaries, even if by this time the tradition was in all probability in decline; the very fact that Snorri felt the need to record this learning in book form suggests that it was already on the way to becoming moribund. Before modern scholars start accusing Snorri of ‘misunderstanding’ or ‘misinterpreting’ something ‘correct’ or ‘original,’ we need to examine closely exactly what he and his contemporaries say in their writings and take it as genuine evidence of the tradition as it existed in their times. What it might have to say about the ancient stories, myths, and customs of the North in pre-Christian times is, of course, a quite different matter and a subject for other research; but the business of Þórr’s foot points at least to a tradition that was homogeneous throughout the North from viking times all the way up to the time when literate men in the southwest of Iceland took up their pens and started compiling books in the first half of the 13th century.

The 19th century saw great advances in classical philology, both in the areas of biblical research (see Culley 1986) and Homeric studies. On the Homeric poems two main schools of thought emerged according to the emphasis placed, on the one hand, on the part of tradition in the shaping of the poems and, on the other, on the creative input of the individual poet Homer (see Foley 1988:1-18). The role of scholarship thus became either to elevate Homer’s poetic genius or to identify the sources of individual episodes in older sources. This quest for origins shed light on many aspects of the texts but on occasion led scholars some distance away from the actual object of their research, the works themselves, as memorably described by the English medievalist J. R. R. Tolkien (1936) in his lecture ‘Beowulf: the monsters and the critics.’ Tolkien compares the Old English poem Beowulf to a splendid tower dismantled by scholars in order to investigate the provenance of individual stones and the fragmentary inscriptions found on them, while the master builder stands by and weeps because from the tower he had once been able to look out upon the sea.

The origins of the bookprose theory can be traced to the work of the German scholar Konrad Maurer (1871), who applied methods of textual research developed in Germany in the field of classical literature to a study of Hœnsa-Þóris saga. Though academically the discussion of the origins of the sagas centered around the application of scholarly methods similar to those used more generally in the study of ancient texts, both classical and medieval, it is notable that the heyday of the bookprose theory in Iceland coincided with a growing sense of national identity and awareness among Icelanders during (and after) the struggle for independence from Denmark. Much effort was employed in demonstrating to the Danes and the world at large that medieval Icelandic literature was the product of an impressive body of learning that had been brought to Iceland and flourished there in the hands of a vigorous and independent people prior to their submission to the king of Norway in 1262. The sagas were used to lend weight to the Icelanders’ demand for independence. The Icelanders could point to the sagas with pride and say that they provided irrefutable evidence that the Icelandic people were and had always been a culturally separate and independent nation; they had preserved their cultural heritage both in language and literature, unlike the Norwegians and later the Danes, who for all that had ruled over the Icelanders and even oppressed them in times of hardship.

With the lines thus laid down, the debate turned around what in particular texts might be of oral origin and what might be traced to other written works. Within this debate, the written was associated with the learned Latin tradition, aesthetics, and authorial stamp, and there was a general assumption among scholars of the bookprose school that oral accounts could not assume any hard form: they were intended merely to preserve isolated fragments of historical information rather than serve as artistically created stories. The most extreme bookprose men, such as the German Walter Baetke in the 1950s, even went so far as to assume that, if it could be shown that a particular episode in a saga conformed to aesthetic principles of narrative, it was automatically suspect historically and thus the work of a literate author who was consciously creating a saga rather than writing up traditional tales from oral transmission (see Baetke 1956:49-54).

To be sure, the concept of oral tradition was never entirely ignored by the bookprose men of the Icelandic school. But it was reserved to account for the ‘leftovers’ in their studies; once the sources, models, and artistic input of the ‘author’ had been identified and highlighted, there was always a residue of minor details for which there were no apparent sources, and these could be said to derive from oral tradition. There was a constant reluctance to tackle the problems inherent in postulating an oral tradition behind the literary texts; instead, little by little the attention was turned ever more toward the supposed learned Latin influences in the writing of the sagas. So it is worth spending a little time over the question, Where precisely do these learned influences manifest themselves?

The Latin learning introduced by the Church was already firmly established by the time the Icelanders started to write the kings’ sagas and sagas of Icelanders. This led Sigurður Nordal (1953), Turville-Petre (1953), and later Lars Lönnroth (1965:15 ff.) to the view that Icelandic literature developed as a domestic efflorescence upon a stem of Latin historiography. However, others have found this development as Nordal and Lönnroth envisaged it—broadly from foreign saints’ lives and hagiographical writings to royal biography, which then merged with an internal tradition to produce the sagas of Icelanders—far from self-evident. For instance, in his critique of these ideas Michael Chesnutt observes that the subject matter of the sagas of Icelanders is not such as to suggest itself automatically to clerics intent on putting their native language to literary use:

It is possible to divide the suggested learned influences of foreign texts, mainly Latin, on the Icelandic sagas under three broad headings:

1. Individual motifs and short episodes in the sagas derived directly from foreign writings.
2. Ideological influences. Hermann Pálsson has propounded the view that various of the sagas of Icelanders can be seen as a kind of fable constructed around proverbs or well-known sayings, or as romans à clef based on real incidents from 13th-century history, and that they reflect more than anything the theological and philosophical preoccupations of that century.
3. Various features of the narrative technique of the sagas; i.e. how their elements are put together to create integrated works using methods developed in historiographical writing in continental Europe in the 12th century.

Influences on the ideological background of the sagas. We must now look a little closer at the suggestion that the Icelandic sagas reflect the preoccupations of 12th-and 13th-century philosophy and theology. The purest example of this approach to saga research is to be found in Hermann Pálsson’s studies of Hrafnkels saga (1962a, 1966, 1971). Pálsson strongly rejects the idea that in writing the saga the author was in any way interested in the preservation of historical material from pre-Christian and viking times; the saga should rather be read as something produced by a Christian man, for Christian men, in a 13th-century world of Christian values (1971:10, 15). Neither the authors of the sagas nor their readers had any real knowledge of the pre-Christian past, and the sagas can thus only be understood in light of the cultural environment in which they were produced.

To Pálsson, Hrafnkels saga is a kind of test case for how the sagas were created. He takes the view that it was written a little after the middle of the 13th century and points to stylistic similarities with Gyðinga saga (‘Saga of the Jews’) by Abbot Brandr Jónsson (d. 1264), a compilation based on various Latin texts (see Wolf, K. 1995:lxxxviii-c). From these supposed similarities, Pálsson suggests that Brandr was also the author of Hrafnkels saga. According to genealogies, Brandr was a descendant of the Hrafnkell mentioned in Landnámabók, and Pálsson takes the view that there is more reason to believe in the historicity of the Hrafnkell of Landnámabók than his namesake in the saga (see also p. 197 ff). Pálsson (1962a: 25-68; 1971:12-22) also sees Hrafnkels saga as a kind of roman à clef, whose ‘real’ subject is the tragic events suffered by Brandr’s family in the middle years of the 13th century, as described in Svínfellinga saga, part of the Sturlunga saga compilation. On this basis he comes to the conclusion that the saga of Hrafnkell is built around people and incidents from the 13th century, which the author of the saga deliberately archaizes by use of information gleaned from texts such as Landnámabók. These incidents are then examined in light of 13th-century Christian ideas on ethics and morality.

A number of earlier scholars, including Gordon (1939) and Sigurður Nordal (1940), had already shown that Hrafnkels saga was not reliable as a historical source and should therefore rather be read as a piece of creative fiction, i.e. a conscious effort on the part of an author to write a good story. Pálsson goes further and claims that the author was not remotely interested in presenting his readers with information about their pre-Christian past; his main aim had been to give them a conscious lesson in ethics, and the saga can only be interpreted in this way.

Pálsson (1971:16-7) also points to features he considers evidence of an author deliberately employing distancing techniques, such as the introduction of names familiar from other sagas like King Haraldr hárfagri (‘the Fine-Haired’) and Þórólfr Skallagrímsson, the brother of the poet Egill. He considers the passage on Hrafnkell in Landnámabók to be the main historical source for the first two chapters of the saga. To illustrate the saga author’s supposed use of his sources, the two passages are reproduced below (my italics):

As well as bringing in known characters from the past, Pálsson believes that the author deliberately spiced his story with familiar bits and pieces of archaizing color, such as heathen customs, sacrifices and feasts, priests and burial mounds. He is also guilty of anachronism when he speaks of Icelanders traveling to Mikligarðr (Constantinople) at the time of the saga, i.e. in the 10th century, since, on the basis of other sagas, Pálsson claims that such journeys did not get under way until the 11th century. Pálsson (1971:19) cites as another example of historical ‘error’ in the saga that it seems as if the author believed that new land was still being claimed and settled in the Eastern Quarter of Iceland at the time when the action takes place. This he considers a blatant anachronism, since anyone who had read Landnámabók would have known immediately that this could not be the case; Landnámabók is quite specific that the Eastern Quarter was fully settled at an early date, while according to the chronology of the saga Hrafnkell was driven out of Hrafnkelsdalur many years after the end of the settlement period.

Pálsson’s arguments call for three main comments:

1. Traditional oral tales are equated with historical reliability.
2. Pálsson attempts to show that the ‘author’ used written sources to obtain historical information for his story, but then goes on to say that the author used these sources with such lack of care that it is obvious he had no intention of writing history.
3. Pálsson cites a number of what he considers serious historical ‘errors’ and anachronisms on the part of the ‘author’ of the saga, basing his knowledge of the ‘true’ facts on the very sources that the ‘author’ is supposed himself to have used when seeking information about the past.

In view of the general unreliability of oral tradition, we are likely to come to a deeper understanding of the ancient sagas and how they work if we leave aside all accusations of historical error and speculations about possible inaccuracy in the way the writers used their sources. From the examples cited by Pálsson, it in fact seems better to suppose that whoever wrote Hrafnkels saga never made use of any written sources such as Landnámabók and related historical writings. The saga is too unlike such works for this to be at all probable. The most natural explanation for the so-called errors in the saga is that the person who wrote it got his material from traditional oral tales. As is well known, looking to such tales for strict historical accuracy is a waste of effort, all the more so when the tales are rooted in events that took place three hundred years earlier. But in spite of this, we must allow for an unbroken chain of telling throughout the intervening period, with the stories undergoing changes each time they are told. This makes it extremely unlikely that bits of old material would have been tacked on to the saga to divert the audience’s gaze away from the 13th century.

It is, of course, perfectly true that authors of all ages have used knowledge of local conditions and geography to gives their stories a ‘real’ setting, without there being any need to assume that these stories are based on ancient accounts, let alone ancient events. Nor is it unlikely that the class divisions that constitute an important theme in the saga reflect conditions in the 13th century rather than the settlement period. And it is extremely probable, as Davíð Erlingsson (1971) has said, echoing Pálsson, that the ethical values of the saga are closer to the teachings of the 13th-century Church than to the heathen outlook of the 10th century, whatever that may have been.

The error in the argumentation, however, lies in the belief that, if a writing from the 13th century is not thoroughly heathen and historically accurate on events from the 10th century, it must then be a work of pure imagination by a 13th-century ‘author’ without any connection to oral tradition. This argument runs counter to the basic and proven fact that stories pre- served orally are subject to constant change and, just like purely written works, are influenced by the present and colored by the prevailing values of their times. Prehistorical characters are always viewed through the eyes of the times when the stories about them are told.

Thus, Pálsson fails to demonstrate convincingly that Hrafnkels saga is not, to some extent at least, based on oral accounts purporting to tell about Hrafnkell. The parallels with events of the 13th century are certainly interesting, but there is nothing to stop contemporary events from shaping and coloring stories from earlier times in oral tradition. The person who wrote the saga might also have noted similarities between contemporary events and things related in the ancient stories, and so it is by no means inconceivable that he modified the story and tailored it to the expectations that people made of written works, for instance so that the saga’s message to his own times might stand out more clearly. It is perfectly plausible that whoever wrote Hrafnkels saga did so with an eye to providing his contemporaries with a lesson in ethics—as Pálsson has stressed repeatedly in his studies; this is something storytellers of all ages are prone to dreaming of. But this purpose certainly does not mean that he could not have used oral tales as the basis for his saga.

This is not the place to analyze the individual examples presented by Pálsson in support of his contention that Hrafnkels saga exhibits a pervasive influence from proverbs and Christian ethics. The conclusion remains the same: that such influences do nothing to reduce the likelihood of the saga being based on oral tales about Hrafnkell. It is perfectly conceivable that some of these tales go back in some way to the 10th century and actual events. They must, however, have changed over time and been colored by the personal tastes and attitudes of their storytellers and audiences. The writer of the saga was undoubtedly familiar with 13th-century Christian ethics and would have read the schoolbooks that came with an education provided by the Church. It might also well be that he recognized some sort of connection between his school learning and the oral tales he had heard about Hrafnkell and thus set out deliberately to write a saga demonstrating the validity of certain ethical rules, so it need come as no surprise if the saga reflects problems the writer might have had to struggle with as part of his education.

In addition to all this, it should not be forgotten, as Davíð Erlingsson (1971:12) pointed out, that there is often no way of deciding for sure whether a particular ethical feature is typical of Christianity or heathendom. There are views and attitudes that are common to all humanity and have little to do with the specific ethical codes promoted by individual religions. Bjarni Guðnason (1965) has taken this a step further and maintained that the course of the saga is determined by the heathen and humanistic attitudes of the edda poem Hávamál. The dominant ethical imperatives espoused in Hrafnkels saga are self-knowledge, wisdom, honor, and vengeance, and thus akin to what may be deduced of the heathen view of life as it appears in Hávamál; the central concept of Christianity, forgiveness, says Guðnason, is notable by its absence from the saga of Hrafnkell.

Influences on the structure of the sagas. The third and final area in which critics have sought to identify influences from Latin writings in the sagas concerns their structure and narrative technique. A valuable contribution to this debate was made by Carol Clover in her book The Medieval Saga (1982). Clover relates the Icelandic sagas to the wider narrative tradition of the Middle Ages, with particular emphasis on the contrast between the sagas and the Aristotelian precept of literary works as self-sufficient wholes with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Medieval stories tend to be un-Aristotelian in being ‘open’ at both ends, and Clover sets the sagas within the context of this tradition. The sagas start a long time before the main course of events gets underway and often relate large numbers of incidents that appear to have no direct relevance to the story, if viewed from an Aristotelian literary perspective. Thus the sagas of Icelanders generally have extended prologues and continue to include apparently adventitious details even after the action has reached the main events. Additionally, the sagas are open ended: they sometimes close with short résumés of the characters’ later lives and list their descendants down to the time when the saga was written, just as they list their forefathers at the beginning.

This, according to Clover (1982:41), indicates that the sagas are not to be seen as discrete units but rather as parts in an overall conceptualization of the history of Iceland reaching right back to the settlement period—just as each individual king’s saga is not so much a self-contained entity as a constituent element in an inclusive history of the kingdom of Norway. The unAristotelian features of saga style should not therefore be viewed as structural defects, but rather as integral to what people expected of stories, how they thought stories ought to be. These formal features offered a more detailed and discursive presentation of events (Latin amplificatio), as well as allowing the saga writers to assemble a number of disparate stories under one hat. Both these features are found widely in medieval literature, which tends to treat the same events again and again but with constant accretions of new material into the narratives. Another feature common in medieval literature, including the sagas, is that originally unconnected deeds tend to accumulate around just a few heroes—just as fugitive and anonymous verses tend to become ascribed to a limited group of named poets. Similarly, saga style shares with works from mainland Europe techniques of bipartite narrative, used to create tensions and allow significant events to be highlighted and intensified; events from an earlier part of a saga are made to re-occur in some later part, generally more impressively and set at a higher level. As a simple example we may cite the structural parallels in Egils saga, where the account of Egill’s Norwegian forefathers sheds light on later events in the saga.

Clover uses such features to argue that the writers of the sagas were benefiting from a learned European tradition in the construction of their works. Another authorial device viewed by Clover as an importation is the way saga authors allow two stories to run side by side. One of the chief characteristics, she says, of oral narrative is that storytellers present events in strict chronological order and avoid multiple storylines. Thus it should be taken as evidence of written literature when we meet phrases in the sagas like ‘nú ferr tvennum sǫgum fram’ (‘now two stories progress’), ‘víkr nú sǫgunni til’ (‘now the story turns to’), ‘nú er þar til at taka er áðr var frá horfit’ (‘now we must return to where we left off before’). Similar phrases appear in Latin writings, and even if we cannot demonstrate direct models for the Icelandic formulas in Latin works it is the general technique that is significant; having adopted the technique, the saga writers were perfectly capable of developing their own phraseology. This technique provided the key to much more complex and sophisticated modes of narrative than had previously been known or would have occurred in oral narratives. By allowing two stories, or even more as in Eyrbyggja saga, to move forward concurrently it became possible to break up narrative time in a way that constitutes an important innovation of medieval European literature. Clover (1982:147) maintains that this technique plays a key role in the Icelandic sagas and is not paralleled before the experiments of 20th-century authors aimed at creating disjunctures of time and plot.

That the Icelandic sagas should have features in common with learned writings of the Middle Ages need come as no surprise. Much more remarkable is just how different the Icelandic literature is from the works that are supposed to have influenced it. The explanation can hardly be other than that in Iceland there was a strong and independent tradition of oral stories that merged with the learning brought in from abroad and modified it to its own rules and demands. Without the learning there could have been no sagas as we know them, since it was the learning that made it possible for the native tradition to find expression in written form. But it is equally clear that this learning on its own and unsupported could not have engendered the Icelandic sagas and the literary tradition as we know it from 13th-century Iceland; as proof of this, we need only look to mainland Scandinavia, where the same learning existed, but produced only negligible results in terms of original literature.

A related approach applied by various scholars, originally deriving from the field of medieval Biblical and theological studies, centers on notions of the multiple ambiguity of texts (see Weber 1987, Tómasson 1988:251-3). Much of the research on the sagas conducted in this vein has been characterized by entertaining, if highly speculative, interpretations (see, for instance, Pálsson, E. 1990), but tends to skate over an important fact—that the Icelandic sagas do not contain any key as to how they should be interpreted, such as we usually find in genuine medieval allegories—and thus modern scholars in this area have been apt to let their imaginations run far beyond what is likely to have been in the minds of the writers as they wrote their sagas and their readers as they read them. Perhaps a more promising way forward is along the lines suggested by Torfi Tulinius (1995:203-9; 2001), of looking to ideas we know were familiar to Icelanders of the 13th century of hidden meanings within skaldic verse and seeing if we can identify similar semiotic forms in the prose works produced at this time. This kind of comparison is not without its problems and there are various approaches that might produce results—or not, as the case may be.

There is thus no way around the need to discuss and adopt a position on theories of the origins of medieval texts like the Icelandic sagas, since the position we adopt on origins will influence all our attempts to interpret the texts. All research is conducted in light of a theory of origins, if only in the choice of subjects that the researcher chooses to deal with.

Many bookprose scholars would, it seems, disagree, claiming that their approach is based not on theory but on method. As an example we may cite the comments of Einar Ól. Sveinsson (1958:7-8) in his book on the dating of the sagas, which may be read as a kind of statement of principles of the ‘Icelandic school’:

Nordal and Sveinsson appear to have encouraged a similar conviction among their disciples: that the theorizing was all on the part of those who advocated oral tradition; that they themselves were concerned only with the written texts as they were preserved; and that since, unfortunately, the oral tradition had fallen silent it was no longer a fit subject for academic inquiry.

However, this attitude involves a danger of raising scholarship on unreliable grounds. Anyone who deals with medieval texts needs to work with some kind of theory of origins, and it is better to be aware of this and make allowances for the limitations of the research than to live in a fool’s paradise where everything is safe and secure and in perfect working order long after the walls have started to fall in around us. It is thus impermissible to claim that the question of origins is settled and no longer of any relevance; it is ever-present and demands a response from all who are involved in scholarship, demands that they be clear in their own minds, and to others, about where they think the most probable answers lie before they can proceed any further. You cannot both have your cake and eat it.

How then can we investigate oral tradition in the Middle Ages when all we have to go on are written sources and there are no sound recordings? Are there any means available to us that might help in tackling the question of what oral tradition in medieval Iceland was really like?

To this we may add that even if the references to orality are taken at face value they are not actually of much use to us. They do not explain whether the texts were floating, i.e. constantly changing—as it seems most oral texts are unless they have a sacred or ritual function and there is a trained group of specialists responsible for their verbatim preservation (see Finnegan 1988:86-109); they do not explain how the oral texts came to be written down, e.g. whether learned performers dictated them to scribes or whether the writers and oral performers were one and the same; they do not say how widespread the texts were in their oral form, when and where they were performed, by whom and for whom, how they were passed on from generation to generation, and so on. The direct references to orality are thus of sadly little use when it comes to the questions we would like to have answers to, and we must therefore turn else- where for a more reliable method of studying oral tradition in medieval Iceland and its part in the writing and understanding of the sagas of Icelanders.

At the point reached here, scholarly discussion of oral tradition stalled. The research interests and methodology of the bookprose school became utterly dominant and all speculation about oral origins was pushed to one side. However, around 1960 news started to filter through to Western scholars of Vladimir Propp’s (1928; first English edition 1958) discoveries of formalized and recurrent patterns in the structure of Russian folktales and legends, as well as Albert B. Lord’s (1960) descriptions of his and Milman Parry’s research into the oral poets of the Balkans, and the idea arose that certain fixed and replicable elements of form, ranging from short formulas to longer episodes and even whole stories, might be used as evidence of originally oral material within written texts. A number of studies appeared based on formula counts and the identification of common structural units, both of which were held to indicate the presence of such material. By the use of these methods, attempts were even made to distinguish what was oral from what was written within individual works.

The new ideas represented in these writings have been given the covering label of ‘formalist-traditionalism’ or ‘new traditionalism,’ a movement which established itself firmly in Iceland with Óskar Halldórsson’s book on Hrafnkels saga (1976). Halldórsson demonstrated the existence in the east of Iceland of stories concerning the events related in the saga and went on from here to interpret the saga in light of oral tradition. Various critics had difficulties coming to terms with the sea change in attitude that this book represented, for instance Peter Hallberg (1977) and Hermann Pálsson (1978, 1979). Halldórsson answered this criticism in 1978 with an excellent survey of developments within the field of saga research and reiterated his view that the sagas were independent and integrated works of art, but with roots in orality. Hughes 1980 provided a detailed review of Halldórsson’s book, setting it in its intellectual context and detailing the discussions it had provoked. A further contribution to this debate appeared with Jesse L. Byock’s book (1982) on the feuds in the sagas, which put forward a number of challenging ideas on links between oral narratives and the handling of real disputes during the Commonwealth period; Byock envisaged an interaction in which feuds engendered sagas, which in turn offered people lessons in how to deal with and solve similar kinds of disputes—not unlike Eric Havelock’s (1963) ideas on the function of the Homeric poems in Greek society, which Havelock saw as a kind of knowledge bank and model for ethical and social behavior.

In other areas of medieval studies, attempts to apply Lord’s methods to identifying the oral within written texts produced only mixed results. The main problem was that it soon became clear that so-called oral features were open to contradictory interpretations, as signs of genuine orality or as creative input on the part of writers. The same features could thus point in opposite directions, just as the direct references to oral tradition in the sagas had for scholars of the previous generation. It was, to be sure, beyond doubt that traditional poetry and storytelling at the oral stage were grounded on fixed formulas and that their material was integrated into prestructured themes. The problem was that the same aesthetic methods were also available to authors who were not performing in front of a live audience (see Benson 1966); these techniques were simply a recognized way to tell a story or construct a poem, and they survived long after people had started to compose their works in silence with quill in hand.

Robert Kellogg’s (1979) contribution to this debate was to introduce in this context the terms ‘traditional art’ on the one hand and ‘high art’ on the other, with an intermediate stage which he designated ‘popular art.’ Traditional art is not the creation of a particular artist, but rather communal and conservative in nature; high art is the innovative and personal work of an author. Popular art combines the two, being based on common property but at the same time created by people with the deliberate intention of producing something new. Oral culture is always traditional in this sense, while high art only appears with written culture. But even after the influence of literacy began to make itself felt, people continued to create new works in the spirit of traditional artistic forms; people’s ideas of what art was had been shaped by the tradition and so the saga authors and poets continued to write using traditional modes based around the formulas and narrative themes that had been handed down to them. According to Kellogg, it is not until Dante that we find the emergence in medieval European literature of personal originality, and with it high art. Accordingly, a work written by a single author might still display all the characteristics of oral literature, because that was how it had to be to be considered a work of art in the eyes of its audience. Throughout the first centuries of writing authors continued to struggle with the intractable task of holding the attention of their readers and listeners, and to this end they resorted to the methods that had proved their effectiveness in the oral performance of poems and stories. As a result, ‘oral features’ continued to live a good life at the authorial writing desk.

Along with these studies there grew a clearer understanding of something that Lord (1960) had touched on in his chapter on ‘Writing and oral tradition’—that oral tradition could only be recorded successfully with the aid of modern technology. Oral performers never used the same words when performing to a single plodding scribe as when entertaining a live audience, and the task facing literate storytellers who might want to transfer their own oral artistry to the page was fraught with difficulties (Lord 1986)—a problem all too familiar to schoolteachers when trying to get reasonably articulate pupils to write essays. It is thus simply not possible to speak of medieval ‘oral texts.’ Even the popular tales that the folklore collectors fired by the ideals of 19th-century Romanticism were supposed to have taken down direct from the lips of ordinary people were in fact dressed up in literary style; what had been oral entertainment had been converted into written literature, to be enjoyed in private by silent reading of a printed book. Had the classic 19th-century collections of folktales been published as ver- batim transcriptions of modern electronic recordings, they would in all probability never have achieved the success that they did as literature; however good it may sound in performance, oral storytelling simply does not transfer directly to paper (see Sigurðsson, G. 1996:409-27).

So it might appear that we are left to conclude that it is simply not possible to use written texts in our search for orality in the way that has been done hitherto. It is just not feasible to sift the oral from the written in the sagas, because they were all written using the same stylistic techniques. But rather than throw up our hands in despair, we need to look again at the fundamental questions we wish to ask. Perhaps the preoccupation with finding ways to identify where the oral and the written meet in written texts is the wrong question to ask and has simply led us down a blind alley.

Unfortunately, much research conducted in the spirit of comparativism has been vitiated by the lumping together of societies and literary genres so different that they cannot justifiably be compared in any plausible manner, and the method has consequently laid itself open to criticism. Using information from societies that are amenable to modern research to shed light on ancient cultures requires great care; scholars need to take account of the peculiarities of each society and avoid the temptation to take conditions from one society and superimpose them blindly onto another. What we can do, however, is to use new information gathered from living oral societies to formulate new questions of the limited sources at our disposal.

Perhaps the most important thing to emerge from modern-day field studies of oral societies is that many of the basic assumptions that scholars formerly made about the nature of orality were, quite simply, wrong—though obviously there was no consensus of ignorance and not all of the mistakes listed below apply equally to all previous scholars. Among the most prevalent misconceptions have been:

1. That oral tradition necessarily maintains information accurately for centuries on end.
2. That the oral can be equated with what might be historically true.
3. That artistic expression precludes oral origins, and vice versa.
4. That oral stories cannot survive for two or three hundred years among peoples and families living in a single location. This misconception has even led some scholars to assume that people in oral societies are incapable of having any genuine knowledge about their pasts (see Guðmundsson, H. 1997:42, 81, 296).

If all these assumptions are wrong—and they have, to varying extents, provided the basis for most older ideas about orality and remain remarkably persistent even today—we must also conclude that all ideas based on them are in urgent need of reappraisal. In other words, we need to start from scratch and work our way through the written sources in search of clues about and residual elements of the oral tradition as it once existed in medieval Iceland; only then can we determine whether orality might affect the way we understand and interpret a saga or particular literary text, and if so in what ways.

Meulengracht Sørensen’s work centers on the functions of the written sagas and places less weight on the extent of any debt they may owe to oral tradition, other than to say that the sagas are written in the spirit of the tradition and are supposed to sound as if they derive from real oral accounts (pp. 53-6). He thus takes a rather different line from the one attempted here to try to add to our understanding of the sagas. The same applies to some extent to Vésteinn Ólason 1998, who examines the world of the sagas of Icelanders from a literary perspective, though often with explicit regard to the tradition lying behind them.

The formalist-traditionalist approach has breathed new life into many of the ideas behind the freeprose theory, while discarding its emphasis on historicity and the verbatim preservation of texts in oral tradition. Formalist-traditionalism teaches that artistically created traditional oral tales were an important element in the writing of the sagas but were never put together as integrated wholes before the time they were committed to parchment. But despite the great progress that has been made in our understanding of the laws to which oral tradition is subject, little has been done to address the question of how the way in which we view their origins might affect how we view the sagas as works of art, i.e. what it means for our interpretation of individual sagas to assume an oral tradition somewhere in the background. General scholarly debate in the field of oral studies has, however, started to edge its way towards aesthetic questions of this sort. Instead of squabbling about whether particular works come from oral tradition or are purely written literature, we now speak of works being grounded in oral tradition; and instead of bickering about whether formulas and formulaic narrative themes are evidence of oral origins or stylistic tics on the part of the writers, we now attempt to assess their aesthetic value (see Foley 1991). Thus it becomes possible to consider how the aesthetics of stories and poems may have been shaped by the oral tradition that both they and their audiences were elements in, and to demonstrate how familiarity with the tradition may have helped audiences in their interpretation of the works.

One of the most significant recent accounts of the ways in which long stories survive in oral tradition is to be found in an article by Carol Clover from 1986. She notes that such stories are not usually told from beginning to end in the way we are accustomed to with written works; instead, it is generally assumed that the audience is familiar with the story material and the main characters beforehand, and a typical performance extends only to individual incidents from, to use Clover’s term, the ‘immanent whole,’ the conceptual saga as it exists as the sum of its parts at the preliterary stage. This immanent whole is never told in full and exists only in the minds of the members of the traditional culture, and only achieves an integrated form when the story comes to be written. This is how Clover sees the origins of the written sagas. Clover relates her ideas to the so-called ‘þáttr theory’ (see Andersson 1964:61-4), a theory of origins that had previously been discarded because scholars assumed verbatim recording from oral tradition and could not see how short episodes like the ones we know as the íslendingaþættir (see p. 31) could have been combined to form full sagas like the sagas of Icelanders.

John Miles Foley’s book Immanent Art (1991) owes a direct debt to Clover’s article and represents a major contribution to the aesthetical interpretation of oral culture. Foley takes his central concept of ‘immanence’ from Clover and works out from the idea that the meaning of traditional works in oral preservation is founded on formulas and prefabricated themes that build up a series of links to other works within the tradition which treat of similar characters and events; this differs fundamentally from the idea that long dominated thinking in this area, that such elements were first and foremost mnemonic devices to help storytellers and poets perform fluently and coherently. Thus Foley envisages a traditional superstructure that colors meaning and interpretation: no aspect of a text can be understood simply from its immediate context; each requires to be viewed in light of the tradition as a whole, wherever similar circumstances occur. This overall view, says Foley, helps people to make sense of what is happening through hints and allusions, without everything needing to be spelled out specifically on each occasion. This differs from textual relationships between written works (intertextuality, rittengsl) in that in oral tradition it is meaningless to talk about one work coming before another and another copying it, or about one particular work having correspondences with another; it is rather a case of all works obtaining their material from a single tradition. As a consequence of this characteristic of oral art, certain texts often appear to be deeply flawed if judged from modern literary perspectives; but what would be a clear defect in a written work by a single author might be a feature of the artistic technique of an oral storyteller, something which Foley calls ‘immanent art.’ Foley also stresses that, when discussing medieval and even older texts, we cannot properly regard them as ‘oral,’ even if we have good reason to believe that they tell of the same characters and events as figured in the oral tradition of their times. Instead, he speaks of ‘orally derived texts,’ texts built out of material from oral tradition. By such means we can relate discussions of the origins of old Icelandic literature to developments that have taken place in recent decades in the fields of philology and literary theory and which are characterized by, among other things, a growing interest among scholars in oral performance and the reception of medieval texts among their original audiences (see Schaefer 1993).

Scholarly thinking has now reached a point where it is safe to say that the premises on which we base all discussion of the relationship between ancient texts and oral storytelling traditions are now quite different from what they were only a few decades ago. Research into living traditions has shown that many older ideas were, to a greater or lesser extent, incorrect, but because of the resistance between different academic disciplines it has proved difficult to mediate this new knowledge beyond the ranks of the ethnologists and folklore specialists. Literary specialists continue to analyze ancient texts using the methods of 20th-century literary criticism, and historians and archaeologists continue to reject the sagas as sources of preliterate times and concentrate largely on the age of the manuscripts, which in turn are the special province of the paleographer. Anthropologists have taken refuge in electing to view ancient texts as sources for the times in which they were written, a course that scholars in other disciplines often find decidedly unsatisfactory. Despite the chilly reception it has been accorded among other academic disciplines, the change that has taken place in our understanding of oral stories and poetry as art can be compared with the revolution in the natural sciences in the 19th century that followed the publication of Darwin’s ideas on natural selection. In the humanities, however, things move slowly and within many disciplines there still seems to be no awareness that this revolution has taken place. This in itself gives us food for thought, to observe how long it takes for new knowledge to come to the fore and produce results where it is needed.

The proper task of the humanities is to talk about man and human culture under the banner of the search for truth—however elusive the truth often proves to be. This search sometimes involves the use of different methods associated with different disciplines. But scholars are apt to suffer from tunnel vision and are often reluctant to take any interest in what goes on outside the walls of their own departments. There is always the danger of forgetting the task we all have in common and believing that the ultimate aim of research is to ascertain the history of the documentary sources, or of some literary genre, or of whatever ideas are most in fashion at any moment in time. With such a narrow perspective it is all too easy to lose sight of the main point, of which the particular methods of research form only a part.

According to the methods of literary history, we begin from a fixed starting point and explain the development of a particular literary genre in terms of works appearing in a definite order and one book leading to other books, and so on. People tend to think they have identified the origin of all kinds of ideas when they first come across them in books. There is a danger of solipsism here unless we bear constantly in mind that stories and poems existed without writing, that individuals and societies had a particular mental image of their pasts, that world views were constructed, laws established, judgments passed, and religions practiced, and that people engaged in genealogy, navigation, astronomy, poetics, and rhetoric—all without being able to read or write. Medieval studies that do not take account of what can be ascertained about oral culture of this kind run the risk of bypassing medieval life and culture entirely and losing themselves within the narrow task of tracing just the sources and their provenance.

People had always told stories and performed poems about gods and heroes and kings and settlers, and recited the law and trained young people to memorize and preserve traditions. Much of this was not touched by writing in any way. The art of speaking and telling did not change, nor the art of composing poetry, and learned men continued to hold their honored position in society—at least to start with. It took a long time for people to accept the precedence of the written word over the testimony of the wise. The main changes brought about by the arrival of writing were that religion became associated with books, or the book (i.e. the Bible), that people acquired a wider outlook once they could read in books about things from far away in place and time, and that it became possible to produce bigger works, structured in a more organized way. An external chronology was established, and knowledge began to pile up as libraries came into existence and the learned tradition of the Church was added to the knowledge and culture that society already possessed.

This general epistemological background, the result of research into living oral traditions in the latter part of the 20th century, has completely revolutionized the foundations underlying all study of the Icelandic Middle Ages. In the research that follows, I attempt to build on these foundations and take them a step further.

The main subject of the research that follows is oral tradition in medieval Iceland and the sagas of Icelanders. The research considers the methods available for investigating oral tradition at the time when the sagas were created, and how this tradition might affect our interpretation of individual sagas and our choice of subjects for research. In this I make use of the body of knowledge on oral tradition that has built up over recent decades to ask new questions of the ancient sources, regarding a) the oral tradition that we know existed in 12th- and 13th-century Iceland in connection with the law and poetry, and b) the possible interrelation- ship between the written sagas and the oral story tradition. Broadly, there are two main ques- tions that need to be considered, on the one hand concerning the tradition, and on the other concerning the interpretation of individual texts. These questions are, however, closely related, since it is difficult to talk about an unspecified oral tradition behind saga texts without discussing the oral tradition in general and being explicit about what can be known of it.

In the foregoing Introduction I have traced the history of research relating to the main questions to be addressed. Particular emphasis has been placed on how great a role Latin and scholastic learning may have played in the writing of the sagas and the methods and evidence scholars have applied when discussing oral tradition and the part of orality in the origins of the sagas: viz. a) direct information about storytelling and the performance of poetry, and references to oral stories in particular texts, and b) research into the structure of sagas and oral tales, the ‘prefabricated’ diction of formulas, and thematic narrative patterning. Both approaches have proved unsatisfactory because a) the descriptions in the sources fail to answer the questions we would like to ask, and b) the structural units, formulaic diction, and narrative themes that were held to be a sure sign of orally preserved works can all equally appear in works produced with pen in hand. The discussion of oral tradition and the oral origins of sagas thus stalled on the methods that could be applied.

The research itself is divided into three sections. In the first section I look to field studies of oral traditions for ideas and information that may shed light on traditions that we know existed in medieval Iceland. The intention is not to superimpose conditions from various societies scattered around the world today directly onto society in medieval Iceland, but to come up with new questions for which answers may be sought through fairly conventional textual criticism of the ancient sources. The two areas considered are:

1. The role of the lawspeakers of the Icelandic Commonwealth and what we can find out about these men from the meager sources available, particularly as regards a) their attitudes to the writing of the laws, b) the party politics surrounding the election of the lawspeakers, and c) the growing role of the Church in 11th-, 12th-, and 13th-century Icelandic society.
2. The range and scope of the oral poetic tradition in 13th-century Iceland as evidenced by the examples of verse quoted by Óláfr Þórðarson hvítaskáld in the Third Grammatical Treatise (Icelandic Þriðja málfrœðiritgerðin). By investigating where the poets he refers to came from and when they lived, we can build up a picture of the literary horizons of a man of the 13th century who was well versed in both the oral, secular learning of his family, the Sturlungar, and the Latin learning associated with the Church.

The second section deals specifically with a group of sagas from the east of Iceland and attempts to assess whether their internal relationships are better explained as literary borrowings or through an oral story tradition shared by them all. These internal relations manifest themselves in three areas:

1. Four characters that appear in more than one saga: the two father and son pairs Brodd-Helgi Þorgilsson and Víga-Bjarni, and Geitir Lýtingsson and Þorkell Geitisson. Here the focus is on whether and to what extent their characterizations match and/or conflict in the sources, and what this may signify.
2. The genealogical information given about Helgi Ásbjarnarson and the Droplaugarson brothers in the different sagas. The questions addressed here concern the function of the genealogies and whether they can be supposed to derive from authorial ‘source work’ or whether there is anything to suggest that they are based on a general knowledge of genealogy shared by both the writers and their audiences.
3. Accounts of the ‘same’ incidents in different sagas, viz. a) the battle of Bǫðvarsdalr, b) the story of how one of the Droplaugarson brothers’ ancestors obtained a wife abroad, c) the drowning of Helgi Ásbjarnarson’s first wife, d) the killing of Þorgrímr torðyfill, and e) the killing of Gunnarr Þiðrandabani. Tentative conclusions are drawn about the relationships between the different accounts and what they tell us about the genesis of the written sagas in light of their interplay with oral tradition.

The third and final section turns to the sagas and truth, specifically the historical reality that may lie behind sagas based on a unified and unbroken story tradition going back to the Viking Age and the settlement period. I look particularly at the picture passed down to us by the saga tradition of the lands explored by sea-rovers from Iceland and Greenland to the west and south of Eric the Red’s settlement in Greenland and which they called Helluland, Markland, and Vínland. According to this tradition, these men discovered an island lying north of the mainland to the southwest of Markland and named the area nearby Vínland. The tradition also mentions places by the names of Leifsbúðir, Kjalarnes, Furðustrandir, Straum(s)fjǫrðr, and Hóp—and says that on one journey the explorers came upon a one-legged man on the far side of some mountains they had previously seen from Hóp. The main areas of interest here are how theories of saga origins have shaped people’s ideas about the Vínland sagas, and how advances in archaeology, textual criticism, and, not least, our understanding of oral tradition may be used to shed new light on the Vínland question. It will be shown that, with the change in premises advocated in this research, it may be possible to move Vínland studies a step forward toward the solution of an otherwise extremely intractable problem.

The final chapter contains some general comments on what allowing for an oral tradition behind the Icelandic sagas means for the principles on which research is based and the conclusions that can be drawn from it. Two particular examples are taken for consideration: the scholarly debate surrounding the connections between Vatnsdœla saga and Finnboga saga ramma; and the way in which Hœnsa-Þóris saga refers to and works with its audience’s familiarity with the mythological tradition and how this forms an essential part of the interpretation of the saga.

It should be stated here that, because of the different methods used to locate information in the works under discussion, I have not been completely consistent in my use of texts. Section II is based largely on the indexes and notes in the Íslenzk fornrit series and the quotations are therefore from these editions. Elsewhere I have made extensive use of a computer-based corpus of the sagas in modern Icelandic spelling. For this English translation an attempt has been made where possible to substitute the modern Icelandic spelling with the ‘Fornrit standard’ spelling for Old Icelandic.