‘That’s my cue,’ says my father when he wants to get in with one of his stories and link it in with something someone else has just said apropos of something completely different. My interest in the oral telling of stories and reciting of verses goes back, like so much else in our lives, to influences in my childhood. At the time when I was growing up in the residential suburbs of Reykjavík, it was considered a proper sort of way of spending a Saturday or Sunday morning for fathers of mature years to get together in each other’s homes and have a glass of something invigorating and tell stories and recite verses and poems, while the mothers got on with the housework and the cooking. I suppose it was my father’s contribution to the child minding to have me with him on such occasions and let me listen in to what went on, encourage me even to put in something of my own to the conversation. My father’s guests, and he himself, appeared to possess a vast fund of verses that they would bring out to accompany their stories about past events and notable individuals, and each tale told acted as a cue for the next, and then the next after that. Even though these men—whom my aunt Ragnheiður called ‘the rubber men’ from the certain flexibility in their veracity induced by the schnapps—presumably already knew each other’s repertoires inside out and back to front, it was an unspoken rule that none of them would ever tell a story that one of the others had made his own. Each of them could give chapter and verse on where his stories came from—sometimes from personal experience, but more often from oral accounts of things that had happened in the country regions around Iceland where their families originally came from, or even lifted from printed books. But such origins did not prevent them from treating these stories as theirs and theirs alone, both through how they selected the bits and put them together, and in the contexts in which they were told. In this way they established a kind of copyright over material that was for the most part acquired from others, if we judge things from the standpoint of the modern concept of intellectual property.

My experience of the art of oral storytelling acquired on these weekend mornings broadened greatly when as a teenager I started to attend the midday sessions of the dining club Gnægtir (‘Plenty’), which met regularly every working day at my father’s law practice at Laugavegur 18 in downtown Reykjavík. Here people of all sorts came together, each with something to contribute to the lunch table, to entertain each other with their skills as raconteurs. These were wells that appeared inexhaustible, and I fear that the legal work often found itself conveniently forgotten when things got into full swing.

I never came across anything like this in books. Sometimes I tried to track down the sources that people said they had gotten this or that out of, and I scoured the volumes of Íslensk fyndni (‘Icelandic humor’) from cover to cover in search of this material—but always in vain. Now and then I stumbled on something a bit reminiscent, but nothing that came anywhere near to sitting among these people and listening to them talk. Many years later, when at university I came to read academic studies of oral cultures, it dawned on me that there, in my father’s office, I had been witness to a completely independent art form, one that cannot easily be captured in writing or set down on paper: the art of oral entertainment. [1]

When I started to study literature at university in 1979, there was much talk about sagas and novels, poems and plays, but not a word about the form of literary art I had grown up with and in my innocence believed to be a natural, everyday source of entertainment in the lives of most Icelanders. This sense of something missing grew even stronger during a winter spent in Winnipeg as part of my BA at the University of Iceland; there I sat at the feet of Haraldur Bessason and his courtiers in the Montcalm Society, where they practiced an art of conversation not unlike what I had experienced at the Gnægtir dining club—though moved to a totally different cultural environment. [2] At university, literature was studied, for understandable reasons, entirely ‘by the book,’ and when any attempt was made to discuss the esthetics or oral origins of ancient texts using the methods of contemporary literary criticism, very little use was made of examples drawn from living traditions of oral storytelling. Folklore studies, too, seemed very distant from this world that I had come to know; folktales turned primarily around beliefs in elves and huldufólk (‘the hidden people’), and students were still being led to believe that the classic collections of folktales were more or less word-for-word transcriptions taken straight down from oral tradition. This worried me, though it was a long time before I was able to put my finger on quite what it was that struck me as questionable about this book-based approach. I was well on into my university studies when I first became aware that there were areas of scholarship where the questions I was asking myself were at the very center of academic debate: how experience gained from living oral traditions might be applied to the study of ancient texts whose roots lay, at least to some extent, within such traditions. Much of what I now read struck me as obvious, being in various ways reminiscent of what I had seen with my own eyes in the circles around my father and later Haraldur Bessason, and I felt sure that others would see things this way too—if only they would take the trouble to look at the evidence. But far from it. The reaction of some people to comparative work of this kind was, and remains, like the one described by von Sydow (1922:22) among Norse scholars to the idea of Gaelic influences on the Icelandic sagas: ‘[Det] verkar […] som ett rödt kläde på en tjur’—‘like a red rag to a bull.’ Or, put another way: ‘Unsere Germanen sind nicht mit den wilden Hottentotten zu vergleichen’—‘You can’t go comparing our Germans with the savage Hottentots’—a phrase I heard ascribed to a certain Germanist when I was in Freiburg in 1995 about the use of living oral traditions from illiterate modern societies to shed light on societies in northwestern Europe in pre-Christian times. I was also told that it was not so long since these words had been uttered.

In such a stalemate I began to see that to make any headway with my Gaelic influences I would first need to put in some work on connecting the sagas to an oral tradition. One might thus say that it was the Gaelic influences that provided the ‘cue’ that finally sparked in me a serious interest in the study of oral culture and literature. This work got under way with a conference on Icelandic literature of former times that Örnólfur, Gunnar Harðarson and I arranged in 1989 under the name Skáldskaparmál [3] —a name we also used for the journal we launched the following year, starting off with articles based on papers delivered at the conference. At the conference I delivered a short paper on oral culture and the sagas, outlining various general points that I felt to be of particular significance. This led afterwards backstage to a fairly sharp exchange of views with the Nestor of Icelandic studies Jakob Benediktsson, who found my approach in the lecture rather gung-ho, as with my ideas on the edda poems [4] —I had at the time recently produced an edition of some of these poems for schools and Jakob had done me the great service of reading over it for me. Jakob was, let it be said, well at home in oral studies and told me how he had first been introduced to the subject by Halldór Laxness, who had come across the work of Milman Parry, found it interesting and challenging, and directed Jakob’s attention to it over fifty years earlier. [5]

Around the time we were organizing this conference I was writing the entries on Old Icelandic literature for Íslenska alfræðibókin [6] and found myself face to face with the classic problem of all areas of study, that of defining what we know and how we know it. This compelled me to give careful thought to the foundations on which accepted knowledge stands, for a general encyclopedia is hardly the place for information based on unproven theories and dubious premises. In my search for a secure foothold I thus had to clear away everything that depended on the disparate theories of the origins of the sagas; what was needed was hard facts, not received opinions about the age of original texts, authors, and verbal correspondences claimed as evidence of loans between one written text and another. All right, I couldn’t take the same course as Descartes in rejecting everything except his own existence: ‘Cogito ergo sum’—‘I think, therefore I am’—he said, and that was about as far as certainty went. But I was not all that much better off. I could read the sagas and poems as they were preserved in particular manuscripts, but beyond this there was not much I could feel really secure about, with the possible exception of the dating of the manuscripts; here at least I reckoned I could trust the research, to within a century or so.

Now, a good ten years on, and after much thought, reading, attendance at conferences and seminars, and writing of articles, I have put together something that I feel fulfils what I set out to achieve—and goes rather beyond it. Some of the material has already seen publication, at various stages of completion, in books, journals, and conference papers, in deference to the cardinal principle of academic life that I first heard from the lips of the linguist Helgi Guðmundsson in one of his lessons on the history of the Icelandic language—‘Publish or perish!’—which at the time seemed a rather risible eccentricity of the university system in North America. As is only to be expected, there have been many twists and turns along the way and the research has turned up various unexpected matters that it never occurred to me beforehand might find a place within the basic idea I started with, that of hypothesizing a strong oral tradition within the society that produced the Icelandic sagas and considering the implications: matters such as the party politics of the ancient lawspeakers, the localized poetical knowledge of Óláfr Þórðarson hvítaskáld, the figure of Þorkell Geitisson in the saga tradition of eastern Iceland, and the riddle of *Saga Njarðvíkinga, the ‘lost’ saga mentioned in passing in Laxdæla saga, and its connections with the eastern sagas. [7] All this came as a surprise, yet lay clearly within the bounds of what I might have expected when I set out. Rather more of a surprise was my subsequent realization that this approach and the overall view I was taking of the sagas might also bear fruit in the quest to unravel the problem of Vínland.