Realism and the Fantastic in the Old Icelandic Sagas

MUCH RECENT SCHOLARLY WORK on medieval Icelandic sagas has concerned itself, in one way or another, with the saga genre as a medium of cultural memory. There is no doubt that saga literature was central to the development of an independent self-image among medieval Icelanders, and it continues to constitute a significant part of contemporary Icelanders' sense of national identity today. An important goal of modern research has therefore been the exploration of the various textual means whereby Icelanders of the High Middle Ages, mindful of both their present and their past, composed for themselves a narrative of events, locations, persons, and relationships that satisfied their desire to write a history for themselves, both national, familial, and personal, and to write themselves in those same capacities into European history, as well as to construct an interpretation of the past that satisfied personal and family pride and national consciousness. Textuality and the process of textualization was a major technological and intellectual achievement of medieval Icelandic culture. It was recognized as such in the Middle Ages by Saxo Grammaticus among others when he praised the men of Thule for their compensation for external poverty with the gifts of the intellect by collecting and then disseminating knowledge about other nations' histories (Olrik and Raeder 1931:5). Although Saxo probably had the Icelanders' command of oral narratives in mind here, he was writing at a time when they were swiftly turning their oral narrative resources into written ones. Growingly, modern scholars are coming to recognize that many twelfth-, thirteenth-, and fourteenth-century Icelanders, some whom we know by name and others whom we do not, used sagas and poetry as instruments of political power and self- aggrandizement, whether as composers or commissioners of those works (see Gudrun Nordal 142-3). We can connect the compilation of some of the earliest known collections of sagas of Icelanders with such impulses (Clunies Ross, Prolonged Echoes 103-21) and, it has been argued persuasively by Armann Jakobsson (I Leit ad Konungi), the genre of kings' sagas in Icelandic reveals a deep engagement by a people who had no king until 1262 with their lack of political conformity to a medieval norm. It follows, then, that Old Icelandic literature is unlikely to be without a shaping ideology and a set of dominant values, and it has been one of the concerns of modern research to lay bare the ideological underpinning of saga literature as the fictionalized history of the Icelandic chieftain class. It is also increasingly the case that scholars are beginning to notice the silences and gaps in saga writing, which betray the interests of that class. Questions such as: who is marginalized? who is discredited? what is downplayed or elided? are becoming as interesting to contemporary scholars as the issues of saga structure and style that dominated literary discussion in the middle part of the twentieth century. Furthermore, and we now come to the nub of the present article, scholars are becoming increasingly interested in the nature of the fictional itself in Icelandic saga literature (see Torfi Tulinius, The Matter of the North). In recent scholarship on the Icelandic sagas, the emphasis has shifted from an older attitude that sought to classify sagas as either history or fiction, but not both, to an approach that allows the two creative impulses, historical and fictional, to coexist in any text in a variable relationship, both within a single text and between texts. Increasingly, what can be learned of the relationship between society and literature in medieval Iceland is considered a productive nexus for our understanding of the genesis and character of saga writing. Yet that relationship is never simple, and it operates in both directions as Preben Meulengracht Sorensen wrote in a recent study: We can probably see the Icelanders' historical experience and special social circumstances as a basis for their literature, but the literature was not only a consequence of that history. …