The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method

Folklore, April, 2006 by Carolyne Larrington

The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method. By Gisli Sigurosson. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, 2004. 392 pp. 19.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk). ISBN 0-674-01457-X

Scholars who are generally interested in oral tradition, but not specialists in the Icelandic sagas, and Icelandicists who are not Icelanders, may find themselves surprised that Gisli Sigurosson needed to write this book (translated from an Icelandic original published in 2002). But, as Gfsli explains, in an admirably clear introduction, attempts to formulate the relationship between oral tradition and the manuscripts in which the sagas are preserved have been trapped in a theoretical dead-end, silenced by a prevailing orthodoxy that has stymied research in this area for some fifty years. Gisli's work is thus, in the context of the study of Icelandic literary history, long overdue.

Study of Icelandic family sagas is bedevilled by the legacy of a quarrel dating from the early part of the last century between the "Free-Prose" school, who believed that the sagas preserved genuine history, retold in an unchanging oral form for some three hundred years before they were written down, and the "Book-Prose" school, who argued that the sagas are essentially literary creations, made up by their thirteenth-century authors aided by a few early, often subsequently lost, documents and drawing substantially on European literary tradition. The "Book-Prose" school was ultimately victorious; since then saga study in Iceland has largely been engaged in uncovering analogues in European literature and identifying learned and Christian ideological influences. Using modern investigations into contemporary oral cultures, Gisli cuts through a great deal of the orthodoxy of the Icelandic school by admitting, on the one hand, the impossibility of proving satisfactorily the existence of oral sources on the basis of form or style, but by showing, on the other, the thinness of the evidence for a large number of lost literary sources, or indeed a widespread culture of literacy at the time the sagas were being written down.

Starting with Snorri Sturluson, the early thirteenth-century author of the Prose Edda and Heimskringla, a history of the kings of Norway, Gisli demonstrates how evidence in picture-stones and in earlier texts supports the contention that Snorri did not invent the mythological stories he retells ex nihilo, but clearly had access to a substantial mythological tradition, as well as knowing a considerable range of poems. The most probable explanation is that the tradition existed orally.

The argument continues through an examination of the changing role and affiliations of the Law-Speaker after literacy impacted on Icelandic culture. Previously the Law-Speaker had recited one-third of the laws each year on a three-year cycle at the Assembly, so that all present could assent to the accuracy of his memory. Gisli uncovers the implicit belief in modern historians that the writing down of the laws would have been seen as a great technical advance and have been universally welcomed. The writing down of the laws eventually put power over and knowledge of the law in the hands of the church, excluding from the office those families who failed to embrace the new technology, but for some decades the two methods of preserving the law existed side by side. Gisli wonders what the feelings of the Law-Speaker were in June 1118 as he listened to someone else read out the portion of law that had been written down that winter. Did he glimpse a future in which his skills would be redundant?

Later sections of the book show in great detail what we can learn if we take the oral hypothesis seriously. The chapter on Olafr hvitaskald, the author of the Third Grammatical Treatise, analyses exactly what poetry this member of the Sturlung family based in the west of Iceland knew. It proves that his corpus was limited to the "classics" composed by Icelanders visiting the Norwegian court, the work of poets active in the west of Iceland, and material preserved in written form in the works of Snorri, who belonged to the same family. Cultural knowledge is more localised than has previously been thought. The next section shows, with unusual and sometimes rather repetitive thoroughness, that the most plausible hypothesis to explain the characteristics of a group of sagas composed in eastern Iceland is precisely that they are dependent on local oral tradition, rather than defective literary sources, or that inconsistencies result from authorial clumsiness or misreading. Thus, in different sagas, the same character may have a different name or kin affiliations, the chronology may be inconsistent, or the saga author assumes that his audience already knows something about the characters. This phenomenon is evidently most easily explained by the existence of an "immanent saga," in Carol Clover's terms: a broad version of events that everyone local knows, which can be retold with different emphases, making varying use of competing oral versions. When events in the east are narrated in a saga that is agreed to originate in the north, Gisli demonstrates that the story has to be told quite differently since local knowledge cannot be assumed.