Bishop Jón Halldórsson and 14th-Century Innovations in Saga Narrative: The Case of Egils saga einhenda ok Ásmundar berserkjabana (original) (raw)

2021, Dominican Resonances in Medieval Iceland The Legacy of Bishop Jón Halldórsson of Skálholt

By the early 14th century, when Icelandic sagas and poetry had matured into an impressive literary system of their own, a new generation of saga writers seem to have developed a taste for importing themes, motifs, and story patterns into their sagas that were evidently picked up from continental literature, mainly those of Latin and French. In the best of these sagas we see a cultivation of playful virtuosity in the style, an increased richness of descriptive language, alliteration, and parodic exaggeration; even an ironic narrative stance, though the underlying meaning of the irony may defy definition. Equally decisive for the development of the art of the Icelandic saga in this period is the emergence of structural unity. In the early sagas, what unity there was in the narrative as a whole tended to derive from the organic unity inherent in an individual's life story, and a certain balanced vision of human existence. Though difficult to generalize, the narrative structure of these early sagas is highly episodic, rendering them rather amorphous as texts, a quality they share with most of contemporary Latin narratives. But starting from the 14th century, Icelandic literary artists begin increasingly to glue narrative episodes together, as it were, by employing such Aristotelian plot artifices as 'hidden identity,' 'recognition,' and even 'apparent death' (from classical romance), not to mention recurring significant items, such as rings, weapons, armor, and clothing. The most favoured structural innovation of this period was the bridal-quest scheme, an overall story pattern so loved by saga writers and their audiences that it soon became near irresistible.1 Another very useful scheme of this kind, especially important for the present study, is 'frame narrative,' sometimes called 'Rahmenerzählung' from its frequent use in German 19th-century story collections. Although this structural artifice did not become popular in Icelandic sagas, it was occasionally used, and deserves study because of its potential for revealing the precise sources of the new practitioners of saga writing. As is well known, earlier scholars of Old Norse-Icelandic literature were sometimes baffled by these innovative imports, into what they regarded as a pristine and indigenous tradition, complete and not in need of embellishment, though their censure differs substantially depending on whether they are 17th-century Lutheran historicists, 18th-century belletrists, or the romantic nationalists cum folklorists of more recent times. What should not be forgotten, of course, in the often critical evaluation of 14th-century innovations in Icelandic saga narrative, is the fact that from the early 12th century Icelandic literature had developed its distinctive features in a formative dialogue with Latin letters. Thus, by the 14th century it had already incurred a considerable debt to the figures and schemes of Old and New Testament narrative, Latin hagiography, historiography and pseudohistoriography. It is not for nothing that The Prose Edda and Ynglinga saga derive the origins of Nordic culture from 'Turkey' and Troy, as did the Franks theirs, and later, the French in imitation of the Romans (who in turn built on early Greek legends about the foundation of Rome). Already in the 11th and 12th century the most learned Icelanders of whom we have records, the bishops Ísleifr and his son Gizurr, Saemundr of Oddi, Teitr of Haukadalr, and his son Gizurr the lawspeaker, St Þorlákr, and Páll his successor as bishop of Skálholt, were educated not in Iceland or even Scandinavia, but on the continent or even in Norman England. Icelandic book production in general-the Gothic script derived from the Carolingian script, and the advanced systems of denotation, abbreviations, and ligatures that came with it-was imported to Iceland and borrowed from continental literacy. And yet no other literature has, to the same extent as the Icelandic medieval corpus, defined, both in prose and poetry, the peculiar qualities that count as the essence of Nordic or Germanic culture and identity. Indeed, the Icelandic skalds and saga writers almost single-handedly created what we know as the Nordic and Germanic medieval heritage. Even the 14th-century genre of rímur, Icelandic verse romances which in form and outlook ultimately derive from the French verse romance, respects