Series Foreword This new series is dedicated to the empirical study of oral traditions in their historical contexts. The rigorous methods of investigation developed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, as documented in Lord’s The Singer of Tales (Harvard University Press 1960; Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 24. Second edition 2000, with Introduction [vii-xxix] by […]
Pronunciation Guide The information given here should help non-Icelandic speakers to make a recognizable attempt at pronouncing the words and names that occur in this book. It does not aim to give comprehensive details of Icelandic pronunciation. It gives only the main rules and ignores the numerous refinements to these rules. In […]
Bibliography Published Editions of Works Referenced by Page Number Wherever possible, all references are to the editions in the Íslenzk fornrit (ÍF) series (Reykjavík, 1933-). (For an English translation of the sagas of Icelanders see: The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. Ed. Viðar Hreinsson. Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríksson Publishing 1997). Other editions used […]
8. Implications for Saga Research The overall conclusion to emerge from this study is that, by assuming the existence of a living oral tradition in Icelandic society in the 12th and 13th centuries, the perspective of our research shifts fundamentally. This change applies equally to how we interpret both the historical facts […]
7. The Saga Map of Vínland As has become clear in the preceding chapters, the relationship between the written sagas and oral tradition is not simple and uniform. There are no clear-cut answers to the questions facing us. And, as if the part of orality in the composition of the written sagas […]
6. Conclusions to Part II The sagas of the east of Iceland contain a large number of passages with parallels of subject matter or theme with other sagas within the group or with written works from other parts of the country. Of the examples considered in the previous two chapters, the only […]
5. The Same Event in More Than One Saga The previous chapter looked at how particular characters from the sagas of the east of Iceland are presented in sources that appear unlikely to be directly related to each other on a written level, i.e. through literary relations. It emerged that there is […]
4. The Same Characters in More Than One Saga As a literary genre, the sagas of Icelanders (‘Íslendingsögur’) are defined by their geographical setting (Iceland) and their historical setting (from the settlement of the country down to shortly after the conversion in the year 1000). These sagas show considerable internal consistency in […]
3. Conclusions to Part I As described in the Introduction, the debate about oral tradition and the Icelandic sagas under the opposing labels of ‘freeprose’ and ‘bookprose’ came to a dead-end since the methods and ideas available proved unable to shed new light on the problems. All discussion of oral tradition in […]
2. Óláfr Þórðarson Hvítaskáld and the Oral Poetic Tradition in the West of Iceland c. 1250: The evidence of the verse citations in The Third Grammatical Treatise Collections, Anthologies, and the Literary Corpus As pointed out in the Introduction (p. 6–17), there is good reason to reject the often expressed idea […]