Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Manuscript Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Romance Contexts
- 1 Manuscript Witnesses: Different Versions, Different Worldviews
- 2 Intertextuality: Communicating with Other Romances
- 3 Setting the Scene: Geography and Space
- Part II Romance Characters
- 4 The Hero and her Rivals
- 5 Women Helping Women, and Other Minor Characters
- 6 Romance through the Eyes of the Narrator
- Conclusion
- Appendix Nítíða saga Text and Translation
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Romance through the Eyes of the Narrator
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Manuscript Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Romance Contexts
- 1 Manuscript Witnesses: Different Versions, Different Worldviews
- 2 Intertextuality: Communicating with Other Romances
- 3 Setting the Scene: Geography and Space
- Part II Romance Characters
- 4 The Hero and her Rivals
- 5 Women Helping Women, and Other Minor Characters
- 6 Romance through the Eyes of the Narrator
- Conclusion
- Appendix Nítíða saga Text and Translation
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter will complete my consideration ofcharacterization and relationships among charactersin this second part of the book, by looking at thevoice of Nítíða saga’sanonymous narrator, seen through his (or her)comments in the first person voice. I will focusespecially on the narrator’s interventions in thesaga’s opening and closing, which I will alsocompare with those of other Icelandic romances. Thenarrator is important in Nítíðasaga as the teller of the tale, and assuch is portrayed as a character with a personalityand opinions, which are sometimes revealed freely.In the discussions that follow, I have chosen ingeneral not to distinguish between author, scribe,and narrator when discussing late medieval Icelandicromances. Of course, I recognize that each isusually a very different person, and that themedieval texts we study today are oftenamalgamations of at least two versions – that ofauthor and that of scribe, as I have pointed out inChapter 1. Whether the narrator in Nítíða saga or any otherIcelandic romance can be identified with either orboth an author or a specific scribe is difficult todiscern in the early versions. While I acknowledgethat author, scribe, and narrator are separate, Iwill in this chapter refer to the narrator as acharacter, for it is the narrator who is mostreadily visible in the texts with which I amconcerned. The author’s views or intentions arevirtually impossible to determine unless through(nearly) blind conjecture because of theimpossibility to match a name or precise location toNítíða saga’sauthor. However, the narrator and his or her viewsas they exist in the version of the text underconsideration could be interpreted as a complexmixture of the original author, his (or her) sourcesand influences, and the anonymous scribes throughwhich the story has been preserved up until thisversion. In speaking of scribes instead of narratorcharacters, Marianne Kalinke has said that‘Icelandic scribes were an individualistic lot’ withvarying ‘attitudes to the texts they weretransmitting’. Such diversity of style, attitude,and opinion will be evident in the romancesdiscussed in this chapter, as each scribe (Kalinke’schoice in the quotation above), or narrator (analternative perspective, which I generally employhere), relates to the story told in a slightlydifferent manner.
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- Popular Romance in IcelandThe Women, Worldviews, and Manuscript Witnesses ofNítíða saga, pp. 195 - 216Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016