Identifying and Dating the Sagas of Icelanders

In 1958 Einar Ólafur Sveinsson published an essay entitled Dating the Icelandic Sagas: An Essay in Method, in which he highlighted the difficulties of establishing a watertight chronology for the sub-genre of sagas of Icelanders. That problem remains with us, in spite of much recent research that has clarified some of the relationships between individual members of the sub-genre. Recent and ongoing studies have also shown how many sagas have undergone revisions or are likely to have had sections added or removed, so that it often becomes difficult to speak of the age of a particular saga in absolute terms. The same applies to the poetry that forms part of the fabric of the majority of the Íslendingasögur: where it is possible to date the poetry contained in a saga, it sometimes seems to be of varying age, or to be confined to particular sections of the text which may be older or younger than the rest. Nevertheless most saga scholars have been able to reach a broad consensus on the identity of the individual sagas that constitute the sub-genre and on the relative chronology of its members.

The question of the membership of the sub-genre, that is, which saga belongs to the Íslendingasögur and which to other sub-genres, like kings’ sagas, samtíðarsögur, riddarasögur and fornaldarsögur, is taken as read for the purpose of the argument of this book. That is, I accept the general consensus that there are approximately forty sagas that belong to the sub-genre of the Íslendingasögur, give or take a number of þœttir [short tales] that are sometimes included in the count and sometimes excluded. (They are largely excluded here unless they contain poetry.) What is pertinent to this study is the relationship between prose narrative and its accompanying poetry in terms both of the sub-genre’s development as a whole and in terms of the kinds of poetry chosen for its prosimetrum. It traces the ongoing history of the saga prosimetrum from that favoured in early sagas to the poetic material chosen for sagas of Icelanders from the later Middle Ages, arguing for developments within the sub-genre that have not previously been recognised by saga scholars.