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

by Gísli Sigurðsson

This work explores the role of orality in shaping and evaluating medieval Icelandic literature. Applying field studies of oral cultures in modern times to this distinguished medieval literature, Gisli Sigurosson asks how it would alter our reading of medieval Icelandic sagas if it were assumed they had grown out of a tradition of oral storytelling, similar to that observed in living cultures.

Sigurosson examines how orally trained lawspeakers regarded the emergent written culture, especially in light of the fact that the writing down of the law in the early twelfth century undermined their social status. Part II considers characters, genealogies, and events common to several sagas from the east of Iceland between which a written link cannot be established. Part III explores the immanent or mental map provided to the listening audience of the location of Vinland by the sagas about the Vinland voyages. Finally, this volume focuses on how accepted foundations for research on medieval texts are affected if an underlying oral tradition (of the kind we know from the modern field work) is assumed as part of their cultural background. This point is emphasized through the examination of parallel passages from two sagas and from mythological overlays in an otherwise secular text.

416 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2004

Reviews

[Carl]

I really enjoyed Gisli Sigurdsson's unique take on the problem of orality in the sagas. Rather than starting with an a priori commitment to an oral saga, or some variant of the thattr theory, or a book prose bias, Gisli begins with an investigation into the way in which writing as a technology affected the Icelandic social, cultural, and political milieu, and goes on to investigate the relationship of literacy and oral tradition to key families (particularly the Sturlungs) as a sort of cultural or intellectual capital. After making his case for an active oral tradition among even the upper class at the time, Gisli moves on to an investigation of groups of sagas associated with particular regions of Iceland and finds evidence that they are best read as embedded in an oral tradition in which local knowledge is taken as given-- in other words, lapses in the information provided by the author do not necessarily need to be taken as evidence that the saga was purely the author's invention and out of touch with the history and geography of the region, but instead may be taken as evidence of a common body of knowledge. To clarify yet again, the "gaps" in the text may be taken in a receptionalist sense as evidence of the particular audience/context of the texts.
I found particularly interesting his chapter on the Vinland sagas, in which he explores the historical validity of the "oral tradition" which we would guess might be behind those sagas. I'm afraid my memory of the details of this argument and the others in the book are a bit fuzzy, as it has been a while since I read it. In any case, I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested either in the relationship of oral tradition to Old Norse prose literature, or anyone interested in the historical validity of the Vinland sagas-- or, in fact, anyone interested in the question of "oral history" in general, or the transional period between an oral and a literary culture.