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This book is an attempt to come to grips with the family saga as formal narrative. Though it would seem late in the day to be undertaking such a fundamental task, it can hardly qualify as a work of supererogation. The question of formal definitions and formal categories has in fact seldom been raised, for the simple reason that the saga has never been entertained by literary scholarship. It has traditionally been the property of philologists, historians, and folklorists, who have devoted themselves to textual questions, to the issue of historicity and the problem of origins, or at most to the cultural yield of the sagas. A programmatic acceptance of the sagas as literature is still only a few decades old and has been accompanied by the critical dogma that a saga is best studied in isolation and that a comparative perspective blurs the image. As a result we have a few articles and monographs on individual sagas but no general studies. This would seem to be a critical malproportion. The family sagas do, after all, constitute a homogeneous genre capable of a homogeneous definition. I have tried in the following pages to make some progress toward such a definition, in the knowledge that first steps are always clumsy, but in the hope of providing a tentative basis for discussing the saga as a literary form with specific literary characteristics.
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The Icelandic Family Saga
HARVARD
STUDIES
IN COMPARATIVE
FOUNDED Β Y WILLIAM
28
HENR Y
LITERATURE
SCHOFIELD
The Icelandic Family Saga AN ANALYTIC
READING
Theodore M. Andersson
HARVARD
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts · 1967
© Copyright 1967 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-21329 Printed in Great Britain
Preface
This book is an attempt to come to grips with the family saga as formal narrative. Though it would seem late in the day to be undertaking such a fundamental task, it can hardly qualify as a work of supererogation. The question of formal definitions and formal categories has in fact seldom been raised, for the simple reason that the saga has never been entertained by literary scholarship. It has traditionally been the property of philologists, historians, and folklorists, who have devoted themselves to textual questions, to the issue of historicity and the problem of origins, or at most to the cultural yield of the sagas. A programmatic acceptance of the sagas as literature is still only a few decades old and has been accompanied by the critical dogma that a saga is best studied in isolation and that a comparative perspective blurs the image. As a result we have a few articles and monographs on individual sagas but no general studies. This would seem to be a critical malproportion. The family sagas do, after all, constitute a homogeneous genre capable of a homogeneous definition. I have tried in the following pages to make some progress toward such a definition, in the knowledge that first steps are always clumsy, but in the hope of providing a tentative basis for discussing the saga as a literary form with specific literary characteristics. The book is divided into two parts. Part I is theoretical and tries to isolate the basic structure and some of the larger and more prominent rhetorical patterns in the sagas, and to account for their development. My aim is descriptive and I have therefore dispensed with references to the critical literature, a good deal of ν
PREFACE which is evaluated in a previous volume, except in the third chapter, where I am conscious of building on the work of others. M y indebtedness to the approach of W . P. Ker, whose essay in