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  • The Partisan Muse in the Early Icelandic Sagas (1200–1250) by Theodore M. Andersson
  • Vésteinn Ólason
The Partisan Muse in the Early Icelandic Sagas (1200–1250). By Theodore M. Andersson. Islandica, 55. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Library, 2012. Pp. x + 227. $65.

The Partisan Muse consists of seven fairly independent chapters, five of which “substantially reproduce previously published papers,” as stated in the Preface. This explains a few unnecessary but harmless repetitions, such as in the beginning of Chapter 2, where a survey of research from Chapter 1 is repeated in condensed form.

The question of orality, of an “Oral Prelude to Saga Writing“—to quote the heading of Chapter 1—was an important subject in Andersson’s early saga studies, and it is revisited in the first two chapters. Most scholars today will accept his belief that oral narrative was thriving in Saga Age Iceland and played a significant role in providing saga writers with material and means of narration. The exact influence and role of oral tradition is, however, difficult to estimate, and consequently many scholars concentrate on the written texts without considering the oral background. They would hesitate to agree that “there were full-length oral stories precursory to the written sagas” (p. 6), while accepting Carol Clover’s idea of an immanent whole that developed through time and was realized in different forms in narration, but never as a whole. Andersson goes a step further when he argues that rhetorical devices of oral descent “are approprite not to brief, episodic tales, such as those envisaged by Clover, but to full-length, highly articulated, almost meditative [End Page 374] narratives.” (p. 34). This conclusion is further argued in Chapter 2, “The Prehistory of the Kings’ Sagas.” It stands to reason that the kings’ sagas must be based on oral tradition, but the length and scope of oral tales concerning Norwegian kings is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain. Andersson assumes that fairly lengthy narratives must have existed and were, if not verbally copied, then at least imitated in the written kings’ sagas (pp. 41–43). In Chapter 4 it is demonstrated that in the Saga of Óláfr Haraldsson in Heimskringla, rounded narratives, þættir of limited scope with no skaldic stanzas, alternate with more informative and loosely composed sections with skaldic stanzas. There is no disagreement that the combination of these different traditional elements into full-fledged royal biographies must have been the work of writers.

Chapters 3–7 are primarily concerned with literary history, the characteristics of written texts and relations among them. Chapters 3 to 5 argue for certain datings of kings’ sagas based on the attitudes toward political issues that Andersson sees in them. There is a heavy emphasis on literary loans, but surprisingly little attention to the possibility of continuous oral influences. The relationship between the sagas about the missionary kings Óláfr Tryggvason and Óláfr Haraldsson is treated as a question of priority—which text came first and influenced the other?—while it seems likely that anecdotes about the two kings were mixed and mingled in oral tradition before they were written down, in which case the question of priority of one text over the other becomes irrelevant.

Andersson seems indeed more interested in the attitudes of writers than of oral story tellers. He explains the political attitudes of individual sagas with reference to contemporary conflicts between Icelanders and Norwegians. Frequently, one saga is assumed to be composed as a reaction or a response to another. The resulting “literary history” is fairly hypothetical—as Andersson would readily admit. It is perhaps defeatism to think that, due to the nature of the sources, such a history is impossible to establish. Anderson’s construction has an inner consistency and is an interesting contribution to a long debate. He finds a “palpable” “Icelandic bias” in Morkinskinna, and an “equally pronounced” “collision between royal authority and Icelandic assertiveness” in Morkinskinna and Egils saga, while a negative attitude toward Norwegian kings is toned down in Heimskringla. He connects this with problems in Icelandic-Norwegian relations around the time Morkinskinna and Egils saga were supposedly composed, while...

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