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  • An Irish Sovereignty Motif in Laxdæla saga1
  • Lindy Brady

While the overall extent of Irish influence on Old Norse literature is still debated,2 there is critical agreement on the importance of Irish material to Laxdæla saga3 because this text offers a sustained focus on the Celtic presence in Iceland. Not only does the saga begin in Scotland, but Melkorka, the daughter of King Mýrkjartan of Ireland, plays a prominent role: she had been carried off in a slave raid at age 15 and eventually becomes the mother of Óláfr pái. These features suggest that Laxdæla saga is “the family saga which approaches the question of Irish blood in Iceland most squarely” (Sayers 1988, 97). Building off the foundational comparative work of Rosemary Power and William Sayers, this article adduces a previously unnoticed Irish motif in Laxdæla saga: the sovereignty test for kingship, best illustrated by the Old Irish Echtra Mac nEchach [End Page 60] Muigmedóin (The Adventures of the Sons of Eochaid Mugmedón),4 the earliest surviving example of a genre of medieval Irish tales that focus on sovereignty.5 Óláfr pái and his Irish counterpart, Níall Noígíallach, are both illegitimate and youngest sons who gain their fathers’ inheritances at the expense of their older, legitimate brothers, yet by the time this motif appears in Laxdæla saga, the outcome and significance of the sovereignty test have shifted. Awareness of these changes sheds new light on both Óláfr’s status in Laxdæla saga and the values at stake in his rejection of an Irish kingship. In finding points of contact between Óláfr and the “heroic biographies” of Irish kings, Sayers has argued for “an appreciation of the Irish concept of kingship and an interest in manipulating this information for thematic ends in Laxdæla saga” (Sayers 1989, 92), noting the ways in which Óláfr fails to fulfill the tripartite functions of a successful sovereign (legal justice, military success, agricultural prosperity) in the Irish model of kingship. Recognizing the Irish roots of the sovereignty test in Laxdæla saga further aids our understanding of this work’s use of Celtic motifs, as the saga depicts Óláfr successfully passing a series of sovereignty tests, yet ultimately rejecting that sovereignty itself.

In what follows, I will explore the parallels between Laxdæla saga and the Irish trope of the sovereignty test and discuss how its themes of inheritance, leadership, and kingship have been reshaped and reframed in an Icelandic milieu in the saga. As Laxdæla saga itself indicates, there were numerous avenues for the oral transmission of cultural material from the Celtic British Isles to the ears of early medieval Icelanders. Historical and literary accounts of Iceland’s foundation make clear that a significant proportion of its population, particularly its female population, came from slave raids on the British Isles,6 and recent genetic studies have confirmed that roughly 60 percent of Icelandic female settlers and 20 percent of Icelandic male settlers were of Celtic origin (Agnar Helgason, Sigrún Sigurðardóttir, Gulcher, et al. 2000; Agnar Helgason, Sigrún Sigurðardóttir, Nicholson, et al. 2000; Agnar Helgason et al. 2001). The Viking Age Norse settlements in Ireland and the rest of the British Isles offer another avenue by which medieval Icelanders would have become familiar with Celtic cultural [End Page 61] material.7 As recent studies by Rosemary Power (1985; 2013), John D. Niles (2006), and Matthias Egeler (2013) have demonstrated, Norse (and Anglo-Saxon) texts incorporated a great deal of Celtic material that was transmitted orally before the surviving manuscripts in either language were written. As Power notes, “the oldest area of contact between the Norse and Gaelic worlds, involving the transmission of stories of the kind now regarded as literature or folktale, seems to have occurred almost exclusively in the Viking Age,” though the possibility that “traditional stories that had circulated orally might have been open to supplementation by travellers’ accounts in later times” (i.e., the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) cannot be ruled out (Power 2013, 19–20). The Irish material in Laxdæla...

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