The Life and Death of the Medieval Icelandic Short Story

I. The Þáttr as a Short Story

There was never any such thing as a medieval Icelandic short story. Nevertheless it had its presence as a category of scholarly thought for most of the twentieth century in the form of the saga subgenre known as the þáttr.¹ Below I will explore how this came about. I will discuss the circumstances of its birth, the premises for its well-being, the ideological context it thrived in, and the reasons for its eventual decline and fall. This study is concerned with the how no less than the what, as it aims to illuminate the whole story of this category.

The medieval Icelandic short story had its own name, and the term “short story” was rarely used. Scholars flirted with the term, mainly in the 1970s and the 1980s, without daring to use it openly.² The Icelandic word þáttr actually has entirely different connotations, as I will discuss in more detail below. However, the terms were successfully disregarded throughout most of the twentieth century, and the Icelandic þáttr was widely believed to be a short story—an independent narrative conceived as such—and eventually it gained its own generic features. In the 1970s a typical þáttr structure was diagnosed and eventually made it into the curriculum of Icelandic high schools.³ And even though the term “short story” was not often used without a caveat, there were some scholars who went all the way,⁴ sometimes even crediting medieval Icelanders with the invention of the short story, beating out powerful, if not particularly well-chosen rival claimants, such as Boccaccio and Chaucer, by two centuries.⁵ These examples may have been exceptions, but they were nevertheless an integral part of a dominant school of thought that may have just shied away from calling the þættir short stories but nonetheless believed them to be more or less the same thing: minisagas of Icelanders abroad and closely related to the Sagas of Icelanders.

One of the main features of the concept of the þættir as a distinct category was the grouping together of Íslendingasögur and Íslendingaþættir—novel and short story—in works of reference and in the most influential editions, as I will discuss below. However, despite the fact that only in recent decades have scholars discussed sagas as novels in a serious way,⁶ it was the rule for most of the twentieth century to discuss Íslendingasögur and Íslendingaþættir together as the respective long and short version of the same form.⁷

In this study I will explore how the þættir were reinvented as independent narratives in the twentieth century, with editors taking the lead and scholars following close behind, juxtaposing this with the actual medieval preservation of the þættir in the kings’ sagas. This will be followed by a closer look at the prehistory of the þættir as independent narratives, reviewing the manuscript evidence from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Then I will discuss the premises for the twentieth-century editions and how they evolved from romantic nationalism to the late twentieth-century emphasis on form and content. This story of the þættir is essentially not the full story of the þættir but of how twentieth-century scholarly thought was dominated by the work of editors.⁸ It may be regarded as a case study of how the work of editors may provide an invisible frame for scholarly thought, guiding it toward predetermined results.

II. Editing the Þættir in the Twentieth Century

The year 1904 is important in the history of Iceland, as it was the year when Iceland gained home rule.⁹ The first þættir edition also appeared in this year, and it was a sign of the changing times that it was published in Reykjavík, rather than Copenhagen, which had been the center of publications of Old Icelandic texts by Icelandic scholars in the nineteenth century.¹⁰ This edition was named Fjörutíu Íslendinga-þættir and was edited by Reverend Þórleifur Jónsson of Skinnastaðir (1845–1911), an...