Holy Vikings: Saints' Lives in the Old Icelandic Kings' Sagas (review)

The five "holy Vikings" who are the subject of Carl Phelpstead's study are the kings Óláfr of Norway (d. 1030) and Knútr Sveinsson of Denmark (r. 1016–35); Duke Knútr lávarðr of Denmark (ca. 1096– 1131); and the earls Magnús Erlendsson (ca. 1075– 1116/17) and Rǫgnvaldr Kali Kolsson of Orkney (d. 1158/59). Their lives are included in the vernacular konungasögur or Kings' Sagas. In his introductory chapter Carl Phelpstead reviews the sagas that contain the royal saints' lives and the Latin hagiographic and historiographic traditions to which they are indebted. His thesis is that the "King's Sagas develop the ideology of royal sainthood by incorporating the saints' Lives in larger historical texts, thus affirming the role of royal sainthood in national history" (p. 32). The lives and deaths of Sts. Óláfr, Knútr, and Magnús in Heimskringla, Knýtlinga saga, and Orkneyinga saga respectively take up a chronologically disproportionate amount of text, which may be attributed to a greater availability of source materials for these rulers than for their predecessors, but which also seems to indicate that the centrality of these saints' lives is deliberate (p. 34). The great histories that have incorporated the royal Saints' Lives are constructed around them, Phelpstead writes, "so as to offer an interpretation of the past which ascribes central importance to the life of a country's protomartyr and the ways in which his sanctity was manipulated by his successors" (p. 37).

Phelpstead discusses the theoretical underpinnings of his study in his second chapter "On Genre" (pp. 39–75). He eschews what has become a traditional distinction between King's Saga and Saint's Life as being too simplistic. He notes that whereas historiogaphy "is concerned with the past itself," hagiography is concerned with "the eternal as it is manifested in history" (p. 49). The Kings' Sagas that recount the lives of royal saints are distinct by virtue of their indebtedness to hagiographic traditions; they share features with Saints' Lives and cannot easily be classified as either a saint's vita or a king's saga. The author considers the 380 Journal of English and Germanic Philology, July 2009 konungasögur containing the biographies of the royal saints as a "host genre," as texts that do not constitue a single genre but rather contain a variety of literary types. The study is indebted to Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of genre and the novel, "involving the concepts of heteroglossia, dialogism, and the polyphonic text" (p. 62). Instead of viewing the biographies of the royal saints as either hagiography or historiography, which, according to Phelpstead, suppresses the "multivoicedness" of these texts, he understands them as participating in both genres and thereby consisting of a dialogized heteroglot text (p. 71). In the discussion of the lives of the royal saints, Phelpstead argues that the sagas exhibit the Bakhtinian syncrisis, the juxtaposition of various points of view, which provokes the anacrisis, whereby a reader is asked to arrive at his own viewpoint when opinions conflict. The author maintains that vis-à-vis the traditional saint's life the lives of the royal saints in the konungasögur have undergone a dialogization that accords more fully with the dialogic nature of reality itself (p. 221).

The fruitfulness of this approach is evident in the analysis of the lives of St. Magnús and St. Rǫgnvaldr in Orkneyinga saga, which reveal contradictory aspects of their characters. The exploration of sanctity in Orkneyinga saga is dialogic, achieved through the juxtaposition of different viewpoints on the saints and different genres, including St. Rǫgnvaldr's own verse, which establishes a dialogue between the narrator's voice and that of his subject, and by these means the author of the saga provokes a response from the reader. Phelpstead explicates the seemingly irreconcilable antithetic portraits of the holy kings by appealing to Bakhtin's theories. In the discussion of the eponymous protagonist...