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  • Beast and Man:Realism and the Occult in Egils saga
  • Ármann Jakobsson

As a Troll

The sagas of Icelanders are frequently referred to as realistic narratives.1 Despite this reference, their narrative realism or indeed any sort of textual realism is not easy to pin down, not least when it concerns a past narrative whose vocabulary remains interpretively obscure and often lacking a correlation with the modern language. Opinions of what is real may vary a great deal; thus realism must boil down to an uneasy contract between a text and its audience where the audience chooses to believe in the reality of a narrative although they may realize it is, in fact, fictional. Such a contract seems to have been in place between the sagas of Icelanders and their original audience with the added provision that they were likely regarded as history rather than fiction. History, in this sense, signifies not a potential world but [End Page 29] the world as it existed with historical figures and situations meant to be understood as accurately portrayed by the saga narrative.

Even though their composition exhibits aesthetic elements commonly associated with fiction, the sagas demand to be taken seriously as accurate accounts of the past.2 And yet the degree to which the medieval audience necessarily believed in the factuality of the sagas eludes us—their reaction is lost. The possibility of an attitude characterized by a willing suspension of disbelief thus remains in play. In this scenario, we have the medieval audience believe in the reality of the saga not due to a lack of healthy skepticism, but rather through the necessity of establishing some version of the past accepted as truth without a naive failure to realize the uncertainty of all knowledge of the past. In other words, some of the past may be legendary, but it is still necessary and has thus been accepted as true in lieu of a better authenticated version. The legend can become fact, as the cynical Maxwell Scott expresses in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."3

In a given work of realistic fiction and to some extent in all fiction, one can argue that a certain degree of plausibility is required. It is necessary to keep in mind that this argument applies to fantastic fiction as well. A magic ring may exist, but its guardian must still encounter the same troubles any wanderer might expect when crossing a marsh or climbing a slope. The sagas of Icelanders may be classified as containing the same type of realism that occurs in modern fantastic fiction: what is now referred to as the supernatural is far from excluded from the narrative. Thus a saga may contain realistic elements in its depiction of the human world yet present a hero who sometimes appears more beast than man. Of course, such an occurrence does not make a narrative unrealistic in and of itself—that must depend on what is regarded as real by its creator and by its audience. For those who believe in trolls, [End Page 30] the appearance of a troll hardly makes a narrative less realistic and the idea that the demarcation between the natural and the supernatural can be clearly defined does not seem applicable to a medieval text such as a saga (see Ármann Jakobsson, "History" 54-56). Nowhere is this more evident than in Egils saga.

Saga heroes are generally considered to be what Northrop Frye would have called "high mimetic" (33-5); that is, they are superhuman, extraordinary rather than ordinary people, men and women who in various ways dominate their surroundings. And yet saga characters are rarely perfect, and there is a strong element of ordinariness in the sagas: some of the issues that arise are mundane and most likely easily recognizable from the everyday existence of their intended audience. There are even some remarkably ordinary people in the sagas although mostly in supporting roles.4

And yet there are also saga heroes who may, in fact, not be entirely human. It is this dubious humanity upon which I will focus in connection...

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