Astronomy and Dream Visions in Late Medieval Iceland: Stjörnu-Odda draumr and the Emergence of Norse Legendary Fiction

The massive corpus of dream visions surviving from medieval Iceland testifies to a powerful fascination with dreams and with the challenge of interpreting them. Perhaps the most challenging of all is the independent prose tale or þáttr known as Stjörnu-Odda draumr, "Star-Oddi's Dream," set in twelfth-century Iceland and probably composed in its extant form some two centuries later. This miniature saga is unusual for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that its dream vision is an embedded fornaldarsaga. Stjörnu-Odda draumr is not one of the better-known Icelandic sagas, but those scholars who have studied it acknowledge that it is a literary tour de force and altogether unique in the saga corpus. For this reason alone, it deserves a more extended literary analysis than has hitherto been given. Its wider importance lies in the light it sheds on a vexed question in Icelandic literary history, namely, the emergence of fictionality in the sagas.

In the first section of this article, I analyze the text's narrative structure and its authorial self-consciousness. In the remaining sections, I discuss its possible meanings for a contemporary audience by considering the relationship between dream and frame tale within wider literary and historical contexts: the corpus of medieval Icelandic prose dream visions (section 2), information about the tale's protagonist and his astronomical activities preserved in other texts (section 3), and the experimental, self-consciously fictional dream visions produced elsewhere in Europe at this time (section 4). Stjörnu-Odda draumr is usually seen as having been written in a long tradition of legendary fiction;² I will suggest on the contrary that, while its use of legendary narrative topoi is undeniable, it may represent the earliest extant example of Icelandic legendary fiction as such. Recent scholarship has tended to question the orthodox view that the fornaldarsögur are best seen as a genre of fiction or fabula, highlighting instead their proximity to the broad category of medieval historia; yet Stjörnu-Odda draumr may be an exception to this rule, using the dream frame to legitimize the composition of what appears to be a self-consciously fictional narrative.

Narrative Structure and Framing

Stjörnu-Odda draumr is preserved in at least twelve manuscripts from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. Two of these claim to have been copied from the Icelandic manuscript Vatnshyrna. This manuscript was burnt in the Copenhagen fire of 1728, but evidence from early modern copies, lists, and other references has enabled Stefán Karlsson to identify some of the sagas it contained and to date the manuscript itself to between 1391 and 1395.³ The oldest of these two copies, AM 555h 4to, was made in 1686 by Árni Magnússon during a period in his early career when he has been shown to have practiced a particularly accurate "diplomatic" form of copying.⁴ In its extant form, then, Stjörnu-Odda draumr may reasonably be dated to sometime before 1395. The complete text has been edited several times and has been translated twice into Swedish and twice into English.⁵ It is now beginning to receive more attention than hitherto: a critical edition of the tale's embedded verses is currently being prepared by Tarrin Wills as part of the ongoing Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages project, and new translations into Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are also in preparation.

Most of the text is taken up by a narrative about legendary Gautland. In many respects, this narrative is a typical legendary saga. The central character is the poet Dagfinnr, who accompanies and assists the young king Geirviðr on two exploits that bring stability to his realm: a fight against two berserks in a forest, and a climactic sea battle against the fleet of an expansionist shield maiden with trollish powers. Dagfinnr commemorates each victory with a praise poem in the king's honor, and he is rewarded by being given the king's half-sister...