The Legendary Sagas: Origins and Development ed. by Annette Lassen, Agneta Ney, and Ármann Jakobsson (review)

It has been customary for several decades now to begin any discussion of the fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda—literally “Stories of ancient times in the northern lands,” but normally referred to in English as “Mythical heroic sagas,” or, as here, “Legendary sagas”—with some statement to the effect that this otherwise highly interesting group of medieval Icelandic prose narratives has not hitherto been the object of scholarly attention to the extent it deserves. It has become increasingly difficult in recent years to make such a statement, however, as the situation has changed greatly, in no small measure due to the efforts of the editors of the volume here under review, the third, and apparently final, in a series of volumes arising from as many colloquia devoted to this highly interesting but hitherto largely neglected genre (there, you see). The first of these was held in Uppsala in 2001 and the proceedings published as Fornaldarsagornas struktur och ideologi (Uppsala, 2003), and the second at Schæffergården, north of Copenhagen in 2005 and published as Fornaldarsagaerne: Myter og virkelighed (Copenhagen, 2009). The present volume is based, for the most part at least, on papers given at the colloquium held in Reykjavík in 2009, though with several additional contributions from other scholars.

The three colloquia were organized, and the published volumes subsequently edited, by Annette Lassen, Agneta Ney, and Ármann Jakobsson—all “early-career” academics (from Denmark, Sweden, and Iceland, respectively) when the enterprise began, but all now firmly established scholars. This dynamic trio—which internally at least goes by the name of the “legendary saga society”—deserves the gratitude of the scholarly community, as their initiative has changed the face of fornaldarsaga study completely.

As reflected in the titles of the respective volumes, the colloquia have been multilingual affairs, with about half the papers presented in Danish, Swedish, or Norwegian and the rest in English. The proportion of non-English articles in the volumes has diminished, however, from about half in the first two to only three (out of twenty) in the third. While this will undoubtedly make the current volume more accessible to the international scholarly community, it has to be said that a number of the articles in it, including the editors’ Preface, would have benefitted from being read over by a native speaker of English prior to publication.

The twenty articles are grouped under three headings, “Origins,” “Development and Generic Considerations,” and “Late Development.” The first of these contains some interesting articles on the beginnings of the fornaldarsaga tradition, including three—by Margaret Clunies Ross, Guðrún Nordal, and J. S. Love—on the role played in the fornaldarsögur by poetry, generally believed to predate the sagas themselves. The section begins with an article by Ármann Jakobsson—one of the best in the volume, in the opinion of this reviewer—on the early transmission history of the fornaldarsögur. The author looks at the contents of the earliest manuscripts in which sagas ascribed to this genre are found, noting that most of these manuscripts preserve other material as well, suggesting that the fornaldarsögur were not regarded as a separate genre by the fourteenth-century producers of these manuscripts—or presumably their readers. This argument has been made before, but is frequently forgotten in the scholarly discussion. Most of the earliest legendary saga manuscripts, as Ármann points out, are from the fifteenth century, and he argues we would do well do study the sagas within the context of that century, rather than of their presumed thirteenth-century (and earlier) background. In her article, Annette Lassen presents her rather controversial but by no means implausible theory that Saxo’s Gesta Danorum not only preserves the earliest examples of (proto-) fornaldarsögur but also provided the impetus for the writing down of this material by Icelanders. Another outstanding contribution to...