The Secret Prehistory of the Fornaldarsögur

In the roundtable discussion published as “Interrogating Genre in the Fornaldarsögur,” but that originally took place at the final session of the conference “Fornaldarsagaerne: Myter og Virkelighed” (Schaeffergården, Denmark, August 25–28, 2005), several of the contributions reflect upon the fact that the fornaldarsögur genre can in many senses be defined with equal validity as a corpus.¹ Said corpus, it is commonly accepted, has very specific origins in Carl Christian Rafn’s 1829–30 edition Fornaldar sögur nordrlanda, and at least five of the participants make specific reference to this fact. The reason why such an edition is easily traceable as the birthplace of the genre is because Rafn was the first person to publish a text designated by the term “fornaldarsaga.”² While it seems fair to grant Rafn the invention of the nomenclature, in this article I would like to challenge the oversimplification of his role as sole founder of the corpus/genre by emphasizing his reliance upon previous groupings made by other scholars. Such an approach is by no means carried out with the intention of replacing Rafn with an ignored precursor or of discrediting his work, rather, the aim is to contextualize the formation of this corpus/genre and highlight how our modern categories often come into existence through the suppression of certain information.

GENRE AND CORPUS

It is important first, however, to make some broader clarifications about genre.³ One of the most visible outcomes of the fornaldarsögur roundtable is that we often work at cross-purposes when the question of genre comes up. The various comments put forward reveal the fact that there is no agreement on the object under discussion, with different interlocutors meaning vastly different things when referring to genre in Old-Norse/Icelandic literature.⁴ This is all the more surprising considering that there is, as stated, general agreement on the matter of Rafn being the founder of the corpus that seems to be conceived of as, if not synyonymous with the genre, then a protogeneric cluster. This, however, is not the place to delve into the tangled web of genre theory, and the discussion here will be restricted, as far as possible, to some observations on the viability of a corpus functioning as an adequate equivalent for a genre.⁵

I agree fully with Ralph O’Connor’s contribution to the roundtable discussion in which he reminds us that genre definitions need not be mutually exclusive and that we must come to terms with and maybe even learn to love hybrid and multiple overlapping generic classifications.⁶ With an eye to aiding comprehension, different viewpoints can of course be beneficial in supplying wider perspectives on texts. It has, moreover, long been recognized, at least in literary critical and theoretical circles if not among a wider general audience, that genre is not best conceived of as a classificatory system.⁷ Rather than an array of pigeonholes, genre is a viewpoint, a perspective formed out of previous experiences and modified with each new literary event. Since perspectives change constantly (even reading the same text twice is a different experience in terms of our expectations), so too does genre. It looks back, retrospectively, on our previous engagements with narratives and texts and identifies the patterns encountered. But it also pushes forward, fitting new experiences and challenging narrative elements to those patterns as well as conceptually modulating the material encountered along predisposed lines. The recognition that genre can be both posterior and prior has been deployed in the concept of genre as a diachronic process, rather than a synchronic structure. Bearing this in mind we are wise to follow Marianne Kalinke’s invocation of Jauss in understanding genres as “groups or historical families that are underivable and indefinable and that can only be determined, delimited, and described in their synchronic and historical context.”⁸

Rafn’s edition slots neatly into the processes of genre development that were playing themselves out in his day. His work serves medieval and modern perspectives by looking both backwards and forwards. Although the term fornaldarsögur has come...