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  • Gibbons saga, an Exemplary Frame-Tale Narrative
  • Marianne Kalinke

The fourteenth century saw the origin and evolution of a new genre in Iceland, romance, that is, the riddarasaga. The Icelandic narrative type was generated by and evolved from translations of French romances, lays, and epic poems, the first of which were commissioned by King Hákon Hákonarson of Norway (r. 1217–1263). The earliest romance rendered into Old Norse during Hákon’s reign was Thomas de Bretagne’s Tristan, known as Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar. This was followed by Elíss saga ok Rósamundar, the translation of a chanson de geste; twenty-one short lays transmitted in the Strengleikar collection; and the Arthurian Ívens saga and Möttuls saga. Manuscripts of the Norwegian translations were circulating in Iceland by the end of the thirteenth century, and there they stimulated Icelanders to compose stories in the foreign genre.

Icelanders adopted the alien literary type and developed it by blending foreign and indigenous narrative traditions. The foundation, growth, and flowering of romance in Iceland is a story of Norse texts copied, redacted, and revised in Iceland; of scribal intervention in plot, structure, and style; of imported texts adapted to new ends; and, finally, of the creation of original romances. They flourished in an environment of storytelling that favored the revision, adaptation, and re-creation of existing tales.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, scholars generally deemed the riddarasögur “among the dreariest things ever made by human fancy” (Ker 1908, 282) and prime examples of “a period of decadence in saga writing,” as Halldór Hermansson put it (1912, preface). This judgment is questionable. Saga writing did not become [End Page 265] decadent. Rather, a foreign literary type was introduced in Iceland, and authors began to try their hand at the imported genre. Over forty riddarasögur, both translated and indigenous, had currency in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Icelanders copied, revised, and adapted the imported romances at the same time as they created tales in this new genre by ingeniously blending foreign and native narrative matter, imported and indigenous themes and motifs, and experimenting with narrative structure. Nowhere is this more manifest than in Gibbons saga, which epitomizes and is paradigmatic for the composition of narratives in the imported genre romance.1

In his classic study, Angevin Britain and Scandinavia, Henry Goddard Leach categorized Gibbons saga as a fourteenth-century import of a Byzantine romance (1921, 383), but in a subsequent essay on the relationship of Gibbons saga to Partalopa saga, he concluded that Gibbons saga “derived from an independent romance, from a lost Latin or French original” that was among the “romances translated in Norway in the reign of Hákon the Old” (1927, 117). He attributed the at-times incoherent accumulation of incidents in Gibbons saga to “the impatience of a translator boiling down the windy explanations and soliloquies of a French original” (1927, 131). Leach does not offer compelling evidence for asserting that Gibbons saga is a translated romance; his thesis is untenable.

Gibbons saga is an original romance that exemplifies the composition of Icelandic riddarasögur in the fourteenth century. Nearly a century ago, Finnur Jónsson criticized the plot of Gibbons saga as a trivial tangled web, constructed rather illogically (1924, 112), while no less a connoisseur of Icelandic romance than Margaret Schlauch referred to the saga as a “phantasmagoria” (1934, 10). More recently, Gibbons saga has been described as “a not entirely successful amalgam of two basic motif patterns: maiden-king romances and tales of the union between human and fairy” (Driscoll 1993, 226). This last comes closest to encapsulating the plot of a romance that is an Icelandic composition. Generically, Gibbons saga is a fusion of courtly romance and fabliau, a narrative combining an imported and an indigenous tale type constructed around a potpourri of motifs from classical, religious, learned, chivalric, and folkloric traditions. The author constructed the story of the eponymous protagonist’s love of two women, a fairy mistress and [End Page 266] a maiden king, as a frame narrative, the former an imported figure, the latter an indigenous type. The saga is unique in that...

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