The Reality of the Fantastic: The Magical, Political and Social Universe of Late Medieval Saga Manuscripts by Hans Jacob Orning (review)

Hans Jacob Orning’s Reality of the Fantastic is an important contribution to a burgeoning field of study that is now coming to grips with late-medieval Icelandic manuscript production and literary culture. Orning is particularly concerned with contextualizing the production, reproduction, and social circumstance of the ‘fantastic’ genres of fornaldarsögur (legendary sagas), riddarasögur (chivalric sagas), and fornsögur suðrlanda (romances). He approaches this task with a particular focus on the legendary Örvar-Odds saga through (i) an exploration of its place in the AM 343a 4to manuscript where it is one among fifteen (nine being fornaldarsögur), (ii) a synchronic analysis of two contemporaneous manuscript testaments to this saga (AM 343a 4to and AM 471 4to), and (iii) a diachronic analysis of saga variants in manuscripts Holm perg 7 4to and AM 343a 4to.

Orning orients his work around the centre/periphery approach of Russian scholar Alexey Eremenko, but expands it and challenges its simplicity. He argues that although fornaldarsögur, at the surface, are to be read as non-realistic, this genre and the ‘fantastic’ sagas more generally can be interrogated for the conditions of their production: they are nuanced mediations that negotiate interactions between centre and periphery. Orning identifies three levels at which this binary plays out. The surface level explores the function of magic and the supernatural (vis-à-vis the ‘real’ world), where popular beliefs are peripheral, and where socially reinforced belief systems, such as Christianity, are central. Orning argues that the two are not exclusive, instead impinging upon each other, revealed through narrative. The second level at which the centre/periphery dichotomy functions is the political, a discursive space where courtly society stands in opposition to the wild and the monstrous. This binary is well-known from chivalric text scholarship, but it is not clear-cut: the monstrous can be socially constructive and, whether in the wild or at court, agents are ‘in a political sphere […] part of the same culture’ (p. 53), while the civilizing hero role actually serves to mask the interdependence of the courtly centre and the wild periphery. The third level is the social, wherein a normative bias in this literature places idealized society at the centre. Orning identifies tensions in this binary arising from the ideology of rex iustus and subject obedience (in the context of thirteenth-century Norway), counter to reciprocity in the friendship/patronage paradigm of the Icelandic kin-based ideal. Orning notes the presence of (Norwegian) courtly and monarchical manuscripts in the same milieu and geography as AM 343a 4to and argues that ‘the two [social] ideals interact, collide and supplement one another’ (p. 57).

Having established these three levels of the binary, Orning then moves to three modes of reading: different ways that sagas can be read as sources for contemporary ideas about magic, politics, and society. Moreover, for the scholar, sagas can be read as stories, as structures, and as dynamics, and here Orning’s approach is multifaceted, resistive, and exemplary for future saga studies. The first of these three modes examines the discrete sagas as idealizing narrative, while the second approach favours manuscript collocations as heterogenous blocks rather than a linearity, a chance gathering, or a window on taste. The third takes saga textuality as polyphonous, with dynamic undercurrents and counter-voicing embracing the divergence of texts.

Orning reads his manuscripts against these theoretical orientations and reaches conclusions about the importance of, and limitations to, the different ways of reading medieval texts. He looks at Örvar-Odds saga in multiple contexts: as part of the AM 343a 4to manuscript collection, as one of the so-called ‘Hrafinista sagas’, through his tripartite lenses of magic, politics, and society, and by examining the sagas as stories, structures, and indicators of social dynamics...