Perseverance and Purity in Flóamanna saga

Flóamanna saga is a young Íslendingasaga, written probably between 1290 and 1330 and perhaps with a close affinity to Haukr Erlendsson, the owner and one of the scribes of the famous manuscript Hauksbók. The saga focuses on Þorgils orrabeinsfóstri, who was one of the first Icelanders to be baptized. It belongs to a small group of Íslendingasögur, in which a pagan god plays a part.¹ It also belongs to the subgroup of sagas that to a large extent takes place in Greenland, but while Eiríks saga rauða and Grænlendinga saga describe a successful attempt to settle in Greenland—even though these sagas describe Greenland as a religious periphery—a large part of Flóamanna saga describes Þorgils’s disastrous attempt to settle there. The composer of Flóamanna saga borrowed many motifs and much material from a variety of texts: Landnámabók, Íslendingasögur, fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, hagiographical texts, and Scripture itself. In comparison with the classical Íslendingasögur, Flóamanna saga has been considered somewhat substandard in terms of contents and style and been characterized as a generic hybrid. However, it was probably never the intention of the writer, most likely a learned cleric with access to a large number of written works, to write a classical Íslendingasaga. The saga has not received much scholarly attention; the most exhaustive study is Richard Perkins’s doctoral dissertation, “An Edition of Flóamanna saga with a Study of Its Sources and Analogues” (1971). A portion of the dissertation was published in 1978 as Flóamanna saga, Gaulverjabær and Haukr Erlendsson, in which he advances the hypothesis that the saga may have been composed for Haukr.²

TRANSMISSION AND CONTENTS

Flóamanna saga is preserved in two redactions, a shorter and longer one. The shorter redaction is extant only in postmedieval manuscripts, the most important ones being AM 516 4to (ca. 1620–1670) and AM 517 4to (ca. 1686–1688). The longer redaction, which is believed to be closest to the lost original, is preserved only fragmentarily. There are two extant fragments of the longer redaction; these cover Chapters 19–25 and Chapter 33 to the end of the saga. Two leaves of this redaction are preserved in AM 445 b 4to (ca. 1390–1425), which belonged to the lost so-called Pseudo-Vatnshyrna³ and to a young copy of a part of that manuscript in AM 515 4to (ca. 1660–1695). In their edition of the saga in Íslenzk fornrit, Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson primarily follow the shorter redaction representing AM 516 4to (K), although the fragmentary longer redaction is also edited and based on AM 515 4to (E) and AM 445 b 4to (M).⁴ The present article is concerned mostly with the longer redaction.

Flóamanna saga may be divided into four parts. Most of the first part, Chapters 1–9, takes place in Norway and deals with Þorgils’s ancestors, including Ingólfr Arnarson and Leifr Hróðmarsson, and their settlement in Iceland. Þorgils, the protagonist of Flóamanna saga, is the grandson of Atli, a Norwegian earl, and his father, Þórðr, is an Icelandic settler. When Þorgils is two years old, his father sails to Norway to claim his ancestral property, but he is shipwrecked and drowns. Þorgils’s mother marries Þorgrímr, a former Viking.

The second part of the saga, Chapters 10–19, is concerned with Þorgils’s rather adventurous youth. At the age of five, he is denied participation in games played by other boys, since he has not killed a living creature. After nightfall, he therefore stabs his stepfather’s old horse to death. Accordingly, his stepfather sends him away from home (chap. 10). When Þorgils is nine years old, he catches a huge fish at sea at a time when no one else is able to catch anything, and he rows to shore in stormy weather and drags the fish home. Along the way, the fish tears up the ground, and he finds a silver ring, which he gives to his foster father (chap. 11...