Stories Found on Stone Walls: Contemporary Research on the Riddarasögur

It was Henry Goddard Leach (1880–1970) who initiated in English the serious study of the Icelandic romances or riddarasögur (histories of knights). His book, Angevin Britain and Scandinavia, a work that may still be read with profit, appeared in 1921. Chapter 6, “Western Romance,” that is those romances translated into Norse in the twelfth century, is followed by chapters on “Tristan in the North,” the “Breton Lays” (Strengleikar), and “Arthur and Charlemagne.” With chapter 10, “Eastern Romances,” he turned his attention to the indigenous romances, those tales of chivalry composed in Iceland and not the translation of a foreign model. These he called lygisögur (untruthful histories), a term rarely encountered in the medieval period although frequently used disparagingly of these works by those in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were intent on “reforming” the reading taste of the Icelandic public at large (Bibire 1985; Spurkland 2012). Part of the preparation for Leach’s chapter can be found in MS Icel. 54 in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. This is a typescript (167 leaves) containing the summaries of twenty-seven indigenous Icelandic romances (including six that still remain unpublished) made during a research trip to Copenhagen and Stockholm in 1910, followed by twenty-five leaves containing an “Index of Principal Themes.”² After this chapter, Leach turns his attention to Beowulf and Grettis saga, six Viking sagas, and the outlaw sagas before concluding with a chapter on the ballads. Even though the discussion of the riddarasögur occupies only a third of the volume, it reveals that there is a significant body of literature that at the time was unstudied, untranslated, and seemingly incomprehensible in terms of its popularity and proliferation. But a decade later, a young scholar would take up the challenge to attempt to understand these works better.

In 1929, Margaret Schlauch, then Assistant Professor of English at New York University, applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship to study “Folklore in the Icelandic Sagas” (Rose 2005, 527–8). She appears to have spent much of the Autumn of 1929 and part of 1930 studying in Copenhagen, and on her journey home, she spent a month in Iceland. The fruit of this labor was her volume Romance in Iceland (1934), a work that is still essential reading for anyone interested in what has been termed “non-classical” saga literature. Schlauch follows Leach in referring to these non-classical works, the riddarasögur and the fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda (histories of ancient Scandinavia), as lygisögur. That is, they were narratives that were not “true” compared to the Íslendingasögur (histories of Icelanders) and samtíðasögur (histories of contemporary times), as the reigning opinion still considered them to be.³

In 1884, the printer Sigmundur Guðmundsson published the first fascicles of a proposed multi-volume edition of the fornaldarsögur edited by Valdimar Ásmundarsson. In what appears to be a response, 2 years later, the Reykjavík bookseller and publisher Sigurður Kristjánsson (1854–1952) published the first fascicle of what he was proposing as a multi-volume edition of the riddarasögur, although he called them “Ævintýra-sögur” (folktale histories).⁴ In order to garner support for this project, he printed a long defense of these stories on the inside cover to the first volume, the fourteenth century, Yngvars saga víðförla. While he admits that it cannot be proven that the events related in these stories took place precisely as narrated, he argues that these sagas have hidden in them a great deal of truth, hidden so deep in fact that not everyone is able to grasp it. Those who cannot grasp these deep truths are presumably those who only glance at the surface narrative and dismiss the whole thing as a lygisaga because, until the twentieth century, there was deeply divided opinion about the value of these stories, and even those who dismissed them as historically unreliable could hardly deny that they were engaging entertainment.

Following in the footsteps of Leach, Schlauch included in her...