Long Lives of Short Sagas: The Irrepressibility of Narrative and the Case of Illuga saga Gríðarfóstra by Philip Lavender (review)

'To really understand the impact that Illuga saga has had, it is necessary to engage with a great number of contiguous texts' (pp. 350–51). Unlikely as this bold claim might seem, that such a little-known saga can even be described as having had an impact, this volume represents a challenge and a clarion call for saga scholarship more broadly. Philip Lavender is a champion of textual contiguity, and in this work, derived from his PhD and subsequent postdoctoral work at the University of Copenhagen, textual contiguity is shown to be of fundamental importance in negotiating and understanding the interactions and complexities of Icelandic narratives over their many living centuries: sagas don't stop when the Middle Ages ended.

This study is exemplary in its methodological scope. Lavender comprehensively negotiates the range of current theoretical worlds of saga and saga-related scholarship: manuscript history; textual variability; prose/poetry interactions; intertextualities and literary contexts of production; close literary analyses against different axes; the appropriation of text for geopolitical and historical ends; and the importance of the modern reflex as an aspect of ostensibly medieval narrative. From start to finish the work is framed in clear theoretical terms. Its opening orientation is the importance of the case study as (quoting Simon Goldhill) 'a narrativized instance that […] is always in a relation of excess or lack to its comparandum or generality' (p. 15). Lavender leads this particular case study through unparalleled degrees of precision and exactitude in his treatment of the considerable range of manuscript exemplars, of which there are upward of thirty-five. He embraces wider narrative sources, for the Illuga character and the Illuga narrative take divergent forms across both poetry and prose, in fictive as well as historiographic contexts. In the course of this work he argues against long-held views about whether the original narrative was poetic or prose, revises received relationships between extant manuscript witnesses, and amends the presumed authorship of at least one of the post-medieval Illuga rímur.

The volume commences with an extensive examination of the 170 years of Illuga scholarship in Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, and English. Here Lavender traces the concerns of commentators to assess the transmission history of the narrative, and in so doing places the scholarship within a context of the long sociopolitical conditions in Scandinavia and associated national anxieties in a period of modern nation-state formation. Then follow a thorough review and assessment of the many manuscript sources, ordering them into groups and subgroups. Here is where one of Lavender's strengths comes to the fore: his ability to negotiate the divide between New Philology's embracing concern with manuscript variants and the literary critical approach necessary for editorial production. He makes the point that 'the "best" text must be qualified on the ground of "best for what?"' (p. 74), and having sorted the vast array of manuscript witnesses in Chapter 2, he then walks the walk with his approach to narrative analysis in Chapter 3, examining the narrative in different contexts, including the intertextual relationship of this Illuga narrative to other narratives in which there is a character named Illugi, the capacity for the saga to be read as a vehicle for exploring female agency, gender construction, sexuality, and the place of female grotesque, and the difficulties in negotiating humour and irony in such a distant narrative. Lavender then goes on to explore the impact of post-medieval saga reception and print editions, which included production of modern manuscripts based on the Rafn's early nineteenth-century printed edition. He finishes with an extensive manuscript review and analysis of Illugi rímur (poetic Icelandic adaptations), the majority of which are from the nineteenth century, the last manuscript dating from 1956.

Beyond this...