1 - Hebrew Sagas and Icelandic Sagas: Convergent Evolution

Summary

Scholars of the Hebrew Bible have had considerably more to say about sagas than scholars of the sagas have had to say about the Hebrew Bible. There is a long tradition in biblical scholarship of comparing the stories in the Hebrew Bible to sagas, which stretches from Gunkel’s landmark commentary on Genesis, published in 1901, to John Barton’s History of the Bible from 2019. The scholarly understanding of what a saga is changed significantly over this period, and this is reflected in biblical scholarship, which starts out by viewing ‘sagas’ as oral narratives, but moves towards a fuller appreciation of their literary and pre-novelistic features. Likewise, biblical scholars display differing levels of knowledge about the sagas, reflecting the availability of translated texts: Gunkel knows about them only through intermediaries, such as Klaeber’s edition of Beowulf, while scholars like Sternberg and van Seters are familiar with Njáls saga – which they frequently cite – and Damrosch with Snorra Edda. When comparing biblical stories and sagas, most scholars point to the shared focus on family and genealogy, the close connection to place-names, and the shifting relationship between orality and literacy. Some also note the similarity between biblical style and saga style, which will be the focus of this chapter: recent work in both areas has emphasised how biblical and saga narrative alike are characterised by ‘narrative economy’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘indirection’. In this chapter, I will outline some of the important stages in the work of biblical scholars on the Icelandic sagas. I will then look at two biblical stories – the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22) and Jacob’s wrestling with an angel (Genesis 32) – and compare them with passages from the sagas of Icelanders. Although the medieval Icelanders received the Hebrew Bible primarily through the Latin Vulgate, I argue that they recognised in these biblical stories a storytelling tradition that was kindred to their own.

Oral Sagas

One of the earliest scholars to identify the stories in Genesis as ‘sagas’ was Gunkel, who understood it not as a literary genre per se but primarily as an alternative to ‘history’. Although German ‘Sage’ in this context is probably better translated as ‘tale’, I include it here because of Gunkel’s influence on later scholarship.