Introduction: Biblical Literature and Stjórn

Summary

It would be difficult to find a nation so markedly preoccupied from its earliest days with the question of its own origins.

Feuds and rivalries form the basic structure of the work, and the motivation for the various episodes within it.

The characterisation is complex, the motives mixed, the plot riddled with gaps and enigmas […] Through a mimesis of real-life conditions of inference, we are surrounded by ambiguities.

By consistently, though not slavishly, refusing to give the reader access to the inner lives of the characters […] narrators force the reader to constantly negotiate and renegotiate the thoughts and feelings of characters and, thus, the motivation for their action.

A conspicuously innovative narrative art, anticipating the modern novelist’s craft.

These quotations appear to give an insightful picture of the narrative art of the Icelandic family sagas.

Except they do not: all these comments are about the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, written by scholars with little or no knowledge of Old Norse. Yet one only has to omit the word ‘biblical’ to repurpose them as a convincing description of the sagas. While biblical scholars have long realised that the Icelandic sagas are a useful analogue for the stories in the Hebrew Bible, this interest has not really been reciprocated. In the many discussions about the origins of the sagas and their distinctive style, biblical narrative has always been eclipsed by hagiographical and homiletic writing. In many ways, this is obvious and understandable: while the earliest manuscripts in Iceland and Norway contain homilies and saints’ lives, there is no manuscript evidence of translations from the Old Testament before c. 1300. It is less obvious and understandable why later biblical translations have been neglected, but this apparent oversight is carried over into many handbooks and companions to Old Norse-Icelandic literature, only one of which to my knowledge contains a whole chapter on the Bible. It is more usual for biblical translations to be relegated to a few pages or a brief reference in chapters on learned literature, as for example in McTurk’s Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture and, more recently, in The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas.