7 - Conclusion

Summary

What I have argued, in this book, is that one cannot approach the sagas of Icelanders in a literary vacuum: it is right neither to view them in isolation from European genres, nor to think of them as borrowing passively or unconsciously from better-established literary traditions. Metaphors based on the linear development of genre (whether in terms of ‘emancipation’ or ‘decline’) fail to capture the lively friction between genres that is such an energising force in literary creativity and innovation: the sagas of Icelanders developed as they did not because they were isolated from European literature, but through active engagement and dialogue with other – more mainstream – literary genres. Once we move away from the idea that the saint's life was merely a starting point for the saga, we can appreciate more fully exactly what the relationship between these two genres entailed. So the differences between saga and saint's life have been an important focus of this study: it is precisely because the chronotopes of these genres – the spatiotemporal configurations within them – are so different that their interrelationship is so interesting. The sagas of Icelanders rarely intrude on the territory of the saint's life because the saga hero is considered to be a saint. It is more often the other way round: engagement with the saint's life becomes a way of defining what the saga hero is not. Either way, interaction with the saint's life should be recognised as a self-conscious literary act: the saga can only define its own horizons in interaction with other types of narrative prose.

Polysystem theory, developed by Even-Zohar, is particularly helpful for an understanding of the interaction between genres, and has already been usefully applied to the relationship between saga and romance. It posits a hierarchy of genres, and potentially multiple literary systems in multilingual areas, which evolve as a result of constant movement between centre and periphery, as innovative genres arise on the margins and work their way towards the centre. This theory, I have argued, applies well to the literary situation in Iceland where major genres like the saint's life are far better represented in quantity of manuscripts than vernacular genres that are unique to Iceland.