Representing Icelandic Saga Narrative for Victorian Readers

• Main Author: O’Donoghue, Heather
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2020
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199669509.013.37; https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34281/chapter/290640802

Abstract The nineteenth century was the period during which, at last, the great naturalistic prose literature of medieval Iceland—the saga—was beginning to appear in English translations. The subject of this chapter is the representation or recycling of this saga material in new prose fictions, and the difficulties it presented, whether or not there was an attempt to imitate the style and narrative structures of the original. I will explore Longfellow’s adaptation of Snorri Sturluson’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar as part of ‘Tales of a Wayside Inn’; Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae as an experiment in saga narrative method, and his representation of part of Eyrbyggja saga as a short ghost story, ‘The Waif Woman’; H. Rider Haggard’s bravura imitation of a saga, Eric Brighteyes; and W. G. Collingwood’s three ‘Lakeland sagas’: Thorstein of the Mere, The Bondwoman, and the short piece ‘The Story of Thurstan of the Thwaite’.