From the frying pan of oral tradition into the fire of saga writing : The precarious survival of historical fact in the saga of Yngvar the Far-Traveller
The Saga of Yngvarr used to be classified as a Legendary Saga (Fornaldarsaga) on account of its vague and distant geographical setting and unrealistic subject matter, despite its being set in the 11th century - with Swedish Vikings as champions of Christianity in the East. Lacking the mythological o...
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| Format: | Conference Object |
| Language: | English |
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Universität Tübingen
2004
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10900/46208 http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:21-opus-10708 |
| Summary: | The Saga of Yngvarr used to be classified as a Legendary Saga (Fornaldarsaga) on account of its vague and distant geographical setting and unrealistic subject matter, despite its being set in the 11th century - with Swedish Vikings as champions of Christianity in the East. Lacking the mythological or heroic connections of the more “classical” Legendary Sagas, it was considered late and obviously devoid of any historical value. Research of the last quarter century, philological (Hofmann) as well as historical (e.g. Larsson), has turned all of this upside down. The saga’s own dating of its main events to around 1040 is credible. So is its account of its own composition. It is a translation into Icelandic of a Latin saga, written by the Benedictine monk Oddr Snorrason, better known as the author of a Latin history of King Óláfr Tryggvason of Norway (like Yngvar’s Saga only preserved in translation). The translator or editor summarizes a letter by the author where he accounts for his three different oral sources (one of them representing a Swedish tradition) and his doubts regarding certain points. The letter was addressed to the two leading aristocrats of South Iceland, both of them respected for their clerical education. The saga must have been finished before the death of one of them in 1197 – i.e. some 150 years after the events took place. For they did take place. Not only is Yngvarr an historical person, attested to by scores of Swedish rune stones, but his expedition, across the Caucasus from the Black to the Caspian Sea, is mentioned in a contemporary Georgian source, with sufficient detail provided to confirm its identity with the events described by the saga. Yngvar’s Saga, then, represents no less than state-of-the-art historical research in Iceland at a time when Danish and Norwegian historians readily acknowledge the superiority of Icelanders as preservers of historical tradition. A first-rate scholar undertakes, presumably encouraged or recruited by the two Southern aristocrats, to produce an export ... |
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