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The Medieval Saga the North Portal of the Urnes Stave Church, Norway The Medieval Saga The north portal of the Urnes stave church, Norway. Photograph by P. G. Maurtvedt. Copyright University Museum of National Antiquities, Oslo, Norway. The Medieval Saga Carol J. Clover CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that aided in bringing this book to publication Copyright © 1982 by Cornell University First paperback printing 2019 The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. To use this book, or parts of this book, in any way not covered by the license, please contact Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-8014-1447-3 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5017-4050-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5017-4051-0 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-5017-4052-7 (epub/mobi) Librarians: A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Di molte fila esser bisogno parme a condur la gran tela ch'io lavoro. (I need many different threads to weave the wide web I labor on.) -Orlando fu rioso 13:81 Acknowledgments My first and greatest debt of gratitude is owed to the American Council of LearnedSocieti es, whose support during the academic year 1978-79 made this work possible. For their help in making arrangements for me in Cambridge I am grateful to Dorothy Boerstler, Dorrit Cohn, and Eckehard Simon. Einar and Eva Haugen deserve warmest thanks not only fo r their willingness to share their small study in Widener Library, but for their cheerful disregard of the crowding and clutter that resulted. Friends who contributed valuable criticism and suggestions are Frederic Amory, Theodore M. Andersson, Joseph Duggan, and Susan Shively. CAROL J. CLOVER Berkeley, California 7 Contents Introduction 13 1. Open Composition 19 The Question of Unity 19 The European Context 42 2. Stranding 61 Stranded Narrative 65 The Language of Stranding 85 Material Art and Skaldic Poetry 90 The European Context 91 3. Simultaneity 109 Simultaneous Narration in the Sagas 112 The Language of Simultaneity 131 The European Context 135 4. Toward the Classical Saga 148 The Preclassical Texts 148 Literary Features 177 Romance and Saga 184 The Two Audiences ISS Editions Consulted 205 Index 213 9 The Medieval Saga Introduction Aristotle's treatise on poetics appears to have circulated rather widely during the Middle Ages in a Latin translation made in 1256 from the abridged Arabic version of Averroes. As nearly as we can tell, however, it had little ifany impact on actual narrative practice. Only in mid-sixteenth-century Italy, with the publica­ tion of Robortello's edition and commentary and Segni's Italian translation, did the Poetics enter the general literary conscious­ ness. 1 The results are literary history. Although it is probably not fair to say that the Poetics alone caused the ensuing literary de­ bates, Aristotle's views did figure prominently, certain authors attacked others on "Aristotelian" grounds, and, by the time the controversy died down, literary neoclassicism was an established fact. The crux of the controversy was narrative structure-which thus for the first time became the subject of serious theoretical discussion-and the case in point was Ariosto's Orlando fu rioso. The criticism of Ariosto's work was initiated in 1548 with the publication of an epistolary dialogue between Giovanni Battista Pigna and Giovambattista Giraldi Cintio.2 Pigna's letter spelled out the ways in which Orlando fu rioso failed to conform to the classical precepts of epic (it lacked a proper beginning and end, 1Joel E. Spingarn, Historyof Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, 2d ed. rev. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), esp. pp. 107-24. 2A full account may be found in Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916), II, 957..:.71. 13 14 Introduction was too long, had no unity of action, had too many characters, was disorderly in its organization, was far too digressive). Giraldi responded, arguing that the "ancient" model of the Greeks was antiquated, that modem times required modem poetry, and that Ariosto was the supreme practitioner of the "new" aesthetic. As the quarrel unfolded, the defenders of Ariosto refinedtheir defini­ tion of the "new" aesthetic. They preferred multiplicity to unity, stories telling not of "one action and one man, but many actions of many men,''3 and a plot that ''varies and mingles character just as it varies and mingles actions and persons' '4-not epic but ro­ mance, in a word. The Aristotelians, too, became increasingly theoretical in their defense of classical form and, in the process, increasingly enthusiastic about a poem in the epic mode that met their terms: the Gerusalemme Liberata by Torquato Tasso. So it was that Tasso's poem came to serve, in Bernard Weinberg's words, as a "foil, a basis of comparison, in the continuing re­ evaluation of Ariosto' s Orlando Furioso" and as "one of the poles in the violent quarrel over the respective merits of the two Cinquecento poets. "5 Tasso's own theories on narrative struc­ ture (represented in their final phase in the Discorsi del poema eroico of 1594) are firmly pro-epic and pro-Aristotle. What neither side quite appreciated is that the new literature was not so new as it seemed. Ariosto did not invent the narrative form he used in the Orlando fu rioso; he borrowed it from Boiardo, to whose Orlando innamorato he wrote the Furioso as a continuation. Boiardo got it from the epic compilations so popular in his time, which in their tum were descended from the cyclic manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Ariosto's narrative habits were not new at all, but almost fo ur centuries old. Nor were they peculiarly Italian, nor confined to epic. The most prominent representatives of this sort of writing-prominent in their own time as well as in recent scholarship on medieval liter­ ary history-were the French prose romances, above all the so­ called Vulgate Cycle (ca. 1215-30). Of the fe atures these books of chivalry had in common with the "new" literature, one, interlace composition, has been called "one of the fundamental aesthetic 3Gioseppe Malatesta, in ibid., p. 1043. 4Malatesta Porta, in ibid., p. 1048. 5Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism, p. 983. Introduction 15 issues of thirteenth-century prose literature. "6 When the Aris­ totelians in sixteenth-century Italy attacked Ariosto's sense of structure, therefore, they were in effect attacking a large and central part of medieval literature. 7 It is a measure of the eventual success of neoclassicism that "romance" became for posterity more or less synonymous with the works of Beroul, Thomas, Marie de France, and Chretien de Troyes (works, that is, approximating more closely than their prose successors the classical ideal) and was understood only secondarily, if at all, to refer to the popular body of prose works which prevailed from the thirteenth century on. Only recently, largely in consequence of the studies of Ferdinand Lot, Jean Frappier, Eugene Vinaver, and Jean Rychner, has this,"other" side of romance been brought up for reconsideration on its own terms. These terms tum out to be crucialto our understanding of the period in general, for they point to a conception of form so pervasive and so consistent that it may be regarded as the major­ ity aesthetic of medieval literaryculture -an aesthetic better rep­ resented by the Prose Tristan than by the lais of Marie de France or Erec et Enide of Chretien. The particular value of the Tasso­ Ariosto controversy is that it isolated the special properties of this narrative aesthetic and explicated its underlying philosophy at a time when it was still in use, if only in some quarters and in attenuated fo rm, This "medieval" aesthetic, reflected in its most characteristic form in the prose romances of thirteenth-century France, is the point of departure fo r the fo llowing study of the Icelandic family sagas. The prevailing view of the sagas is that as formal construc­ tions they are peculiarly local products. Hagiography and ro­ mance are held accountable in varying degrees for the biographi­ cal scheme, the occasional expressions of courtly sensibility, cer­ tain words and phrases, and many points of plot. But the style and composition of the sagas, together with their main content and themes, are attributed to native tradition. What foreigndebts they owe on the level of form were incurred earlier rather than later 6Eugene Vinaver, "The Prose Tristan," in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. R. S. Loomis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), p. 345. 'See especially, William W. Ryding, Structure in Medieval Narrative (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), esp. pp. 9-17. 16 Introduction and to religious writings and chronicle traditions rather than to romance. This book takes a somewhat different view. Its premise is that the Icelandic sagas as formal constructions are not sepa­ rate from the larger European development of the thirteenth cen­ tury, but part of it; that the same literary forces that played an important role in the rise of imaginative prose forms in France also played an important role in the evolution of the prose saga in Scandinavia; and that, despite large and obvious differences in temper and style, the Icelandic sagas as literary compositions bear direct comparison with some of the major narrative works of contemporary France and may therefore be classed with them as medieval.
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