The Icelandic Family Saga: An Analytic Reading

This book is an attempt to come to grips with the family saga as formal narrative. Though it would seem late in the day to be undertaking such a fundamental task, it can hardly qualify as a work of supererogation. The question of formal definitions and formal categories has in fact seldom been raised, for the simple reason that the saga has never been entertained by literary scholarship. It has traditionally been the property of philologists, historians, and folklorists, who have devoted themselves to textual questions, to the issue of historicity and the problem of origins, or at most to the cultural yield of the sagas. A programmatic acceptance of the sagas as literature is still only a few decades old and has been accompanied by the critical dogma that a saga is best studied in isolation and that a comparative perspective blurs the image. As a result we have a few articles and monographs on individual sagas but no general studies. This would seem to be a critical malproportion. The family sagas do, after all, constitute a homogeneous genre capable of a homogeneous definition. I have tried in the following pages to make some progress toward such a definition, in the knowledge that first steps are always clumsy, but in the hope of providing a tentative basis for discussing the saga as a literary form with specific literary characteristics.