A precondition for the amazing literary output of the Icelanders was the unique
cooperation that existed in their country between the servants of the Church and the
secular chieftains. While pagan and secular stories from oral traditions were rarely
at this time recorded in other countries of Europe, since writing was more or less
monopolised by the Church, the situation was very much different in Iceland. Here the
chieftain families controlled the Church and the clerical schools and hence also literary
production. In spite of their role as church leaders, the chieftains also saw themselves as
the guardians and preservers of traditional lore from the pre-Christian era in the form of
skaldic poetry, heroic tales, genealogies and legends about their ancestors, particularly
insofar as these ancestors were reputed to have played an important role in the history of
Norway and Iceland. Hence the chieftains took an interest in saga-writing and in
promoting various kinds of literary activities. The first manifestations of this interest
was the writing of the Book of Settlement (Landnámabók) about the first settlers of
Iceland, and brief historical surveys of Icelandic and Norwegian history by the priests
Ari the wise and Sæmundr the Wise in the twelfth century. But it was not until the
thirteenth century that indigenous and secular saga production started on a large scale.
It seems to have started with konungasögur, while Íslendingasögur came some decades later,
and fornaldarsögur towards the end of the century, but the dating of early saga texts is so
notoriously uncertain and has in later years been challenged so often, that it may be
wisest to avoid the dating problems altogether.
While the fornaldarsögur contain traditional legends and Eddic poems about mythical
heroes who are supposed to have lived in the forn öld or ‘ancient era’ before the vikings,
both the konungasögur and the Íslendingasögur present extensive narratives about
historical events and characters of the Viking Age, and they do so in a manner that
appears more realistic and trustworthy than that of the fornaldarsögur. For this reason,
konungasögur and Íslendingasögur have often been classified as ‘historiography’, while
fornaldarsögur have been classified as ‘fiction’ or ‘entertainment’.
Such a classification, however, can hardly be defended from either a literary or a
historical point of view, since all three of these saga genres are obviously meant to be
both entertaining and, in some sense, loyal to what actually happened in the past. No
clear distinction was originally made by the saga-writers between ‘historiography’ and
‘fiction’, although it became gradually accepted that a story did not necessarily have to
be perfectly true in order to be entertaining. From a modern historian’s point of view
there is enough fiction in all sagas to make them unreliable as sources, but this does not
mean that any saga should be read as pure fiction like a modern novel, since they all
claim to present some kind of truth, even though it would hardly be recognised as such
by modern scholars. And although events in a fornaldarsaga often seem more fantastic
than events in a konungasaga or an Íslendingasaga, this is not so much a result of generic
difference as a result of the fact that fornaldarsögur deal with prehistorical and hence
mythical times about which people loved to talk and speculate but actually knew
almost nothing. The saga-writers knew a great deal more about the Viking Age but
their knowledge was embedded in legendary tales and supplemented with the help of
their own creative imagination.
To what extent were the sagas then based on oral tradition and to what extent on
literary authorship? This is one of the main problems of saga scholarship, discussed
primarily with regard to Íslendingasögur but equally relevant with regard to fornald-
arsögur and konungasögur. Scholars used to adhere either to the ‘Freeprose theory’ or the
–– chapter 23: The Icelandic sagas––