on the other hand between the earliest manuscript versions of each of the sagas, and the
later ones, and thus take into account the variability in the transmission of the texts (see
e.g. the transmission of Njáls saga, Guðrún Nordal 2005 ). The sagas’ sense of geography
is furthermore decisive for the narrative mode. Most of the sagas focus on events in
Iceland, while the narration is also played out to a smaller or greater degree in Greenland
(and even America if the Vinland sagas, Eiríks saga rauða and Grænlendinga saga are
grouped with the sagas of Icelanders), in the British Isles and Scandinavia, and some
characters even travel as east as Constantinople. It has been argued that the narrative
mode changes according to the change of location; that the ‘realistic’ mode is relaxed
when events depart the familiar space in Iceland and Norway (Torfi Tulinius 1990 ). But
it is equally evident that among the sagas there is varied interest in other countries
outside Iceland and in the ‘other’, as will become evident in this chapter.
Modern scholars have approached the categorisation of the c. forty sagas of Icelanders
from different angles. These attempts are always linked to the scholars’ ideas about the
growth and evolution of the genre in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. I will
mention three such endeavours. Sigurður Nordal attempted a grouping based on the
balance between the historical and the fantastic in each saga and suggested a timeline for
the writing of the sagas from the beginning of the thirteenth century to c. 1400. His
division of the sagas into five groups is based on the chronology in the writing of the
sagas (Sigurður Nordal 1953 : 235 ). Vésteinn Ólason ( 2005 : 101 – 18 , cf. 1993 : 23 – 163 ),
in the most recent Icelandic literary history, categorised the sagas into three groups
according to their content matter and time of writing: ( 1 ) early sagas c. 1200 – 80 , ( 2 )
classical sagas c. 1240 – 1300 and ( 3 ) late sagas c. 1300 – 1450. Theodore Andersson in his
recent study of the early sagas, written in the period 1180 – 1280 , attempted to define
more clearly the sagas’ relationship with other narrative genres, such as the kings’ sagas,
for their artistic development. Andersson ( 2006 : 17 ) suggests three types of sagas which
are particularly frequent: ( 1 ) the biographical mode, ( 2 ) the regional or chronicle saga
and ( 3 ) the feud or the conflict saga.
Memories about the pagan past in Iceland and the settlement period were most likely
preserved in oral memory from the ninth and tenth centuries to the period in which the
sagas of Icelanders were written (see Gísli Sigurðsson 2004 ). The early writing of the
Book of Settlement (Landnámabók) reveals a social, cultural or economic need in the early
twelfth century to establish an official account of the settlement. The motivation behind
the construction of the Book of Settlement is contested, but the early settlements of
Iceland may have been set in writing in order to secure land claims by ruling families at
the time of writing. The different versions of the work from the thirteenth century to
the beginning of the fifteenth century reflect a continuing interest in and demand for
passing on the stories of the migration from Norway and the British Isles and an account
of the settlement.
The inclusion of the stories of the migration to Iceland and the settlement in a saga
clearly affects its beginning and determines through which door the reader or listener
enters the house of the narrative, to use a metaphor from Geoffrey from Vinsauf’s Poetria
nova. Unusually for a fictitious medieval genre, the sagas of Icelanders do not contain
literary prologues that place the narrative in a context with other medieval genres at the
very outset, nor is there any discussion of the writers’ attitudes to the factual or fictive
quality of the narrative. For this reason, the beginning of each saga may serve as a
prologue, in many cases foreshadowing the main narrative, in some cases comparing or
–– Guðrún Nordal––