Changes in Literary Taste

Of the approximately forty extant sagas of Icelanders that contain poetry, ten sagas and two short tales from the period after c. 1270–80 combine verse and prose, ranging from a few stanzas in a single section of their texts to a considerable number distributed throughout the prosimetrum. In alphabetical order, and with the number of stanzas given in parentheses, these are: Bárðar saga (6), Draumr Þorsteins Síðu-Hallssonar (3), Flóamanna saga (3), Grettis saga (73), Harðar saga (19), Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings (15), Króka-Refs saga (3), Njáls saga (64), Stjǫrnu-Odda draumr (16), Svarfdœla saga (17), Víglundar saga (24) and Þórðar saga hreðu (12). There are also four late sagas that contain no poetry, to be discussed in Chapter 8: Finnboga saga ramma, Fljótsdœla saga, Kjalnesinga saga and Þorskfirðinga saga, also called Gull-Þóris saga.

By any measure the presence of poetry in this group of sagas is significant. Yet, in consequence of the general disregard scholars have shown for sagas of Icelanders that probably date from the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the poetry in late sagas, with a few notable exceptions, such as that in Njáls saga and Grettis saga, has escaped the attention of literary scholars almost completely. This is regrettable, as the poetry in these sagas shows some very interesting new characteristics that distinguish it from the verse cited in earlier sagas and in some cases departs from the usual prosimetrical relationships between verse and prose established in earlier works.

Among other new developments post-1270/80 we may note: a renaissance of the prosimetrum form compared to its use in sagas from the mid-thirteenth century, with poetry attributed to major characters at points of high personal emotion in the saga narrative (a phenomenon that was suggested in Chapter 1 may have been in partial decline in the period before c. 1280); an observable increase in the amount of poetry attributed to female characters, suggesting a link with the increasing popularity of the romance in this period; evidence, linguistic and metrical, that much of this poetry was composed by the authors of the sagas themselves or by poets of roughly the same period; and links with the emerging ríma genre.