8 - Sagas without Poetry

Summary

Why are some Sagas of Icelanders without Poetry?

To ask the question with which I begin this final chapter of the present study of poetry in sagas of Icelanders is to assume that the normal condition of these literary works was to include a mix of prose and verse, a prosimetrum, in at least some parts of their texts. Statistically this assumption has to be correct: as we have seen in Chapter 1, all but nine of the approximately forty extant sagas of Icelanders contain poetry, while three sagas, Grœnlendinga saga, Reykdœla saga and Vatnsdœla saga, have only a single stanza that also appears in another text. These three sagas have been added to the nine in which poetry is entirely absent for the purposes of the present chapter, but, even so, the combined number of twelve sagas without poetry is slightly less than a third of the total.

The majority of the stanzas in sagas of Icelanders are in skaldic metres, most often dróttkvœtt, though a smaller proportion are in fornyrðislag, kviðuháttr and runhent. However, dróttkvœtt is the dominant metre of this sub-genre and this distinguishes it from fornaldarsögur on the one hand, where the dominant metre is fornyrðislag, and from both translated and indigenous romances, on the other, which do not incorporate any poetry into their narratives. The use of dróttkvœtt within the prosimetrum also signals the affinity of sagas of Icelanders with other kinds of vernacular historical writing, kings’ sagas, contemporary sagas and sagas of bishops, in all of which skaldic metres dominate, although some use of eddic verse-forms may also be found there. The absence of verse in the group of sagas without poetry may therefore signal an affinity of some of them with the sub-genre of the romance, and this explanation seems to fit several within the group of late sagas, particularly Finnboga saga ramma, Fljótsdœla saga, Gull-Þóris saga and Kjalnesinga saga. However, this suggested explanation does not account for all twelve verse-less sagas, particularly those that are likely to date from the early thirteenth century.

The lack of poetry in Old Norse translated and indigenous romances in its turn probably indicates an awareness on the part of both authors and audiences that this sub-genre’s subject matter was untraditional, legendary and often non-Scandinavian and so inappropriate to the mixture of verse and prose found in sagas with broadly historical subjects.