Sagan handan sögunnar

Abstract

In this article I try to describe the art and intent of the unique narrative devices employed by some of the anonymous authors of the Icelandic sagas to arouse the interest of their audience and activate their imagination, sometimes by telling as true a story that the audience, unassisted by the author, later on is supposed to discover as a fraud, sometimes by leaving their audience with an unsolved mystery to ponder. Some authors tell only of the deeds and fates of the characters, without any explanations and virtually no indication of their thoughts or motivation, in this way abandoning their audience to the wondrous art of storytelling and leaving it up to them to find their way. By this narrative technique they encourage the audience to fill in the gaps, whether singly or in collaboration with others, to solve the puzzles which the saga narrator lays before them, to enter into the world of the saga and to ponder who is behind the work and what is its intention, so that the saga, even when the reading is over, continues to ferment in the minds of those who listened. I suspect that the use of this narrative technique in written books is a legacy from oral tradition, that it is a means by which the saga narrator can have a lively interchange with his listeners, catch them (so to speak) in the net of oral narrative. I have not been able to study the use of this technique by authors from other times or literary traditions, nor I have kept up with our own Icelandic literature in recent decades so as to be able to say what might be found there — but I would point out that Halldór Laxness used this device, for example in Sjálfstættfólk, and I know that Gyrðir Elíasson is skilled at whetting his readers in this way.