Changing style and changing meaning: Icelandic historiography and the medieval redactions of HeiĆ°reks saga

Abstract

Sagas appeared on Scandinavian scholars' horizons around the seventeenth century, when their narratives were accepted as reasonably accurate accounts on past events. Subsequently, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they were increasingly recognized as literary creations that could rarely be taken as reliable narrative histories; this shift was particularly deleterious for the study of the fornaldarsogur, which not only fell from grace sooner, but were not generally thought very good literature either. Here, Hall seeks to anchor these assumptions more firmly in the surviving evidence by analyzing the changing styles, techniques, and intentions of the medieval redactions of Heidreks saga.