The Irish Saga: Limits of the “Genre” (a Formal Approach)

Abstract

The work considers traditional use of the term “saga” meaning the quantum of the Old Irish epic narrative, in Russian and European research. The correlation of the Russian term’s saga semantics with the English and French (saga) as well as German (die Sage) usages of the notion in scholarly texts describing the same denotates is also analyzed. The comparison with the semantic field of the original term scél, having “story, tale” as one of its meanings, is conducted. The work also attempts at singling out certain formal features making it possible to relate some Old Irish prose narrative to “saga” (in contrast with historical tales, prose texts on legal subjects et al.). As a working hypothesis the author suggests to single out the four aspects: 1) the presence of the initial formula referring to the oral stage of the narrative tradition; 2) the presence of a character’s long descriptions of ekphrastic type; 3) the presence of unjustified use of the Present Tense (the so-called Scenic Present); 4) the presence of verse insertions marking characters’ emotional speech yet not regarded as poetry proper. It is supposed that the three latter aspects should create the described events’ epic visualization. As the time passes traditional Irish narrative prose loses those aspects, neither are they preserved in the oral folklore tradition. To sum up, the conclusion concerning the term’s “saga” relative quality as a mediaeval genre is made, and the necessity to appeal to the researcher’s intuition is pointed out.