The Serpent and the Crow: Reassessing Fairy-Tale Motifs in the Old Icelandic Ragnars saga loðbrókar

Abstract

This article examines folkloric motifs and motif clusters in medieval Icelandic literature with a special focus on Ragnars saga loðbrókar (The Saga of Ragnarr Shaggy Breeches), composed in the thirteenth century. While Ragnars saga has previously been mentioned in connection with the fairy tale ‘Cinderella’, this article provides an in-depth study of the saga’s fairy-tale characteristics, which may further illuminate the literary link between Ragnars saga and the Old Icelandic Völsunga saga (The Saga of the Völsungs). However, while ‘Cinderella’ variants from the modern fairy-tale tradition are comprehensible and single-stranded narratives, the Cinderella paradigm in Ragnars saga proves to be adapted for a many-stranded, complicated, interlaced literary saga text.