Reviewed by: The Saint and the Saga Hero. Hagiography and Early Icelandic Literature by Siân E. Grønlie Margaret Cormack The Saint and the Saga Hero. Hagiography and Early Icelandic Literature. By Siân E. Grønlie. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. 2017. Pp. xi, 306. $130.00. ISBN 978 84384 481 5.) Siân E. Grønlie comments in the volume under review that "the saints were not just literary characters to the medieval Icelanders, but a powerful and active presence in their lives" (p. ix). This basic fact is often ignored by scholars of medieval Icelandic literature and culture. While a token nod may be made to the fact that the thirteenth-century saga authors were Christian (indeed as is now repeatedly suggested, they may have been associated with monasteries), the significance of that fact is often overlooked. Those who study the secular sagas have all too often neglected to read the translated passiones and vitae of the saints. This in spite of the fact that, as Stefán Karlsson pointed out two decades ago, over one-third of the surviving medieval Icelandic manuscripts contain saints' lives. This is twice as many as the next most frequent category (kings' sagas) and three times as many as the two next most popular groups, sagas of Icelanders and chivalric romances.1 The present volume provides a much-needed corrective to this neglect. Dr. Grønlie is thoroughly familiar not only with native saga genres, but also with translated religious literature that would have been available at monasteries, cathedrals, and some churches. That literature included homilies, saints' lives, patristic writings, liturgical books, and works such as Peter Comestor's Bible commentary, Vincent of Beauvais' Historia Scholastica, and Isidore of Seville's Etymologies. After an introductory chapter on "Saints' Lives and the Sagas of Icelanders," her monograph is far more than a search for parallels such as have been undertaken in the past; she is well aware that the sagas do not blindly adopt the ideology of the saint's life, and shows how they respond creatively to it. Using polysystem theory, Grønlie examines how hagiography [End Page 618] and sagas of Icelanders interact with each other, and how different authors imitate, invert, and subvert hagiographic structures and ideals. Her second chapter—about the translation of a Latin work by the monk Oddr Snorrason, known as Oddr's Saga of Óláfr Tryggvason—is a wonderful illustration of the numerous influences that can be traced in this saga, and how they were used. Well aware of later additions to the Icelandic text, Grønlie discusses the insights the underlying text provides into the community of writers at the monastery at Þingeyrar and Oddr's practice as a historian (and, perhaps, would-be hagiographer). Like Ari Þorgilsson, Oddr lists his informants, and it is worth noting that three of the six are female. Grønlie discusses not only Oddr's work but also the poems about Óláfr, both verses contemporary with his life and others by two poets contemporary with Oddr; she concludes that those living in the late twelfth century were working from the same body of material. The following chapters consider sagas that are thematically similar: "The Confessor, the Martyr and the Convert," "The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint," "The Outlaw, the Exile, and the Desert Saint," and "The Saint as Friend and Patron." All provide in-depth readings of passages dealing with particular events, such as the conversion to Christianity, and characters, such as Bishop Friðrekr and Þangbrandr, in works as varied as Kristni saga, Þorvalds þáttr víðförla, Vatnsdæla saga, and Njáls saga. Grønlie is aware that medieval Christianity itself was not uniform (and very different from most modern varieties); she points out that in descriptions of a single episode, the attitude to violence that may be problematized in one saga may be valorized in another. She notes that the heroic violence of the missionaries, and the greater sympathy for the (often quite reluctant) convert, are innovations on the part of saga authors when compared to other missionary accounts. As in any detailed study there are occasional errors, for example, the...
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Nov 1, 2021
Andrew S Reynolds 
Open Access