SOURCE: Madelung, A. Margaret Arent. “Literary Perspectives.” In The Laxdoela Saga: Its Structural Patterns, pp. 147-96. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.

[In the following excerpt, Madelung presents a detailed structural analysis of the Laxdaela Saga, emphasizing such features as balance, symmetry, recurrence, comparison, and temporal patterning in various elements of the work.]

THE SOCIAL AND MORAL ORDER

Although knowledge of the historical, social, and cultural background of a literary work often contributes appreciably to the better understanding of it, an artistic interpretation may, conversely, illuminate with even greater penetration the vitality of the age which produced it. Laxdœla presents the cultural ethos prevailing in Iceland from the time of Settlement to the author's own day. In creating so very real a world in which the characters move and act, the author has set before us the familiar events of that world: births, deaths, wooings, marriage feasts, journeys abroad, business deals and bargainings, ghosts, divinations, dreams, and above all killings and feuds. All the social and moral enactments have been selected in consonance with the saga's overall purpose and design and put into a form that brings out that design most advantageously. Against the backdrop of social conventions, figures move across the landscape in multi-colored array, weapons and shields brightly shining. In spite of its splendor, fate and doom hang over this world; in spite of its variety, the activities contain no real surprises. Everything is caught in a round of formulae, stereotyped scenes, and recurrent phrases. The formulaic character of the language and the predictable patterns in which life in the saga world is depicted mirror the inflexibility of that world.

In the moral order is found the same kind of rigidity and inescapableness as characterizes the social sphere. Here again is formula. Comparison of men and their worth underpins the moral code. Disparities are weighed and counterbalanced; in combat and contests skill is pitted against skill. Snorri Godi recognizes the disparity between Lambi and Bolli in the compensating of one life with another. In the competitions at Ásbjarnarnes Kjartan is matched against the strongest and best; and at court, talk apparently often runs to the comparison of men (mannjafnaður: xix, 44). When king Óláf and Kjartan are measured by the yardstick, they are found to be equally tall: “Þat sogðu menn, at þeir hafi jafnmiklir menn verit, þá er þeir gengu undir mál, Óláfr konungr ok Kjartan” (xli, 124-125). Doubtless the physical comparison is meant to suggest a sizing-up of their worth as well. Equalizing is basic to the meting out of justice, to the settling of arbitrations, to the paying of indemnities. But perfect atonement, an evened score, can never be attained, for the demands of wounded honor carry the killings onward: “‘It may well be that we cannot even the score exactly with these Laxdalers,’ Gudrún says, ‘but now someone must pay dearly, no matter from what dale he comes.’” A retaliatory system of point counterpoint sets up a measured rhythm within the run-on chain reaction of retribution, from which there is no respite. To be sure, disputes could always be settled peaceably, in a way that would do both sides honor, but efforts in this direction are abortive, even though they stand out as an admirable alternative, an unattainable ideal that is reluctantly relinquished. The aesthetic analysis has shown how the author neatly symbolized this two-edged sword of justice: through Repetition and Comparison, the like-for-like and compensating of likes and unlikes respectively; through Recurrence, the eternal chain.

From the concept of equalization and comparison the saga derives its vital form. Aside from the killings, other activities have been purposely selected to point up the same underlying idea: division of inheritances, marriage contracts, divorce settlements, sharing a catch of fish, making equal trades of horses and land. Bargaining stands out as a particular preoccupation in the saga. Much of the substance of the narrative relates to this equivalent and compensatory aspect of the moral law, as do the lexical, syntactical, and rhetorical preferences.

The round-of-life activities with their repeated patterns lend emphasis to the notion that the enactments of the social code, like those in the moral order, can develop into a vicious cycle. The formal organization of the linguistic materials tells us that this is so. As the tendency toward mutliple repetition presents itself in the triplets and quadruplets, where the balance is preserved, however precariously, through resolution into pairs in varying combinations, so the Recurrent linguistic formulations strive for equilibrium in a sort of check and balance system between negatives and positives. The delicate balance is on the verge of being upset at any moment.

The reappearance of the lexical combinations throughout the saga transmits a sense of necessity and predeterminism. The inner world of the saga is always (jafnan) the same world, one inextricably caught in its own entanglement, one ethically as well as metaphysically prescribed.

DESTINY

The irretractable demand of the code of honor is expressed in the lives of the agents as unavoidable entanglements which lead to misfortune and, ultimately, to death. What is called misfortune by the individual is really part of a larger mysterious doom which pervades life itself; for all things there is an ill-fated destiny. Fate works behind the scenes, yet is manifested primarily in and through the characters. The course of events is determined not only by the will of the characters—and their will is motivated by the ethical code—but also by the will of this inscrutable force. Free and self-determined though the characters may seem to be, there is a power at the core of life itself which motivates both the agents and through them the action. The element of chance is thus all but eliminated. By amalgamating an apparition of destiny with the moral order of things, the author has created a compendious impulse that sets off the dramatic tension.

To represent this supernatural force, the author has made use of the convenient folk belief in dreams, portents, curses, premonitions, and revelations of second sight. These “natural” phenomena, belonging in one sense to the “real” world, were also manifestations of the preternatural. They offered a ready-made device by which a preview of events could be given. But so skillfully has the author couched the will of destiny in the language of dreams and the like—a language characteristically ambiguous—that both agents and audience are left in doubt whether what is suggested will really happen. Ambiguity permits the agents to shrug off prophecies or portents as something puzzling or inexplicable. In any case they pay them no heed, and warnings are deliberately ignored (Án Brushwood Belly's dream, Thorstein's admonishment to Thorkel, for instance), a fact which is again motivated by the characters' own will and stubbornness. Fate is actualized through the agents; it is not a deus ex machina. The audience, if alert and atuned to the subtleties of the text, may bear all the long-termed prophetic statements in mind, but somehow also retains doubt concerning the probability of realization. Apprehension aroused increases dramatic anticipation. It is a case of “agents having heard, that still do not hear” and of an “audience having heard, that knows but still plans and hopes.” Alternations between fear and hope heighten the excitement. An evil sword comes into the family; but soon a protective one is acquired, an antidote. Hopes are raised, then dampened when the good sword is stolen, raised again when it is found, and again disappointed when it is put aside in a chest. Similarly, we hope that Kjartan will heed Aud's warning, but he refuses to take her brothers along; they go at her insistence, only to turn back before the crucial moment. Finally, the shepherd “by chance” sees the ambush and wishes to head Kjartan off. But the shepherd is overruled by his master, who, along with Thorhalla Chatterbox, is one of the malicious characters in the saga who delights in the misfortunes of others. Thus, Kjartan's destiny overrides all obstacles and takes its course. From the outset it is clear what the end will be.

In addition to vatic pronouncements of various kinds, other elements in the saga contribute to the establishing of a known result. The seemingly perfunctory adjectives used in introducing a character sum up his temperament before it is revealed in the action. Genealogies introduce even the agents themselves long before they come into the story. Ambiguities and rhetorical devices of different kinds aid in transmitting hints ironically veiled by the context, but transparent to the audience “in the know.”

Although what the characters experience appears to happen naturally or as chance would have it, the underlying concept is not chance but destiny, a predeterminism which fulfills all that is implicit from the beginning. The inflexibility of fate corresponds associatively and structurally with the inflexibility in the ethical order. In the saga, these two spheres, the ethical and metaphysical (represented by the preternatural), are for all practical purposes amalgamated, and the formal aspects in the saga reflect both. Lexical repetitions set opposing sides against one another in balanced strength and power, either as parallels or antitheses, and hence present a symmetry of their own that has the semblance of an evened score. Furthermore, any given item reappearing underscores the inevitability of what has been intimated or once said and so produces a semblance of function fulfilled. Enactment of the moral law and fulfillment of fate are in each instance binding and necessary. The precision with which the formal elements (i.e. the lexical components and the formalized patterns) reappear shows them to be necessary rather than arbitrary. The whole saga is executed according to a preconceived plan. The author, omniscient and behind the scenes, manipulates his puppets and the actions on stage, much as fate has determined all from the beginning.

THE CHARACTERS

The foregoing investigation has shown that the Laxdœla author worked with a selected number of personality traits and attributive phrases. The character types are not infinitely varied nor are the events and situations of unlimited kinds. Both have been chosen to illustrate a formal concept—either balance and compensation or serial happenings. Both agents and events are subordinate to that function. The inner and outer worlds are thus brought into closest correspondence. The agents in general show those qualities that can best motivate the action and set the ethos in motion—stubborn, hard to deal with, prideful, vain, ready to retaliate when honor is at stake. But despite the patterning, the psychological inner workings of the characters are conveyed by the author with remarkable sensitivity. Here he is a master, somehow capable of working with the stereotyped and with the distinctively individual, the true to life, blending them together.

If any one character can be said to dominate the action, it is Gudrún. She arrests our attention from the moment she appears. High-spirited, beautiful, proud, ambitious, fiercely jealous, quick-witted, sharp-tongued, calculating, and insatiable in vengeance, she of all the characters is the most carefully drawn. We observe her in all four of her marriages: spoiled and petulant in the first; mischievous and self-assured in the second; accepting the third one in spite and ill-humor; and agreeing to the fourth as a means toward gaining revenge. How and when she is moved to remorse or begins to see clearly that the flaws in her third marriage initiated the tragedy is hard to say, for we never look into her heart, except for once and even then briefly. The last words she is represented as speaking suggest that ultimately she has come to see her life for what it was: “To him I was worst whom I loved most.” The forces of passion have spent themselves; blind and weary and old she finishes her days as a nun and hermitess. But the fate that is hers has not been imposed upon her by an alien spirit; it has been there inside her all along, forming and shaping her life and finally recoiling upon her. Rather, Christian humility and contrition are the alien elements here; just as medieval gallantry and pageantry comprise, as it were, a light wash over the world depicted in the saga, so, too, Christianity runs thin. The old world order and the fateful conception of life retain their efficacy.

The other women in the saga have something of Gudrún in them: Unn, Jórunn, Melkorka, Vigdís, and of course Thorgerd,—all except the sweet and gentle Hrefna, who is of an entirely different cast and in every respect a foil to Gudrún. Here again the author has brought a contrast into the series, just as a negative element suddenly offsets a preponderance of positives.

The male characters all have something of Kjartan in them: Óláf Feilan, Hoskuld, Óláf Peacock, Bolli Thorleiksson, and Bolli Bollason. Kjartan, as Gudrún's lover, plays the leading male role. He is gallant, self-confident, impetuous, eager for fame and glory, capable in weapons and sports, a born leader, and an extrovert. He comes close to the ideal hero type. When events begin to turn against him, he maintains self-assurance, first through restraint, then by over-compensation, taking especial care to appear gay, flaunting his prowess and authority wherever he can. He is cocky and throws caution to the winds to sport with death. But he, too, has become infected somewhat by Christian ethics: he keeps the fast and Holy Days and in the fight for his life finds it better to receive death than to deal it.¹ Both he and Bolli Bollason with their pomp and weapons and clothes betray the influence of medieval knighthood on the heroic tradition. Nonetheless, both Kjartan and Gudrún are tragic heroes and, like those of old, carry in themselves their fate. In this sense they are like their Eddic counterparts or the classical Greek heroes who are doom-eager. Fate is internalized.

Although Bolli Thorleiksson is said to be closest to Kjartan in prowess and accomplishments, he, like Hrefna, is of a different stamp. What makes the breach between Bolli and Kjartan the more charged with tension is the initial fondness they had for one another. Bolli's passive and introspective nature, his silent, brooding sullenness stand in contrast to Kjartan's outgoing assurance and active retaliation. The first overt act and triumph of Bolli's life, the snatching of the bride, is not enough to bolster his ego; it only brings him inner pain; and his second, the slaying of Kjartan, ultimately is his undoing.

However deft the Laxdœla author is in portraying accurately reactions true to life and in suggesting and inferring through the subtlest of means and rhetorical devices psychological truths, his main aim is not character study. Foremost is his achievement in cleverly controlling his verbal units to bring balance, symmetry, and symbolic imagery to his composition. It is through the mixing and correlating of the patterned phrases that most of the characters are “mixed characters” rather than black-and-white types. Even the events surrounding their lives, we have seen, represent an amalgam from various sources. The mixing and matching of the verbal components was particularly evident among the pairs of inimical brothers. When the characters appear, what they say, what is said about them are totally subordinate to the arrangement of linguistic units with which the author is ultimately concerned. For it is this arrangement that forms an abstract pattern that conveys in itself the notions of comparison, of predetermined necessity, and of a repetitive progression, and these meanings coincide with the structural concepts inherent in the two aspects of the moral code and in a fateful destiny.

Many of the elements appear stereotyped and crystallized even before the Laxdœla author employed them, phrases like mikill maðr ok sterkr; many others become stereotyped within the saga by virtue of the author's repetitious use of them. However true it may be that the author had precedents for his phraseology or that he used merely ordinary Icelandic idiom or common storyteller's devices, he has nonetheless so organized, concentrated, and repeated them that they have become stereotyped patterns for the first time in Laxdœla. Within the overall patterning occasioned by the repeated verbal units, there are thematic patterns or groupings into a complex of specific motifs like the whettings, the drownings, the hero's accoutrements. Characters, too, are modelled after one another. Thorgerd, for instance, represents the stereotype of the prodding woman much more than does Gudrún; Bolli Bollason approaches the stereotype of the gallant much more than does Kjartan. What is intriguing is the author's ability to individualize the elements he has made into stereotypes in the first place, enabling him to conceal his patterns. And here again the author holds the balance.

THE EPIC BASE

The recounting of events in a chronological progression from one generation to the next gives the saga epic scope. The introductory section in particular lays a broader epic base for the central action. The narrative is slow in getting started, halting at intervals to introduce yet another character or episode, looking backward to pick up threads that have been temporarily dropped, rounding out what has been prepared. Chronicling of births, deaths, wooings, marriages, careers, feudings, traffickings between farms, tales of ghosts, gossips and hired hands provide a broader picture of time and place, and supplies, as it were, an epic setting. The terrain and landscape around the Breidafjord Dales, the skerries and channels in the sound, the relationship of the farmsteads to one another and geographical directions, too, set a definite stage, familiar to epic narration. Recurrence, aside from creating the greater tragic aspect of the ethical code through its serial patterning, supplies through its content an epic backdrop for the more dramatic happenings in the foreground.

Many of the trappings and rhetorical devices associated with epic form are also present: backtracking of the action and the use of flash-backs; exaggerations and magnification, a glorification of agents and events. Typical of epic retardation are the incidents prior to the assault on Helgi's hut: the shepherd's account of the band in the woods with the details of dress and appearance; the eating of the dagverðr (main meal) by the group of attackers, as if they were in no hurry to get on with the business; the appearance of the comic Víga-Hrapp on the scene. Again epic delay is apparent in the leave-taking scene between Ingibjorg and Kjartan. Pause is taken to describe the expensive headdress, the little chest in which she keeps it, and its velvet case. This scene affords opportunity, too, to convey between the lines what Ingibjorg's feelings are by the fact that she prolongs these moments while in Kjartan is eagerness and expectancy pressing for departure.

Some few descriptions arrest one's attention like vignettes, masterfully presented with a few strokes that catch the eye: Thórólf standing at the landing stage with halberd ready as Hall comes rowing in to shore in high spirits; Vigdís flinging the purse into Ingjald's face, dealing him a bloody nose; Melkorka sitting on a sunny slope talking to her little son; Jórunn lashing Melkorka about the head with a pair of stockings; Óláf all dressed up in battle array striding forward to the prow of his vessel, which is manned from stem to stern, shields and spears studding the gunwales; Óláf again in all his finery marching off to Egil's booth at the heels of his father; Thorstein and Thorkel in the home meadow at Hjardarholt, nudging so close to Halldór that they are sitting on his cloak, while Beinir stands over them with poised axe. In addition, every now and then some small detail of weaponry or clothes is mentioned: shields embossed in gold with a lion, cross, or knight; or Gudrún's bodice and fancy sash of foreign mode. But there is little time to dwell on any of these in the saga. The descriptions are suggested in a minimum of words that form instantaneous pictures.

Although the story is mainly told through dialogue and indirect discourse and through the actions and deeds of the agents, lending an immediate presence to the action, some awareness that the story moves in the memory of bygone days is preserved. Epic time is past time, whereas dramatic time is an imminent future. Laxdœla participates in both.

THE DRAMATIC PRESENTATION

All the essential elements of drama are present in the saga: actors, motives turned into action, dialogue, and a limited setting made broader through suggestion. The characters act out their parts, and their words and deeds unfold the plot. But the dramatic quality of the saga runs much deeper than such ordinary histrionic devices. The scene before our eyes is suspended as a theatrical present between the past and the future. What has gone on before is the necessary prerequisite for the present moment, and the present action is, in turn, charged with implication for the future. Herein lies the essence of the dramatic conception of tragedy. The saga is essentially a dramatic presentation in epic form. The central action present before our eyes is always moving against a backdrop of past action.

The prophecies and portents, although more internalized than the oracle or chorus in classical Greek drama, boom forth their doom and disaster and intensify the necessity that is already present as moral obligation. Fate and the code of ethics offered the author ready-made dramatic material in the broadest sense. Both work together toward the same end, and the action fulfills all that was implicit from the beginning.

Tragedy dominates the central theme, and destiny brings the saga to its close. All passions have been spent; the forces of doom have run themselves out; all prophecies have been executed; the demands of justice satisfied. Yet, the saga ends on a different note. The generations continue; the life process goes on. Balance and compensation have been attained momentarily; and so the saga ends on a sort of up-beat. Such a rhythm belongs actually to comedy.² Our interest in the story has in a way also remained somewhat disengaged, not because emotions have not been presented, but because they have, without our knowing it, been harnessed in a pattern. Because of this conformity to a mechanical system on all levels in the saga, the tragic impact is not overwhelming. The feeling, however, remains that the closing scenes could easily be as implicitly portentous as the innocent relationships with which the saga opened. It is as if the whole could repeat itself like the round-of-life cycle under Recurrence. The end has run into the beginning. The epic and the dramatic, the comic and the tragic are played off against one another in this two-levelled saga.

STYLE AND TONE

In view of the fact that the structural components, especially Foreknowledge and Repetition and Comparison, are generally so well camouflaged that it requires some sleuthing to detect them, something more should be said about the method of camouflage and the overall style and tone of the saga. The tension produced within the plot through the incompletion of a foreknown conclusion postulates a double audience consisting of some that “hearing shall hear and shall not understand” and others that “when more is meant than meets the ear, [are] aware both of that more and of the outsider's incomprehension.”³ This double treatment penetrates the saga to its core. It is first of all most noticeable in the unawareness of the agents and the omniscience of author and audience. The similarity between the plot structure of Laxdœla saga and the dramatic irony of classical Greek drama is obvious. The agents in the saga remain in the dark about the dreams and portents. They accept them on one level, the audience on another, if the latter is “in the know” and can interpret the signs. The language of dreams is by nature ambiguous; and the other vatic statements (in the broader and narrower sense) are likewise veiled through poetic and rhetorical devices such as litotes, euphemism, idioms and expressions of all kinds that show a discrepancy between surface meaning and significant meaning, between specific reference and general reference, between the literal and the figurative meanings (e. g. kátr; kyrrt; at drepa skeggi; spenna um þongulshofuð; snarisk í bragð; loka hurðir).

Omniscience is also evident in the attributing to the agents knowledge which has been previously heard only by the audience. Statements made by the author or by other characters are often picked up by one of the agents without their having been transmitted. The audience is again “in the know”; the agents, to all intents and purposes, “in the dark.” These passages offer good evidence for the author's method and aim. He, being omniscient, has manipulated his phrases and repetitions, letting them fall at just the right places in the narrative to awaken the sense of necessity and fulfilled function. Some of them (e. g. siti kyrrir ok í friði; framarla til) are so pertinent to the situation that the speaker conceivably could have arrived at the idea independently, by chance, so to speak, under the given circumstance. This veils their invented origin and the author's deliberate purpose. Other of these repetitions by omniscience (e. g. eigi er váttum bundit; Þórhollusonu, er þeir eru sendir til Helgafells; gaman ok skemmtan af viðskiptum þeira) are too good a surmise on the part of the speaker to be coincidental. Rather than resort to pragmatic explanations like neighborhood gossip, which would lead away from the text and outside the poetic illusion, to explain the transmission by real life situations, it is more fitting to see in them part of the total scheme of the author to create structural parallels. Only in some places he has not veiled his method as well as in others. Balanced form and necessary connection are his primary concerns and govern the choice of words and where they occur. He would like to make it all seem as if by chance. Recognition of the reuse of precisely the same words, whether transmitted or untransmitted, discloses their contrivance. The latter type does so more readily since the plausibility for the reappearance of the same words has not been produced.

The irony of the presentation as seen in the double audience also comes out in the contrast between the precise form and the passion and intensity of the events described, causing some disengagement on the part of the reader. Related to this is the objectivity for which the Icelandic sagas have frequently been praised, a generality that needs some qualification. In Laxdœla, objectivity consists in a deliberate literary approach where the author disappears behind the scenes, his planning, selecting, contriving, fabricating all so skillfully concealed that the whole action seems to happen through natural motivation and of itself. But the author, like fate, is doing the directing, whether the audience realizes it or not. Again we meet with double treatment and with camouflage.

Camouflage, duplicity, and ambiguity are the keys to much of the substance of the narrative and to the means of its presentation. Snorri Godi's scheming and the play on the word samlendr immediately come to mind. But the technique runs much deeper. The author has favored those events, those agents, and those lexical, and syntactical arrangements, those rhetorical and stylistic devices that would play hand in hand with his central concept. Events such as bargainings and their counterpart, impasses; antithetical agents (e. g. inimical brothers; Gudrún-Hefna); parallel agents (e. g. Kjartan-Bolli Bollason; Gudrún-Thorgerd) abound. In the larger and smaller units of the narrative the author has played with all possible arrangements of such architectonics as chiasmus: parallels with opposite actions and effects (e. g. lendur góðar / minna lausafé; fá lond / fjolða fjár; Án the Black's two dreams) and opposites with same action and effect (e. g. Bolli Thorleiksson and Thorleik Bollason where the chiasmal transposition of the names sets up a kind of opposition but results in their having identical roles; or the two Bolli's despite the same name having opposite roles); or negative reversals (e. g. jafnræði / eigi jafnræði; good marriages and bad marriages; smooth sea crossings and difficult sea crossings; með mikilli blíðu / með engri blíðu); or antitheses set up through substitution of antonyms (e. g. kært / þústr; vináttu / kærleik; ekki efni / gott efni). He also works with parallel comparatives (e. g. firr / nær; hvergi betr / nokkuru fleiri; vel / miklu betri), as well as with sentences constructed on the basis of parallel syntax (e. g. the sentence about the brothers Ingjald and Hall). Correlatives and duplicates of all kinds abound. Alternations as between the hope and fear discussed above, contrasts between the calm (kyrrt) and the storm, between preparatory gaiety and ensuing tragedy, are used by the author to derive the greatest possible effects. So the major enmities grow from incidents which occur at three festive occasions, and an ominous cloud throws its shadow into the jesting and jostling at Hól before Kjartan's fateful ride into Svíndadal, where the comic and the tragic are also juxtaposed. The tension of the tragedy imminent there in the valley is relieved briefly by the pretense of joking when his companions drag Bolli down the slope by his heels. The puny and ludicrous Víga-Hrapp appears on the scene before the attack on Helgi's hut. Likewise the splendor and ennoblement of the social backdrop complements the disastrous events; the most illustrious of the family are doomed to tragic end. Love and hate, a good sword and an evil sword—such contrastive pairs could be enumerated with many more.

One might gather from these remarks that the prose of this saga could easily verge on the trite, almost the euphuistic. But the author has employed his devices so cleverly, making them one with the content, that the trick is well concealed. Besides, the artistic devices are not mere ornaments but are themselves turned into poetic imagery, hence are bearers of meaning. The embellishment of the accoutrements of the hero, helmet, sword, shield, with golden adornments (usually gullrekit and the like) is on the formal level also an embellishment (i. e. amplification) of the pattern. Substitution of antonyms also mirrors the content—a turn in the situation described, for instance; or parallel syntax as used about Hrapp dead or alive parallels the discursive idea.

The relationships and comparisons which the repetitions among the verbal units set up are not explicitly or discursively stated, they are implied. Only once in a while does the author himself intrude to give hint of his intent, as with the þótti mjok á hafa hrinit in the case of two lesser prophecies or with his sem fyrr that makes a reference direct. These phrases cue the reader as to what the saga is about: the necessary fulfillment of what has been suggested before; a return of the same situation as obtained before, or, most importantly, the reuse of verbal configurations. The audience must be alert not only to what has been said before but also to how it has been worded.

The repetitions and correlations are first of all masked through integration with the content. Any one phrase can be interpreted at face value within the context where it appears; as soon as its counterpart is found, the co-relationship carries the significance beyond the contextual meaning. Through the arrangement, the language itself becomes an event rather than a medium or vehicle. An abstract pattern emerges that conveys the ideas of necessity, fulfillment, compensatory balance, comparison, reiteration, recurrence.

Another way in which the verbal repetitions are concealed from the casual observer is through subtle variations in the wording itself: e. g. the pair áttu þáu Guðrún þar mikit traust / þau Ósvífr eiga allt traust; or the statement referring to Gudrún's remembering exactly what men were in on the raid against Bolli and the corresponding statement that Gudrún's sons hadn't forgotten what men were in on the raid; or the fact that the at klæðum ok vápnum phrase is applied to Bolli's men, not specifically to Bolli. These substitutions are practically synonymous, and in every case mutually inclusive by inference so that the correspondence in pattern remains.

Use of vague terms, plurals, or generalities often conceals the specific implication: (e. g. the plurals nokkura, svívirðingarorð; the vague af inum versti manni; or the future of probability mun auðit verða; the generality spenna um þongulshofuð). Substitution of synonyms into the same pattern also disguises the parallelism or comparison intended (e. g. hlutgjarn / framgjarn; sómamaðr / vaskr maðr). Increment embellishment serves the same purpose of making the similarities fuzzier (e. g. “hafim gaman af leik þeira” / “gerði sér af gaman ok skemmtan af viðskiptum þeira”; “þessir menn siti um kyrrt allir” / “Óláfssynir siti kyrrir ok í friði”; “jafnan til trausts” / “tils halds og [sic] trausts”; “sitr Óláfr nú í búi sínu” / “Óláfr sat nú í búi sínu með miklum sóma”; “hafði sverð í hendi” / “hafði í hendi sverð gullrekit”).

In the thematic patterns made up of a concatenation of motifs, the camouflaging is also achieved through variation and substitution, and through rearrangement somewhat of the sequence of the motifs. But above all, camouflaging is accomplished through imbedding the same forms, whether single phrases or whole patterns, in entirely new contexts. Halldór, for instance, is said to take the lead among his brothers (“hann var mjok fyrir þeim brœðrum”). The confirmation of the statement is put in a new setting: Thorgerd, in goading her sons to take action, says to Halldór: “‘Þú þykkisk mest fyrir yðr brœðrum’” (“‘You consider yourself leader among you brothers’”), which adds a shift of viewpoint to the blanket narrative statement. Despite slight variations and new contexts the designs are never obliterated. The individual motifs in the patterns of the parties, goadings, killings, and drownings offer the best examples of rearrangement and substitution of new substance each time into the same molds. There is no doubt that the author has mastered fully the use of patterns, recognizing established ones, creating new ones.

Many of the themes and well turned phrases can be found elsewhere in saga literature, but their specific and unique form and function in Laxdœla make them wholly pertinent to the literary work regardless of their provenance. What has the author done with the materials of his language? He has created formulae out of normal phrases; he has repeated them in accordance with his own structural idea, turning them to new function. He has created patterns and formulae that have become so for the first time within Laxdœla alone. Whether any of them are solidified patterns taken over bodily from tradition outside the saga or from other sources, requires further investigation. The hero accoutrements pattern attracts particular attention in this regard.⁴ Since with the patterns under Recurrence, as with those in triplicate, not every motif occurs in each repetition of the theme, the archetype of the pattern can only be obtained by building a composite from the specific instances. … These nucleus patterns must have been the basis for the composition, whether newly invented or borrowed. It is as though the author, visualizing the whole structure, worked, so to speak, from these germinating centers outward, just as the saga is more fully developed in the middle, ripples of its main themes spreading to the periphery as preparation or recapitulation. Indeed, only if one has recognized the patterns, seen the saga as a whole, can one—in retrospect—detect the fact that Hoskuld's not riding to meet Hrút, for instance, is a negative reversal of the expected; or that Bolli's not having on a coat of mail contradicts the pattern, or that Hrút's accoutrements and the descriptive details about them are but iterations of a thematic complex. The chronological order of the saga as preparation, central theme, recapitulation must be distinguished from the sequence of the creative process. The critical analysis has perhaps given us some clues as to the nature of that formative process. The reader (or audience), like the author, must keep the patterns in mind in order to anticipate and recall and thus read the saga from the center outwards. The effect of the patterns and formulae is a cumulative one since ever more elements are introduced and repeated as the saga progresses—which accounts for the concentration of formulae in the last part of the saga. One has the impression toward the end that everything has already been said somewhere, sometime before. The author's method has become all too patent.

The patterns under the round-of-life category are the most readily recognized. Rather than being concealed, they act as distractors and do the concealing, especially in those cases where the more or less stereotyped recurrent phrases take on individual and qualified function (e.g. ráðakostr, which is used innocuously enough in the career-abroad offers and then with special intent and double meaning to hint of marriage with Ingibjorg; or the unni mest, which is a running theme but also strengthens comparative bonds among the agents: Hoskuld-Óláf, Óláf-Kjartan, Hoskuld-Bard, Gudrún-Bolli B.). Many motifs receive this double treatment. The agents and events of the main action, it must be remembered, also participate in those events which belong to the background; thus some of the motifs are bound to show a twofold application, i.e. as Recurrence and as Repetition or Comparison. That both Kjartan and Bolli B. are kurteisligr or mikit afbragð annarra manna, for instance, would not by itself be enough to establish any meaningful comparison between them. Seen against all the other parallels, these attributes become part of the foreground schematism, being lifted momentarily from the chain, so to speak, to act as comparatives, which accords them greater significance.

The author's schemes (patterns of words) are thus themselves a scheme. This “bragð” of his is equal to any of Snorri Godi's. Without doubt he would hope that his patterns and formulae might be recognized, for his architectonics of matching prophecy and fulfillment, of equalizing events and agents, of comparing and setting up antithetical relationships, of duplicating and doubling are the key to understanding what the saga is really about. But the repeated phrases, like all the veiled hints in the saga, are subtle and apparent only to the knowledgeable reader or audience, whose position must become analogous to that of the author to see through the subterfuge.

After the foregoing analysis and this discussion it is all but a foregone conclusion to say that Laxdœla is composed to a great extent, despite the historical frame, of fabricated situations, fabricated dialogues, and when necessary for the composition, of fabricated characters, and that it is a literary work of contrived design. The author has capitalized on a technique, using rhetorical devices, patterns, and formulaic phraseology to set forth his idea complex, whatever their ultimate derivation proves to be. The saga is almost what one could call a self-parody. For after the author produced his patterns and formulae, he reshuffled and recombined them, so that they became unique again, individualized, and thereby camouflaged. His ingenuity is hence twofold. He succeeded so well in his endeavor that his highly stylized composition appears natural and uncontrived to all but the initiated, the ideal audience that has caught on to the tricks involved.

Such self-parody can be witty, consciously or unconsciously, e.g. such as we meet in Gudrún's playing with the term samlendr almost to the point of divulging the secret. The author's sem fyrr, sem ván var also come close to this type of wit when read with the whole aesthetic design in mind. In the flash-back reminder about the events in Iceland while Thorkel is abroad (lviii, 176; lxviii, 199), the author's repeating of his own sentences would in itself function as a correlative between referent and antecedent apart from the literary convention used. Is the author's allowing Gudrún to turn the excuses of her sons to her own advantage (a kind of antistrophon) deliberate or the result of the system of repetitions, the witticism being incidental or concomitant? Irony is indeed the distinctive quality of this prose.

RHYTHM AND TIME

Circumstances prevalent in thirteenth-century Iceland, when saga writing was at its height, no doubt encouraged interest in the Age of Settlement and the heyday of the Commonwealth. Rise of power politics had brought with it a breaking down of the traditional moral order; political and material aggrandizement superceded personal honor and prestige based on integrity. This century witnessed the outbreak of feuds, vendettas, intrigues, and savageries on a scale hitherto unknown. Times were undeniably crucial.

The turning to historical subjects probably reflects a consciousness that history was in the making. The relentless step by step movement toward relinquishment of freedom and the end of the Commonwealth must have seemed to some, at least, like the machinations of an inscrutable destiny propelling the country toward disaster. Laxdœla saga is judged to have been composed about 1250; the Commonwealth came under Norwegian control in 1262. Contemporary events in many ways must have appeared like the disastrous result of the code of vengeance and the fulfillment of a fateful destiny. In a sense it was a turning point where past and future met, a time of precarious balance in the life of the nation.

Laxdœla saga reveals this continuity between time past and time present first of all through the genealogies, some of which follow the names back to a time before the story, while others project the names forward to persons beyond the frame of events in the saga but contemporary with the time of the author and his writing. The author's intrusion into the narrative is minimal and difficult to detect. The few places where he does reveal himself point to his consciousness of the discrepancy between the time of the events he is writing about and the time of the composition, and to the fact that he is writing about the past from the perspective of the present.⁵ Some of the anachronisms also show that he is comparing the present with the past. The obvious one concerning the fact that “heathen men then had no less at stake than Christian men do now when ordeals are performed” (xviii, 42-43), which has already been discussed in another connection,⁶ explicitly draws the comparison between time “then” and time “now.” Two other statements where the author's comment reveals his mediating position between former times and contemporary times carry the comparison implicitly. Halldór is described as wearing a cloak with a clasp that was the fashion at that time: “Halldórr hafði yfir sér samða skikkju ok á nist long, sem þá var títt” (lxxv, 219). The author herewith gives us a fact about mode of dress in saga times, a small detail that shows an attempt at historical accuracy, keeping his characters appropriate to their times. More importantly, the þá tells us that that time and the author's are not the same time. It shows the perspective. But we have met with a similar phrase before, and consideration of the author's general method makes it likely that an association is intended between these two, as is the case with any of the repetitions in the saga. It will be recalled that Bolli Bollason carried a lance “as is the custom in foreign lands”: “hann hafði glaðel í hendi, sem títt er í útlondum” (lxxvii, 225). In contrast to the appropriateness of the clasp to the times about which the author is writing, this reference tells us that a contemporary mode of dress has been superimposed on that past time. The one points to time past, the other to time present; and particularly to be noticed, the one is in past tense, the other in present tense. The similarity of the phrases lexically (títt is used only in these two places in the saga), the similarity of the contexts with their references to fashions then and now indicate that a juxtaposition and comparison is being subtly suggested by the author. The natural contexts in which the phrases occur camouflage again the underlying meaning. What the author is hinting is that the fashion is to talk about the present in terms of the past. These inadvertent (I'd rather call them advertent) “slips” on the author's part⁷ tell us on the discursive level that there is a time discrepancy, and on the formal level that the two times represented are to be compared and contrasted. What structural peculiarities in the saga would further substantiate such a supposition?

We have had many occasions to note that the rhythm in the saga is one of a back-and-forth relating of cause and resultant, of antecedent and referent. Recognition of prophecy and associating it with its fulfillment, or correlating a repeated phrase with its forerunner produce the effect of anticipation and recollection. There is a constant back-and-forth comparing going on within the saga by virtue of its formal structure. The same structural rhythm was found in the bargainings, in the handing of the decision back and forth between father and daughter in the betrothals, in the living alternately first in one place and then in another, in the sea crossings, in the forward-looking and backward-looking genealogies, and in the compositional flash-backs.

The narrative itself, we have noted, shows a mingling and a superimposing of the epic and the dramatic mode of presentation. Epic handling would indicate the remembering of things past and giving an account of them, whereas the dramatic handling renders these past events present and actual. This feeling is transmitted throughout the narrative. The events the author is describing are supposed to be of a by-gone time, yet the action is always vividly present. Time past and time present are merged and blended. The dramatic presentation itself consists in compacting into the present moment the culmination of all that was implicit from the beginning and all that is portentous for the future. Past and future meet in the present moment. The visually present action of the saga, suspended between past and future, is completely analogous to the point in history where Iceland stood in the thirteenth century at the time the saga was composed.

The structure and plot of Laxdœla saga are based on a formal conception—that of destiny and dramatic tragedy. The plot is executed through the analogously structured form of the ethical code as necessity and inevitability. The prophecies and the presupposition of rigid fulfillment of the code of honor with its equal retaliations represent that omniscient force in the background which shapes and forms the main action of the drama, action that seemingly takes place naturally and of itself before our eyes. The social order of things, as recognized under Recurrence, serves as the epic backdrop in front of which the drama, the action of the saga, moves as before a screen. This drama itself is also conceived by the author as part of that round-of-existence, part of the whole, the bigger tragedy. Here we discovered the point of contact between the epic mode and the dramatic mode, between the background and the foreground. They are mutually inclusive. And we have seen, too, how on the formal level Repetition and Comparison (used most for the main action) also in places participate in Recurrence. The analogy the author wishes to draw could not be more obvious. The whole saga world, so to speak, was the epic background for the events of the drama taking place in mid thirteenth-century Iceland. Seen against the by-gone days of the Commonwealth as the epic backdrop, the drama of the present represented a culmination of what had been set in motion in Iceland's past and a turning point for the future. What was implicit from the beginning (the social order, the demands of a retaliatory system of justice) was working itself out fatefully in the author's own day. Again we see the author's use of camouflage and pattern. The events of his day supply the new context for the old forms. The background world of the saga represents the same world as that of the thirteenth century—the same social order is implied, the same two-edged sword of justice. Yet the Laxdœla saga holds itself up like a mirror to the thirteenth century, in the sense that it gives a positive reflection of the negative contemporary happenings.

The discussion of the títt phrases and of the epic and dramatic handling has incidentally also touched upon another closely related problem—that of tenses. The realization that Iceland's historical past has been made actual and the present converted into a semblance of the past throws further light on the mixture of past and present verb forms in the narrative, something which has occasioned much puzzlement in saga research. Use of historical present to enliven action is a well-known storyteller's device. It does not, however, explain the mingling of grammatical tenses found in some sagas, and particularly in Laxdœla,⁸ a practice which has generally been dubbed as primitive, inept, or a meaningless enigma. Such mixing apparently has an aesthetic function which has evaded critics.⁹ The reader is never disoriented in respect to the time of the action; it is always immediately present before his eyes. And, indeed, the shift in tenses is so unobtrusive that it generally passes unnoticed. This in itself should tell us that the author has prepared for us another “bragð.” The juxtaposing of the two tenses, past and present, even within the same sentence does not signify that the action in the present tense is the resultant of the action in the past tense in any specific instance—a literary device used by some poets. In Laxdœla saga the mingling has broader implication: all the virtually present actions in the saga are the result of those in the past, and by analogy all the present-day events of the author's time, disastrous and portentous as those in the saga, are the culmination and consequence of Iceland's past and the cultural ethos that generated that history. The mixture of tenses is appropriate to the first level—the saga understood as a closed aesthetic unit in which both epic and dramatic handling are inherent to the structure. And the mixture is a clue to the relationship of the saga as a whole to its cultural context—mid-thirteenth-century Iceland. By mixing his tenses the author has confounded the critics and concealed the fact that he was not only writing about the past, but about and for the present. The interspersing and distributing of the two grammatical tenses, like the mixing, distributing and reordering of the patterned phrases and motifs in the saga, camouflage their existence and their function. Like the prophecies and other hints, like the repeated phrases, the tense shifts, too, go by practically unnoticed. The use of tenses, their specific function already indicated in the títt phrases, is another camouflaged hint.

We thus see that the saga can be read on two levels. To test this out, one only need apply the categories derived from the aesthetic analysis to the analoguous situation of the thirteenth century. The saga functions as Fore-knowledge, the preparation for the events of the author's time. Everything that has happened later is present in nuce, as prophecy. The saga events form a Comparison with later times. The author's own day is a Repetition, a parallel to the earlier period of history. But it is also a contrast, for in the saga Repetition and Comparison received the main focus, whereas in the author's day Recurrence is the aspect which has come to the fore. Thus the author's time comprises a negative reversal, a reversed image. The saga as a mirror for the contemporary age gives the positive image. The one historical period is the reversed reflection of the other. Since the analogy the author is drawing is one of formal principles, namely the idea behind the events, it is clear why he attached so much importance to building the formal relationships in the saga. It was through abstract pattern that the analogy could best be conveyed without stating either the function of the pattern or the analogy that he intended.

This supposition can be tested and explored further. The recurrence of the cycle implied at the close of the saga turns out indeed to be the more disastrous one, for the repeat performance in the thirteenth century illustrates the adverse aspect. The structural analysis of the saga showed how the formal aspects tended constantly toward establishing a balance, even when the repetitions threatened to multiply into triplets and quadruplets. The chain reaction itself, illustrated under Recurrence, tended toward setting up its own checks and balances. By contrast, the thirteenth century was not headed toward balance. The concatenation of events had clearly got out of hand; there were no more checks and balances in the system; the nation was headed for disaster. The saga presented an ideal and through it a warning.

The virtual and essential time rhythm of the saga as a comparing back and forth within the saga and between the saga and its contemporary context has also been camouflaged through a semblance of real time and historical progression. The events depicted carry a semblance of history, and with it a semblance of real time. The natural progression of the generations produces a forward movement. The impression is given of a sequence of before, now, and after, corresponding to the three main divisions of the saga; there is a time before the main action, the main action itself, and its sequel. Increment and increase, embellishment and enhancement also accompany the generations. Qualitatively the enhancement stands in contrast to the analogy the author is drawing with his own times. The purpose of what we have called epic magnification, of the grandeur and idealization of saga times becomes apparent. As a contrast with contemporary times, those times appeared as ideal. Quantitatively the series repetitions under Recurrence and the cumulative effect of the patterning toward the end of the saga represent a parallel with the author's times. Increase and increment of the patterns is not only a natural result of all that has been presented and gone before, on the second level it is also meaningful. For the author's own day shows the cumulative effect of all that has gone before, the increased tragedy. Recurrence in the saga represented this larger aspect of the ethical code—there it was the background. For the author's own day, this background has become the foreground. The quantity of the feuds and retaliations has increased, whereas the quality—the honorable reasons for performing the deeds, the ethical demands of equalization and compensation that would do both sides honor (Repetition and Comparison)—has faded into the background.

There is another aspect to this comparing of the present time with the past time. If the agents and situations in the saga are analogous, as has been demonstrated through the repeated patterns and comparisons, the relationship between the “before” in the story, the “now,” and the “after” are also for all practical purposes annulled. What is happening now has happened before, and will happen again, or at least so it seems, and it is this seeming that counts. Past and present are one and the same, can therefore be superimposed on each other. Just as one generation is patterned after the former, so the author's generation is derived from the preceding generations and his times are like those times in the saga. But if everything is really like everything else, despite new contexts, substitutions, and negative counterparts, then in effect the happenings are lifted into a time which is like every other time, and hence indefinite in reference to everything except the depicted action. The references to the fall of Óláf the Saint, like mention of Ari, put the saga in a historical frame and help create the illusion of historical reality, whereas actually the saga contains a philosophy of history that is related to the syncretic thinking of the Middle Ages. The events in the saga are merely relative to one another, as the time designations in the story will show. The author is purposely working in poetic time, and that time is a virtual present or eternal time in which repetitive instances can be said to take place “at the same time.” The instances in the saga and the analogously repeated instance of the thirteenth century can be interpreted as reenactments of the ethical code, of the pattern of destiny that was common to both. History was therefore envisioned by this poet-author as repetitions of a preestablished pattern—in the history of his country this pattern was based on the cultural ethos, that vital center from which all else sprang. The events of then or now the author saw as taking place in illo tempore, in that eternal time of reenactment, synchronic time. The sequence of historical time is thus erased. The likenesses which have been set up within the saga, and the analogy intended with his own time indicate that this is the case. The pattern, this abstraction of the formative principle behind the course of history, was the central nucleus from which all else could be derived. The author employed the same method in miniature with each one of his patterns in the saga: for the goadings, the killings, the drownings, the hero's accoutrements a nucleus pattern could be established from which the specific examples had emanated, in the creative process, as from a center. Substitution of new content in the same forms, displaying of the negative counterpart, the opposites, does not invalidate or obliterate the pattern. Is it any wonder that the Laxdœla author was so interested in patterns, repetitions of patterns, and their contrastive aspects? Here the spheres of art and history are brought into closest relationship.

The structural analysis has shown the bigger pattern with which the author was ultimately concerned. The agents and events within the saga are analogous to one another, and these in turn are analogous to those of times before the saga and times after the saga—the happenings of those times and the author's time follow the same pattern, hence can be superimposed on one another. The happenings within the saga and those of the analogy outside the saga can also be drawn together in a simultaneous vision; all and both are immediately present. Indeed, one of the favored expressions in the saga is mjok jafnskjótt, which indicates that two actions are coincident. The expression is a loaded one and carries several connotations relevant to basic notions in the saga: On the one hand, two events may be taking place concomitantly: “Nú setr Þorkell fram ferjuna ok hlóð. Þorsteinn bar jafnskjótt af útan sem Þorkell hlóð ok þeir forunautar hans” (lxxvi, 221-222: “Now Thorkel launched the ferry and started loading. Thorstein carried the timber off just as fast as Thorkel and his comrades loaded it”). On the other hand, two events may converge at the same time: “Eptir þetta ræðr sá til, er skírsluna skyldi af hondum inna, ok jafnskjótt sem hann var kominn undir jarðarmenit, hlaupask þessir menn at mót með vápnum, sem til þess váru settir” (xviii, 43: “Now the one who was to carry out the ordeal gets started, and just at the moment when he had come under the sod, the men who had been put up to this rush at each other with their weapons”). This situation is, of course, contrived and the audience is aware of the manipulation. Other such incidents in the saga are also “arranged,” but the author would like it to seem as if “by coincidence,” as for example when Hoskuld and his housecarls arrive home at the same time: “Þat var mjok jafnskjótt, at húskarlar hans koma heim” (xix, 46); or when Óláf Peacock moves to Hjardarholt: “Þat var mjok jafnskjótt, at húskarlar hofðu ofan tekit klyfjar af hrossum, ok þá reið Óláfr í garð” (xxiv, 68: “Just as the housecarls had got the packs down from the horses, Óláf rode into the farmyard”). The same precision attends the meeting of Gudrún and Snorri: “Þat er í Lœkjarskógs landi; í þeim stað hafði Guðrún á kveðit, at þau Snorri skyldu finnask. Þau kómu þar mjok jafnsnimma” (lix, 176: “That is on land belonging to Lækjarskóg and at this place Gudrún had arranged to meet with Snorri. They arrived there just at the same time”). This simultaneity is everywhere manipulated by the omniscient author; it is related to the exactness and symmetry of the saga; it is like a contrivance of destiny. Indeed, the fact that Thórólf and Ásgaut escape across the river is attributed to fate, and in this scene significantly the jafnskjótt also appears:

Ok með því at menn váru hraustir, ok þeim varð lengra lífs auðit, þá komask þeir yfir ána ok upp á hofuðísinn oðrum megin. Þat er mjok jafnskjótt, er þeir eru komnir yfir ána, at Ingjaldr kemr at oðrum megin at ánni ok forunautar hans (xv, 34: And seeing that they were sturdy men and fated to live longer, they got across the river and up onto the pack ice on the other side. Just at the time when they had got across the river, Ingjald and his companions reached the other side of the river).

Much as Halldór expected the men from other farms to arrive just when the sale of the Hjardarholt lands should have been closed, and which they in fact did, the author, too, has neatly prearranged everything. Contemporary time is parallel to saga time, simultaneous with it and also predestined. Jafnskjótt is a coded word to be read first on the normal discursive level within the context, second as a clue to the meaning of the time relationships between the events within the saga (what happens in Hoskuld's day can happen in Óláf's day, in Kjartan's day, in Bolli B.'s day), and third as a key to the meaning of the time comparisons the author has contrived with his superimposed images of time present and time past. It reveals also his view of history.

The flash-backs in the saga repeat this structural form. They, too, relate of events in the saga that are taking place simultaneously and produce a back-and-forth comparing. From this new aspect, the whole saga can be said to be a flash-back from the author's time to saga time, a comparing of events “then” and “now” which emphasizes their simultaneity, their parallelism, and their contrast.

Since the present time (thirteenth century) is superimposed on the past time of the saga and simultaneous with it, the saga can be read like a coded message. That is, the structural categories and stylistic devices, the abstracted forms, have double reference. Why the regular occurrence of bæði … ok and its negative counterpart hvárki … né, why are there always tveir kostir, why is jafnan a loaded word? The saga is both what it seems to be and something more; it is also neither the one nor the other: neither saga time nor contemporary time. The thirteenth century is not wholly analogous to the positive world of the saga; it is the negative counterpart. We have noted, for example, that the positive forms quantitatively outnumbered the negative formulations in the saga, but that the negative reversal in a pattern always carried more than face-value significance. Any one pair of inimical brothers, too, was found not to be a completely opposite pair: Bárd and Thorleik Hoskuldsson overlap in regard to some points, as do Kjartan and Bolli Th., as do Thorleik and Bolli B. The eleventh century and the thirteenth century are the same, yet antithetical. The further import of images in reverse also becomes apparent, as in the betrothals where the pattern is consistently one of presentation of the woman's qualifications to the man and of the man's to the woman; or as in the sea voyages and receptions back and forth in Norway and in Iceland, the one a mirrored image of the other. Then there are reversed images, that is, negative contrasts to a predominantly positive pattern: a bad marriage, a poor sea voyage, a cool reception, an incomplete hero. Án's two dreams are also reversed images of one another, the one negative, the other positive.

It is always the same world that is being suggested—the world of the saga shows within itself a repetitive sameness, but beyond this is implied that the Heroic Age is like the Age of the Commonwealth, is like the Age of the Sturlungs, yet the latter also contrasted with the former ones—Parallels and Contrasts are always implied in Comparison. So there are two choices for the reader: the one level or the other. The game could go on.

The nonsense riddle of the cloak tells of Snorri's “bragð,” and it also explains the riddle of the saga:

Wet it hangs on the wall,
Wot the cloak a trick,
Ne'er more dry after this,
Nor deny I, it knows of two.

The saga contains one trick—the concealed formal elements; the cloak knows of another, the analogy with contemporary times. The saga is not dry, but wet (filled with significance and knowledge). There seems no limit to the author's ingenuity and to the camouflages that can be unveiled. The language of the saga is ironic beyond anyone's expectation. Its layers are actually threefold. Here is then confirmation of the significance of the structural components based on two and three. The first layer, the normal discursive one, is a camouflage, a coded message, for the second layer, the abstract formal layer that the aesthetic analysis revealed. This layer in turn is the key for the third layer, the analogy with the thirteenth centutry. The first must be decoded to find the second, and the second to find the third. The one hinges on the other. By veiling his patterns, the author has hidden the internal structure, hence the analogy remains concealed, both are hidden by the cloak. And what better image could the author have selected than a hooded cloak for concealment? Could it be that the indictment of his own age he could not state directly and openly, so he spoke in parables much as, for example, Brueghel the Elder dared not speak out against the atrocities, the tragedy of his times but feigning innocence depicted them symbolically through analogy with the remoter times of Biblical happenings? It has taken critics long enough to see through Laxdœla's tricks, something with which we have been confronted all along in this analysis, but which only opened up to myself at the very end. And that is as it had to be, for only after the conclusion of the aesthetic analysis could the next level be unfolded, and that is what has taken place as the sections on Style and Tone and Rhythm and Time were conceived. The saga becomes extremely witty, once the parable is recognized, indeed a self-parody. Some of this wit comes through even if one is not fully “aware.” Did the contemporary audience see through it? The saga gives us the author's surmise: Gudrún thinks Thorgils will see through Snorri's first trick: “‘Sjámun hann.’” Snorri answers: “‘Sjá mun hann víst eigi’”; and this is confirmed: “ok sér hann ekki í þetta.” If the first trick is not discovered, the second will forever remain a secret. The author is telling us throughout the saga what it is all about, but the audience has not been wily enough for this “second Snorri.”

The anonymous Laxdœla author can be credited with having produced one of the most remarkable and brilliant prose works of the medieval period. His was a genius of extraordinary power and perception. Significant as literature, significant as a commentary on the age that fostered it, Laxdœla saga represents a tour de force that few could duplicate. With a sensitivity to the workings of human beings and of history, with a sureness of touch, and with a consciousness of the symbolic import behind the happenings he has selected to depict, the author created not just an account of them on the discursive level, but on the formal level through organization of his linguistic materials a virtual and conceptual image of what he observed. Acutely aware of the irrepressible demands of wounded honor, of the lust for retaliation, of commitments that ever led to further involvement, he perceived a destiny behind the inescapable entanglements of life whether the time was that of the Settlement and the Commonwealth or of the Age of the Sturlungs. In this merging of the cultural reference with the cultural context rests the secret of the saga. If Laxdœla saga is a tragedy, it is not one of the human beings but rather of a cultural ethos which had ceased to be constructive. By reason of the selection, arrangement, and organization of all the materials that went into the composition of the saga, it must be conceded that it is a literary monument of the highest order. It stands as a witness to the age that produced it and as a symbol that conveys the meaning of that age more forcibly than any chronicle.

Notes

1. Heller [Literarisches Schaffen in der Laxdaela Saga. Halle, Germany, 1960] compares these words of Kjartan to those of Earl Tostis in Chap. 117 of the Mork. (erroneously cited as Chap. 35 in his Laxdœla Saga und Königssagas, p. 9). Kjartan's casting away of the weapon he compares with King Óláf Haraldsson's similar act in Óláfs saga helga, Chap. 228 (ibid., p. 11).

2. Cf. Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1953), pp. 326-350.

3. H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford, 1958), (sv. Irony) pp. 295-296.

4. See my article in the forthcoming Hollander Festschrift.

5. The author's consciousness of the difference between conditions obtaining at the time of the saga's events and the time of writing comes to the fore in such passages as: “Ok sér þar tóptina, sem hann lét gera hrófit” (xiii, 26: “And one can see there traces of where he had the shed built”); or where he gives explanation for the men being able to conceal themselves in a woods where in his day there was no longer one: “Skógr þykkr var í dalnum í þann tíð” (lv, 165: “There was a thick woods in the valley at that time”); or in “þar sem Kaupstaðrinn í Bjorgvin er síðan” (xi, 22).

6. For the previous discussion of the passage in connection with the understatement about Thorkel's concern, see above, Chap. I, p. 40. For the help this passage gives in dating the saga, see below [A. Margaret Arent Madelung, The Laxdoela Saga: Its Structural Patterns, Chapel Hill: Universtiy of North Carolina Press, 1972], p. 190.

7. What at first might seem like inadvertant slips or nodding on the part of the author may in fact be deliberate cues for his audience. In any case, it is in these places that we can best detect the trick: e. g. repetitions that appear too pat without a motivating circumstance; seemingly inappropriate uses of sem fyrr; misplacement of expected elements in a pattern, like at skilnaði; and of course the anachronisms.

8. How far do other authors or other sagas go in verb-mixing? To answer this the following points will have to be considered first, abbreviations in the MSS and normalizing of editions. Each saga will have to be studied for these aspects individually.

9. See in this connection the articles by M. C. van den Toorn, “Zeit und Tempus in der Saga,” Arkiv, LXXVI (1961), 134-152; and by Carl C. Rokkjær, “Om tempusblandningen i islandsk prosa indtil 1250,” Arkiv, LXXVIII (1963), 197-216.