The ‘Heteronomous Authorship’ of Icelandic Saga Literature

Despite the fact that all Icelandic family sagas are anonymous and, in most cases, preserved in more than one version, the idea of tracing each saga to a specific author is still strong in contemporary scholarship. The author is thought to be necessary as a reference point for the interpretation of a text within a certain historical context, as well as the creative agency behind the text as a literary artwork. The sagas’ anonymity is thus considered to be a deficit of the corpus, since from our modern per spective it is difficult to regard a text without an identified author as a truly literary artwork. Tracing texts back to a specific historical person could remove the blemish of anonymity and allow us to use extratextual information for interpretation, but this process works against the qualities of mouvance and variance that are characteristic of the sagas’ long process of transmission and dissemination. This chapter will first present various approaches to medieval authorship, before discussing the related concepts of ‘weak’ and ‘heteronomous authorship’ and the rhizomatic character of medi eval literature. Sneglu-Halla þáttr will serve as a representative product of heteronomous authorship; it will be shown that the application of these concepts to that text neither results in a neglection of its aesthetics nor in the disintegration of its ‘identity’ as a literary work. It is the objective of this chapter to demonstrate that anonymity and an idea of heteronomous authorship are generic features of the Icelandic sagas. 1