The Nature of the Question

The question of the authenticity of the poetry in sagas of Icelanders has come up in several contexts in the first chapters of this book. It is now time to undertake a thorough examination of this issue and consider how it affects our understanding of the nature of both the prose and poetic components of these sagas together and severally. We must first ask what the term ‘authenticity’ means when applied to this intertextual literary genre. The issue is complicated, not only because these sagas comprise prose and verse elements, but also because the various components may be of different ages and origins. The notion of authenticity also requires consideration of the receiving audience or audiences of saga texts: authenticity for whom, in whose eyes?

The term authenticity, when applied to works of modern literature, does not usually imply truth to historical events in the sense of being in accordance with established fact, but more often refers to a quality of verisimilitude or the appearance of being an accurate reflection of real life in the fictional world the author has created. In the case of sagas of Icelanders, these sagas as a whole are usually judged by contemporary readers and critics to be authentic in this latter sense, but it cannot be presumed that medieval audiences necessarily thought likewise. The question of authenticity becomes more acute for all presumed audiences, however, when it comes to the poetry included as the characters’ actual words within the saga text. Here the saga author or redactor appears to reach back into the past to record the speaking voices of his characters uttered in the form of poetry. Thus he implicitly claims to present authenticity in the first sense described above, truth to what the poet spoke.

At this point we again encounter the saga writers’ fiction that we examined in Chapter 2, the idea that Everyman in Settlement-Age Iceland was or could be a poet, and this fiction can now be seen to carry the further implication that the poetry ascribed to these individuals in saga narratives is authentic in the sense of being the actual words of individuals who lived in the Settlement Age.