From Troy to Iceland: Representation of the Past in Pseudohistorical Sagas
Authors: Matyushina Inna G. ,   Russian State University for the Humanities
Published: May 2023

The present article analyses the means of preserving the past in Icelandic pseudohistorical sagas, which include Trójumanna saga, Alexanders saga, Gyðinga saga, Rómverja saga, Breta sögur and Veraldar saga. Ways of representing the past are determined by the semantic, compositional and structural innovations which the creators of pseudohistorical sagas in-troduce under the influence of the Scandinavian saga tradition. The narrative in pseudohis-torical sagas is dominated not by characters but rather by events: descriptions of the inter-nal world of individuals are superseded by the narration of their actions; introspective monologues disappear; authored digressions are omitted, which leads to a narrative de-tachment characteristic of the native sagas of the Icelanders. Direct speech is reduced to brief aphoristic statements, whereas periphrastic constructions and rhetorical formulas are omitted in order to clarify the narrative structure of the sagas. The creators of pseudohis-torical sagas convey the past through sequences of historical events (or supposedly histori-cal events) using forms of the past tense or Praesens Historicum, which helps them to visu-alise past events, to present them as happening before the eyes of the narrator and to at-tract the attention of the audience to their significance. In pseudohistorical sagas the func-tion of representing the past is attributed to the speeches of characters (as in Rómverja sa-ga), which were endowed with a different function (of characterising heroes) in the Latin originals, as well as to dreams of supernatural beings (as in Alexanders saga) which had pro-phetic functions in the Latin texts. History in pseudohistorical sagas is genealogised: in the Breta sögur genealogy is used as a way of depicting past events, whereas toponymy is en-dowed with a chronological function. The creator of the Trójumanna saga employs mytho-logical names as a means of representing history: events of the mythical and historical past are correlated with events of Biblical and Ancient history. The chronological sequence of presentating mythological and historical events makes it possible to regard Trójumanna saga, Alexanders saga, Gyðinga saga, Rómverja saga and Breta sögur as jointly forming a unified world history, bringing together mythological and historical past. The creator of the Veral-dar saga not only composes a narrative of the whole history of the world, starting from the day of the Creation, but also includes into his world history the Icelandic lawspeaker Gizur Hallsson alongside the Greeks, Trojans, Romans, Carolingian emperors and the Hohenstau-fen. The multiplicity of sources used by the creators of pseudohistorical sagas can be ac-counted for by their desire to fill in gaps in the narrative and build a chronologically se-quential account of events significant for Scandinavian and British history. To this end, the narrative traceable back to Dares in Hauksbók is supplemented by fragments from Virgil and Ovid, whereas Geoffrey of Monmouth’s adaptation is augmented by a catalogue of Wessex kings from Cadwall to Æthelstan and Merlin’s Prophecy, attributed to Gunnlaug Leifsson. The most semantically important is the interpolation in Breta sögur about the Wessex king Æthelstan, who fostered Hakon (the future king of Norway Hakon the Good), the son of Har-ald the Fair-Haired. The function of the interpolation consisted in uniting Scandinavian his-tory with the history of Britain, and the dynasty of the rulers of Norway with the Anglo-Saxon kings, and, consequently, legitimising the power of the former in Scandinavia and the British Isles. The compilers of pseudohistorical sagas seek to establish a cultural connection between the mythological past of European peoples, who consider themselves descendants of the Trojans, and the historical past of Iceland. By adapting Latin historical works in which the mythological past is represented as historical, the creators of pseudohistorical sagas contributed not only to the reception of the European cultural heritage with its notion of foreign (Trojan) descent but also to the creation of a new mythological past.