Abstract
In the long-lasting Icelandic manuscript culture, the production and reception of sagas was situated in a narrative tradition characterised by the absence of notions of an author genius and a high degree of mouvance and variance: from the 13th to the 19th century Icelandic saga literature was transmitted anony-mously and in handwritten form in ever new retextualisations, accompanied by reiterating changes of medium (oral / written) and genre (prose / verse). It is therefore less the absence than the more or less sudden appearance of attributions of authorship for these kinds of texts in the course of the 18th century that is remarkable in the Icelandic case. In a first generation of Icelandic literary histories and philological treatises in this period, not only new saga narratives, but also new versions of medieval texts were ascribed to individual authors. The identification of text (versions) with authors often came along with negative assessments of the literary quality of these texts. This conjunction indicates that particular texts that do not meet the aesthetic conventions of saga literature were singled out as works of individuals and that identifiable authorship thus reflects notions of aberration from the literary tra-dition in the Icelandic case. The humanistic treatises exhibit at the same time a high awareness of and nuanced terminology for the complex processes of rewriting and plural authorship of the handwritten Icelandic narrative tradition. This chapter will discuss prominent examples of this protophilological discourse as to their reflection of and relation to Icelandic textual and literary culture in the late pre-modern period.
Rohrbach, Lena