Compositional Technique in Some Verses from Gunnlaugs saga

Abstract

To discuss the verses of a saga, rather than the work as a whole, may seem reactionary in an age when we are schooled to seek organic unity in almost all literary compositions?even in those, like the Old English Dream of the Rood, which many of our predecessors would have seen as self-evidently the product of multiple authorship, of re vision and amplification. So if I isolate certain verses of Gunnlaugs saga from their prose contexts, it is, I hope, with good justification: that the prose and the verse arguably represent different strata of composition, and that the artistic merits of the verses have been ob scured by their prose setting. The verses I shall discuss are numbered 10, 11, 13, 14, and 16 in editions of the saga. They form a distinct group: Gunnlaugr is the speaker and he laments his thwarted love for Helga. This group is pre ceded by a more loosely knit group of verses most of which have to do with Gunnlaugr's peripatetic and lucrative existence as a court poet, and is followed by a third group which covers the hostilities between Gunnlaugr and Hrafn, his rival in poetry and love, and the death of both men.

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