Things Greek and the Riddarasögur

Abstract

It will be my rather ungrateful task in this paper to try to dispel or at least deglamorize one of the glittering phantoms of saga research -the specter of the supposed Byzantine sources of the riddarasogur which flits across the pages of the older source studies that still control our interpretations of these sagas. 1 Such studies seem to have been conducted on the assumptions that Old Norse poetry and saga followed the flag of East Viking exploration and trade to Novgorod and Kiev and the axes of the Varangians to Constantinople and that Byzantine "influence radiated in all directions, sometimes determining the course of events, and always influencing it," 2 so that both the Scandinavian story of the "east road" and the Varangian guard and the rich culture of Byzantium could theoretically have contributed a lot to the literary formation of the late medieval riddarasogur. These assumptions should be questioned, but first a word on the riddarasogur themselves.There is general agreement among Scandinavianists that this genre of saga falls into two categories of literature -the Norwegian and Icelandic translations commissioned by Hakon Hakonarson and his thirteenth-century successors of the Old French romans and of certain Latin works, like Walter of Chatillon's Alexandreis, and secondly, the Icelandic imitations of these translations, which, ever more fantastic and free, created a kind of escape literature in Iceland at the end of the Middle Ages. 3 The latter have been termed Mdrchensagas by German Scandinavianists 4 because of their fairy-tale qualities and their folkloric content, and as their scenes are laid in the Near East they have been the unhappy hunting grounds of many scholars for the Byzantine sources of the riddarasogur. The hero's prevision of his bride as a faraway (eastern) princess, the architectural curiosities of her palace, the musical festivities on joyful occasions, the trials and tribulations of the lovers, This article is dedicated to the memory of Paul J. Alexander. A shortened form of this paper was read at