“… who is the author of this book?”

Abstract

This essay on some aspects of authorship concepts in Old Norse-Icelandic saga literature and saga studies is divided into four sections. Section 1 begins with a definition of author as proposed by Bonaventure and shows how in the Middle Ages the ‘author’ was conceived of as being one of several persons involved in bookmaking. Section 2 discusses different author concepts with regard to Old Norse-Icelandic narratives with a focus on prose sagas, mainly Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders), anonymous texts in which the problems of authorship have been a matter of discussion in saga scholarship for many decades. Short digressions on such issues as terminology, the emerging narrator figure in medieval romances, the role and function of translations, the concept of the ‘poet’ (skáld), and a quick look at the uses of the term ‘author’ in early modern writings are included here. Section 3 is a case study of some attitudes towards ideas about authors and authorship in saga studies, primarily those expressed by representatives of the so-called ‘Icelandic school’ of the 20^th century and a few of its more formative critics. Section 4 concludes with some passages on textual models developed by recent cultural analysis that could offer inspiration for further studies into the complex of authorship in Viking Age, medieval, and early modern Icelandic literature.