Introduction

Oddr Snorrason used the literary genre of the saint's life to write about a legendary figure who was both royal and saintly, a Christian king and a missionary hero. Not all saga authors had – or perhaps wished for – such promising subjects. Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, written in c. 1220–30, is the biography not of a saint, nor even of a Christian, but of a self-confessedly pagan poet, and it is associated with a school of saga-writing that Andersson describes as political and rationalist rather than moral and hagiographic. It has close links to Heimskringla and Snorra Edda, and may even have been composed by Snorri Sturluson. Hrafnkels saga, written c. 1280–1300, can be grouped with a small number of sagas concerned with issues of governance; whether it is moral or political in nature has been hotly debated, but it too sports a hero who is neither Christian nor saintly, whatever the rights and wrongs of his final killing.

These sagas make use of hagiographic conventions in much more antithetical ways than Oddr, setting up their protagonists in contradistinction to the model of the saint. Egils saga, it can be argued, draws on the biographical pattern of the vita to explore a poetic personality that is temperamentally unstable and profoundly amoral: while Egill shares some of his linguistic powers with saints, he is portrayed as both an older and a more complex figure, whose ancestry is rooted in Scandinavian prehistory, and whose poetic gifts distance him from conventional morals. Hrafnkels saga has at its focal point a torture scene or passio followed by the destruction of a pagan temple, both scenes readily familiar from Oddr's Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar and other conversion þættir (‘short stories’). It is striking, then, that Hrafnkell rejects pagan gods only to embrace godlessness, which is at best only half a conversion from a medieval point of view. In this chapter, I explore to what extent a peripheral genre such as the sagas of Icelanders may challenge the world-view of a central one – the saint's life – resisting the kind of ‘interference’ one might expect to be the rule. These two highly literary sagas have not absorbed hagiographic conventions passively, but actively work with them: they promote their native saga heroes in conscious opposition to the Christian saint.