Choices of Honor: Telling Saga Feud, Tháttr, and the Fundamental Oral Progression

The transition from a semiotic system of textual comprehension to a system of internal structural boundaries constitutes the basis for the generation of meaning. This condition, above all, intensifies the moment of play in the text: from an alternative mode of codification the text acquires features of a more sophisticated conventionality. (Lotman 1994:380) The family and Sturlunga sagas are not only narratives of “sophisticated conventionality, ” but it is precisely the unclear combination of mundane and refined that has made these medieval texts so hard to classify.1 On the one hand the sagas are a sophisticated written phenomenon. On the other, they are stories filled with repetitions and other conventions of oral, ethnographic narration recounting the social past. Can we determine the elemental, generative structure of the Icelandic texts? The answer is yes, since the sagas themselves, despite their overlay of sophistication, retain this primary repetitive progression. With our question in mind, let us look at just such a progression. Toward the middle of Vápnfiringa saga2 is a small tháttr (short story)3, relating a petty dispute with large implications for the people involved. Two farmers, each a thingman of a different local chieftain, quarrel over grazing and tree-cutting rights in a woodland they own in 1 This article expands a preliminary study (Byock 1994) published in Iceland. M