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The fourteenth century saw the origin and evolution of a new genre in Iceland, romance, that is, the riddarasaga. The Icelandic narrative type was generated by and evolved from translations of French romances, lays, and epic poems, the first of which were commissioned by King Hákon Hákonarson of Norway (r. 1217-1263). The earliest romance rendered into Old Norse during Hákon's reign was Thomas de Bretagne's Tristan, known as Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar. This was followed by Elíss saga ok Rósamundar, the translation of a chanson de geste; twenty-one short lays transmitted in the Strengleikar collection; and the Arthurian Ívens saga and Möttuls saga. Manuscripts of the Norwegian translations were circulating in Iceland by the end of the thirteenth century, and there they stimulated Icelanders to compose stories in the foreign genre.
Icelanders adopted the alien literary type and developed it by blending foreign and indigenous narrative traditions. The foundation, growth, and flowering of romance in Iceland is a story of Norse texts copied, redacted, and revised in Iceland; of scribal intervention in plot, struc- ture, and style; of imported texts adapted to new ends; and, finally, of the creation of original romances. They flourished in an environment of storytelling that favored the revision, adaptation, and re-creation of existing tales.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, scholars generally deemed the riddarasögur "among the dreariest things ever made by human fancy" (Ker 1908, 282) and prime examples of "a period of decadence in saga writing," as Halldór Hermansson put it (1912, preface). This judgment is questionable. Saga writing did not become decadent. Rather, a foreign literary type was introduced in Iceland, and authors began to try their hand at the imported genre. Over forty riddarasögur, both translated and indigenous, had currency in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Icelanders copied, revised, and adapted the imported romances at the same time as they created tales in this new genre by ingeniously blending foreign and native narrative matter, imported and indigenous themes and motifs, and experimenting with narrative structure. Nowhere is this more manifest than in Gib- bons saga, which epitomizes and is paradigmatic for the composition of narratives in the imported genre romance.1
In his classic study, Angevin Britain and Scandinavia, Henry God- dard Leach categorized Gibbons...