Such slaves were not always people of humble origin. Gilli (Ir. Giolla), the slave who killed Thorsteinn, son of Hallr[256] of Side, was a descendant of Cearbhall, king of Ossory. Mention is made elsewhere of Nithbjörg, daughter of the Irish king Biolan (Ir. Beollán) who was carried off from Ireland in a Viking raid;[257] also of Melkorka, King Myrkjartan’s daughter, who was bought from a slave dealer in Norway.[258] Icelandic custom did not necessarily prevent the children of slave women from becoming persons of wealth and influence; indeed Ósvifr, son of Nithbjörg and Olaf Pái, son of Melkorka, were among the leading men in Iceland in their time. It is not unreasonable, then, to suppose that by the end of the tenth century Irish blood had found its way into a large number of Icelandic families.
Lastly we may observe that the Irish and Icelandic sagas bear certain resemblances to one another which are at least worthy of attention. In both cases the narrative prose is frequently interspersed with poetry, and in both the use of dialogue is a prominent feature. Nor is the subject matter dissimilar. Indeed it is possible to apply to the Irish stories a classification roughly similar to that which is adopted for the more important of the Icelandic sagas.[259] As far as the “stories of the kings” are concerned, the resemblance is most striking in the case of sagas relating to early times such as Ynglinga Saga. There are Irish stories, too, corresponding to a certain extent to the Íslendínga Sögur, though they are comparatively few in number, while many of the Fornaldar Sögur may be said to bear a certain resemblance to the Irish epic stories.
The evidence discussed above seems to afford some ground for suspecting that the saga literature of Iceland and Ireland may not be wholly unconnected, and, as we have seen, the conditions of the time, particularly the frequent intercourse between the two countries, were such as to favour the exercise of literary influence by one people upon the other. If so, one can hardly doubt that in this case the influence came to Iceland from Ireland.
We have seen[260] that the prose saga appears to have developed in Iceland in the course of the tenth century. There are indeed narratives relating both to the settlement of Iceland and to still earlier events in Norway. But these, in so far as they can be regarded as trustworthy traditions—not embellished by fiction in later times—are quite brief, and not far removed from such local or family traditions as one could find in other parts of the world. The detailed and elaborate type of story which we dealt with in Section I., and which is the distinctive feature of Icelandic literature, can hardly be traced back beyond the end of the tenth century.
The prose stories of Ireland, on the other hand, are without doubt much earlier. Although we have few MSS. of Irish prose dating from a period before the twelfth century, yet it is generally agreed that many of the forms preserved, e.g., in the Yellow Book of Lecan MS. of the Tain Bo Cualnge must be derived from an earlier MS. of not later than the seventh or early eighth century. The oral saga in Ireland is therefore of great antiquity.
It may, of course, be argued that if the prose saga arose spontaneously in Ireland, there is no reason why it should not also have arisen independently in Iceland. But the existence of this form of literature in Ireland may be due to special circumstances for which Iceland offers no parallel. The oldest Irish sagas belong to that class of literature known as the heroic epic, a class which among the Teutonic peoples—as indeed among all other European peoples—makes its first appearance in verse. The exceptional treatment of this subject in Irish is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that among the Celtic peoples the file or professional minstrel occupied a distinguished position in society. It would be strange if the professional minstrel were not primarily concerned with heroic epic poetry in Ireland as in other countries, since in the times to which our records refer the recitation of the heroic prose epics was one of the chief functions of the file.
On the other hand, we know nothing of the ancient forms of Irish poetry. The earliest poems that have come down to us have a metrical form which is not native. Earlier than these—in the fifth and sixth centuries—there is evidence for the cultivation of “rhetorics,” or metrical prose, but this too appears to be of foreign origin.[261] The unique feature in Irish literature, namely, the fact that the early epic, as it has come down to us, appears in prose instead of poetry may be due, at least in part, to the disappearance of native metrical forms before the fifth century. It may be that the prose epics originated in paraphrases of early poems such as we find, for instance, in the Völsunga Saga, which is a paraphrase of older poems dealing with the story of Sigurthr. Or the change may have been more automatic, the outcome of a process of metrical dissolution similar to that of which the beginnings may be seen in certain Anglo-Saxon and German poems. Such metrical dissolution would be favoured, if not necessitated, by the extensive phonetic changes which took place in Ireland in the fifth century. But into this question it is not necessary to enter here. It is sufficient to point out that Irish Saga literature, according to all appearances, began in the heroic epic, a form which in all other literatures, including Norse, originated in poetry.
The preservation of poetry, narrative or other, by oral tradition is a common enough phenomenon among many peoples, but the traditional prose narrative, except in such primitive forms as folk-tales, is very rare. Since we find it both in Ireland and Iceland—and apparently in no other European countries—and since we have found so many other connections between these two countries, the theory that the Icelandic Saga owes its origin, however indirectly, to the Irish Saga, seems to deserve more serious consideration from scholars than it has yet received.