AI Summary
5 min readIn the saga of Thorstein Siðu-Hallsson, the first line is “And they were both killed”—and the saga never bothers to tell you who “they” were. The opening is lost, the ending is lost, and what survives is a fragment so thin that the two medievalists who host this podcast spend more time reconstructing Thorstein’s biography from other sagas than they do discussing the actual text of his own. The saga of Thorstein Siðu-Hallsson is, by scholarly consensus, a minor, defective, and poorly composed work. But that is precisely what makes it interesting: it forces its readers to become literary detectives, piecing together a life from fragments, cross-references, and the ghostly outlines of lost manuscripts.
The Problem of the Fragmentary Text
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:08) **Introducing the Saga and Its Poor Reputation** - John and Andy welcome listeners to a new saga, one of the most obscure and critically dismissed in the corpus.
- 2 (08:04) **The Saga's One Notable Feature: An Abundance of Dreams** - Despite its brevity and poor quality, the saga contains the highest number of reported dreams of any Íslendingasögur.
- 3 (09:10) **The Krávkills Measurement: A Featherweight Saga** - The hosts measure the surviving text against the yardstick of *Gísla saga*, finding it to be a mere 0.59 *Gísla*s.
- 4 (11:22) **The Manuscript Problem: A Lost Beginning** - The saga survives only in two paper copies from the 17th century, made by Ásgeir Jónsson from a now-lost medieval manuscript.
- 5 (16:16) **Introducing Thorstein Siðu-Hallsson Through Other Sagas** - Since the saga’s beginning is lost, the hosts build a character profile of Thorstein from his appearances in other, better-known sagas.
- 6 (19:08) **Thorstein's Role in *Njáls saga* and *Ölkofra þáttr*** - Thorstein appears in two key episodes from other sagas, demonstrating his character and connections.
- 7 (22:19) **Thorstein's Marriage and Prominent Descendants** - The hosts trace Thorstein's family connections, which link him to some of the most powerful figures in Icelandic history.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
“. . . and they both were killed.” This promising but enigmatic sentence fragment opens Þorsteins saga Síðu-Hallssonar as it comes down to us.
Let’s be honest, the Saga of Thorstein Siðu-Hallsson has had a rough time surviving the centuries. This one only survives in a few paper manuscripts from the 17th century, and even these are missing the beginning and ending. The fact that we’ve got any part of this saga to cover on the podcast is something of a minor miracle.
And despite all of that, this saga still has an interesting story to tell. Join us as we work our way through the first two chapters. Only two chapters? Sure, but look at all we accomplish along the way:
- We introduce the saga and its critical reputation
- We dive into some manuscript studies to find out what exactly happened to the this saga
- We tell the story of Thorstein’s family, including that of his famous father Siðu-Hall, and imagine what might have come before in the saga’s opening chapters
- We also revisit the famous Battle of Clontarf where King Brian Boru met his fate and the Vikings lost their hold over Ireland.
You might find that there’s a bit more Njal’s
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