Possible Worlds of Sagas: The Intermingling of Different Fictional Universes in the Development of the Fornaldarsögur as a Genre

The paper investigates how the theoretical discussion on possible worlds of fiction can help explicate some peculiarities of the individual fornaldarsögur and the heterogeneity of the entire corpus. Since different fields of the medieval Icelandic imaginary contributed towards building the specific fictional worlds of the fonaldarsögur, the paper discusses which constraints the authors of a fornaldarsaga had to respect in order to give coherence to his text and at the same time not to violate the religious norms of his society. The diverse strategies employed in order to attain such purposes can, at least in part, explain the well known heterogeneity of the corpus. The paper takes then into consideration some of the fornaldarsögur as examples of such processes of combination and hierarchization of different fields of the imaginary.