SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

39°
Saga-Book of the Viking Society
KINGS BEASTS AND HEROES. By GWYN JONES. Oxford University
Press, 1972. xxv+I76 pp. £3.
Kings Beasts and Heroes is concerned with three works,
dissimilar but with points of likeness: the Old English Beowulf, the
Welsh Culhwch ac Olwen, and the Icelandic Hrol]s saga kraka.
Professor Jones is concerned less with local provenance, though
he does not ignore it, than with what these works commonly
draw on and uniquely transform. Each displays, in very
different proportions, elements of myth, folktale, heroic legend,
legendary history, historical tradition, and history. The author
is concerned chiefly with the second and third of these vague
categories, and especially with folktale or wondertale. Indeed
his book is, in his own words, "an inquiry into the presence of
folktale and folktale-motif in three highly developed and
interestingly diversified medieval literary kinds: epic, romance,
and saga"
Such an approach offers varying rewards. It necessitates a
deal of retelling and quotation (in translation), which is no bad
thing, since most of us will be general readers in one or two of the
fields in which Professor Jones moves so assuredly. Aarne and
Thompson's classifications are employed as a starting-point; in
specific application, these can seem central (Culhwch ac Olwen) or
at the least helpful (Hr6lfs saga); but Beowulf, with its high
sophistication, makes for less tractable material. Certainly the
folktale-type of "The Three Stolen Princesses' is buried somewhere,
but the author has to dig hard to exhume parts of it; and
the ladies themselves have long decomposed.
About each work Professor Jones asks four questions: " 'What
is it?' 'What is it about?' 'How is it done?' and 'How well is
it done?'" His answers to the first two questions are splendid
ones; he knows his texts well, having in fact translated two of them
in the past, and the competence with which he retells the stories
is matched by a way with English which makes their various
qualities instantly accessible. Additionally, his exposition of the
elements which compound each work is plain and helpful: muddle
is unmuddled without oversimplification. Professor Jones scants
a little on the remaining questions, partly because his strengths
are those of the descriptive rather than the practical critic. His
particular responses are often unsatisfactory (the "true simplicity"
of the close of Hr6lfs saga is surely less a calculated effect than a
conventional tidying-up) or, indeed, unparticular. For example,
he sets down a lengthy extract from Culhwch ac Olwen which
describes the hunting of the boar, Twrch Trwyth, and remarks,
"This is fine narrative, gallant, comic, beautiful, deadly, zestful,
hard, heady, and precise" - a statement which, however true,