Abstract
Although the so-called Íslendingasögur (Sagas of Early Icelanders) rarely comment or reflect on questions about the art of narration, short remarks of the narrative voice as well as some narrative techniques demonstrate that the sagas have been composed according to generic rules and that they try to meet generic expectations. Since all Íslendingasögur are anonymous, questions about authorship have mainly focused on identifying specific individuals who might have been responsible for a saga.1 Even less attention than to the concept of authorship has been paid to the function of the narrative voice that has usually been considered to be identical with the author in anonymous texts. In this article I want to look at narratorial comments in Reykdoela saga with a special focus on their function within the narrative.2 It will be demonstrated that the references which seem to be referring to tradition are actually references to the narrative itself and thus on the same level as the clearly intra-textual crossreferences. All these remarks ultimately refer back to the narrative voice and thus to the auctoritas of the text, i.e. to the text-controlling authority.
