La biblioteca nascosta di Sigrid Undset. Una lettura genettiana di Fortællingen om Viga-Ljot og Vigdis (1909)

Sigrid Undset’s short historical novel Fortællingen om Viga-Ljot and Vigdis (1909, Eng. trans. Gunnar’s Daughter) has received little academic attention. Scholars have generally tended to label it, somewhat condescendingly, as a pastiche. In this article, we shed light on the complex ways in which the novel relates to Old Icelandic literature, first and foremost the family sagas, thus showing that the prevailing critical view of the text, which condemns it to obscurity, is incorrect. Drawing on Genette’s famous theory of transtextuality, we explore the intertextual, paratexual and hypertextual relationships between the novel and the multiple texts that it incorporates, imitates and/or transforms. We show how Undset alluded to numerous historical sources with the aim of evoking the cultural and religious climate of the Viking Age in Norway; how her main source of inspiration was probably the groundbreaking 19th-century Danish translation of the family sagas by N. M. Petersen; and how she, while partially imitating Petersen’s saga style, also conducted a series of significant transformations of the genre to adapt it to her interest in the darker aspects of human psychology.