The Episodic in the Historical Background of Family Sagas: Case Study of Fostering under the Agreement

Abstract

The article investigates some imagery of historical family sagas which used to convey information, presumably available to their audience, but are difficult to perceive for contemporary readers. The character descriptions in the introduction of family sagas include information about names of characters themselves, their genealogies and social position. They usually function as historical background to family sagas and set temporal benchmarks at the same time giving their audience a clue about development of events in the subsequent episodes. The article deals with sentence fragments with an abstract noun fóstr / barnfóstr ´fosterage´. The employmen of these sentence fragments within introductory characteristics allows informing about the cases of fosterage which didn’t fit into the stereotypical patterns of relations between a fosterer and parents (in the latter case nomen agentis fóstri / fóstra ‘foster father’ is usually used in introductionary characteristics). The function of stereotypical foster father is significant for the saga narrative and this kind of social status mentioned in the introductionary characteristic usually belongs to the saga historical background. On the contrary, information of cases of fosterage expressed with the help of the abstract noun fóstr doesn’t describe the character itself but defines an occasional situation and thus it takes the transitional position between the introductory characteristic and the episode.