The Historical Present Tense in the Earliest Textual Transmission of Njáls saga

Abstract

The article investigates differences in the use of the historical present tense in the earliest manuscripts of Njál's saga. The manuscripts analyzed show a common stock of forms of the historical present tense that can be explained discourse functionally but, in addition to this, forms that can be found only in part of the manuscripts and cannot be explained systematically. The most probable explanation of this type of variation is that the use of the present tense instead of the past tense is not generally ungrammatical in narratives but is determined by rules at the discourse level. When copying manuscripts, however, the focus of the scribe is directed at shorter semantic units (clauses, phrases) so that mechanisms working at the discourse level may be out of the scribe's sight. This may lead to the scribe expanding abbreviated verb forms that are grammatically ambiguous, not on the basis of the discourse context but subconsciously on the basis of grammatical correctness within a shorter semantic unit. Different scribes can come to different conclusions about how to expand certain abbreviations, which then leads to variation between manuscripts.