SOURCE: “The Making of Heroes and Monsters,” in The Long Arm of Coincidence: The Frustrated Connection between Beowulf and Grettis Saga, University of Toronto Press, 1998, pp. 17-36.

In the following excerpt, Fjalldal refutes critical assertions of relationship between the characters of the Grettis Saga with those of Beowulf, claiming that many comparatists have shown more evidence of imaginative speculation than of literary research.

The purpose of this and of the next three chapters is to examine the basic ingredients of the five genetically related analogues that critics claim to have found in Grettis saga against the relevant sections of Beowulf. Although a great deal of literature has accumulated around these five texts, comparisons have never been very detailed or thorough, even in the case of the most widely accepted analogues, namely, the Sandhaugar and Glámr episodes. Critical discussion has in most cases revolved around a few fragments...