ABSTRACT
Both structuralism and formalism hark back to the early twentieth century, the latter becoming prominent in Russia in the 1920s, with Shklovsky, Tynyanov, and Jakobson doing some of the most important work. J. R. R. Tolkien famously noted the binary structure of Beowulf in his British Academy Essay of 1936, and, following Clover’s Medieval Saga, binary structure became an accepted fact in the discussion of saga composition. In 1967, Theodore M. Andersson’s The Icelandic Family Saga: An Analytic Reading appeared, focusing, in the words of the author, on ‘the family saga as formal narrative’. Andersson famously suggested a six-part schema that would describe the structure of family sagas: introduction, conflict, climax, revenge, reconciliation, and aftermath. Several important analytical works focusing on saga structures emerged in the 1970s and the 1980s, after the gauntlet thrown down by Andersson.
