Stjörnu-Odda draumr (Star-Oddi's Dream) is a ''

þáttr The ''þættir'' (Old Norse singular ''þáttr'', literally meaning a "strand" of rope or yarn)O'Donoghue (2004:226). are short stories written mostly in Iceland during the 13th and 14th centuries. The majority of ''þættir'' occur in two compend ...

'' (short

Old Norse Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and t ...

-Icelandic tale) which recounts the dream-vision of Oddi Helgason, a twelfth-century Icelandic farmer and astronomer. It is considered to be "a literary ''tour de force'' and altogether unique in the saga corpus" because of its saga-within-a-dream narrative. The saga records that Oddi dreams that a guest arrives at his home and starts telling a legendary saga set in Götaland; during the course of the dream Oddi steps into this saga and becomes one of its characters:

Now as soon as this man Dagfinn was named in the saga, the story goes that something very strange happened in Oddi's dream. Oddi himself thought he was this man Dagfinn, whereas the guest – the man who was telling the saga – is now out of our saga and out of the dream; and then Oddi thought that he himself could see and perceive everything which came afterwards in the dream. So after this point the dream is to be told just as it seemed to appear to Oddi himself: he thought he was Dagfinn, and that he was getting ready for his journey with Geirvid the king.

The saga is preserved in the manuscript AM 555h 4to, copied by Árni Magnússson in 1686 from the now lost late fourteenth-century codex

Vatnshyrna ''Vatnshyrna'' was a major Icelandic saga codex destroyed in the Copenhagen Fire of 1728. It was copied between 1391 and 1395 by Magnús Þórhallsson for Jón Hákonarson in northern Iceland. The codex was first called ''Vatnshyrna'' by Arngr ...

Bibliography

Editions

* * Modern Icelandic Edition

Translations

* *

References

Þættir {{Þættir-stub