Proactive Narrative Markers in Icelandic Family Sagas

Icelandic family sagas are literary works of large size and content, the structure of which is rather difficult to analyze and lead to a common pattern. Observations show that some elements in their structure are common for the whole genre. So in this work, I examine the presence in various sagas of such a reception as “proactive narrative markers”. This can be either specific, easily separated from the text excerpts, or abstract author hints indicating the approach of a plot milestone. They serve to draw the attention of the listener or reader to one or another episode, to emphasize its importance - often unexpected or not obvious. This work will focus on looking at the material of several family and royal sagas, how their authors make it clear to the reader that some important plot-forming event will happen in the text soon, and how these methods differ in the two types of saga genre.