The Sagas of the Icelanders Read online

  Praise for The Sagas of Icelanders

  “What better way to begin a new century than with a generous collection—the first such in English—of some of the greatest stories ever told… Irresistible tales that are, as surely as the masterpieces of Homer and Cervantes, the forerunners of the modern European novel.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “The Sagas are the literature not only of the island where they were written, but of the whole Western world of their day—undoubtedly one of the greatest contributions made by Nordic culture to world literature. Even today, they provide the modern reader with fascinating insights; they are stories which reveal an immense variety of human conduct and condition.”

  —Jostein Gaarder

  “Wonderful… this splendid edition will inaugurate the discovery of these great works by adventuresome readers of English for years to come.”

  —The San Diego Tribune

  “Excellent… It would be hard to imagine a finer introduction to this extraordinary body of work… the best thing is the selection itself, which reflects the great variety of saga narrative, from complex family chronicles to brief, witty tales. We are taken from the male-dominated world of feuding and killing to the remarkable depiction of powerful, clever women in The Saga of the People of Laxardal; from the farmsteads in Iceland to the North America of the Vinland sagas… full of vivid and haunting scenes.”

  —The Sunday Daily Telegraph (London)

  “The English is wonderfully accessible to this modern reader. Only now can I fully appreciate my own deep debt as a storyteller to Icelandic writers of long ago.”

  —Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

  WORLD OF THE SAGAS

  Editor: Örnólfur Thorsson

  Assistant Editor: Bernard Scudder

  Advisory Editorial Board:

  Theodore M. Andersson (Stanford University), Robert Cook (University of Iceland), Terry Gunnell (University of Iceland), Frederik J. Heinemann (University of Essen), Vidar Hreinsson (Reykjavik Academy), Robert Kellogg (University of Virginia), Jónas Kristjánsson (University of Iceland), Keneva Kunz (Nordregio, Stockholm), Vésteinn Ólason (University of Iceland), Gisli Sigurdsson (University of Iceland), Andrew Wawn (University of Leeds), Diana Whaley (University of Newcastle)

  Translators

  Katrina C. Attwood

  George Clark

  Ruth C. Ellison

  Terry Gunnell

  Keneva Kunz

  Anthony Maxwell

  Martin S. Regal

  Bernard Scudder

  Andrew Wawn

  THE SAGAS OF ICELANDERS

  A Selection

  Preface by JANE SMILEY

  Introduction by ROBERT KELLOGG

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinron Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First: published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2000

  Published in Penguin Books 2001

  Copyright © Leifur Eiriksson Publishing Ltd, 1997

  Preface copyright ©Jane Smiley, 2000

  All rights reserved

  Translations first published in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders Volume I–V (forty-nine tales), Leifur Eiriksson Publishing Ltd, Iceland 1997

  Leifur Eiriksson Publishing Ltd gratefully acknowledges the support of the Nordic Cultural Fund, Ariane Programme of the European Union, UNESCO, and others.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193326-9

  Table of Contents

  List of Illustrations and Tables

  Preface by JANE SMILEY

  Introduction by ROBERT KELLOGG

  Further Reading

  A Note on the Texts

  SAGAS

  Egil’s Saga (trans. BERNARD SCUDDER)

  The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal (trans. ANDREW WAWN)

  The Saga of the People of Laxardal (trans. KENEVA KUNZ)

  Bolli Bollason’s Tale (trans. KENEVA KUNZ)

  The Saga of Hrafnkel Frey’s Godi (trans. TERRY GUNNELL)

  The Saga of the Confederates (trans. RUTH C. ELLISON)

  Gisli Sursson’s Saga (trans. MARTIN S. REGAL)

  The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue (trans. KATRINA C. ATTWOOD)

  The Saga of Ref the Sly (trans. GEORGE CLARK)

  The Vinland Sagas

  The Saga of the Greenlanders (trans. KENEVA KUNZ)

  Eirik the Red’s Saga (trans. KENEVA KUNZ)

  TALES

  The Tale of Thorstein Staff-struck (trans. ANTHONY MAXWELL)

  The Tale of Halldor Snorrason II (trans. TERRY GUNNELL)

  The Tale of Sarcastic Halli (trans. GEORGE CLARK)

  The Tale of Thorstein Shiver (trans. ANTHONY MAXWELL)

  The Tale of Audun from the West Fjords (trans. ANTHONY MAXWELL)

  The Tale of the Story-wise Icelander (trans. ANTHONY MAXWELL)

  REFERENCE SECTION

  Illustrations and Diagrams

  Ships

  The Farm

  Social and Political Structure

  Glossary

  Index of Characters

  Illustrations and Tables

  Ages of Icelandic History

  The Duty of Revenge and the Right to Inheritance

  Types of Saga

  Family Ties between Six Sagas

  Ingimund’s Ancestors and Family in Vatnsdal

  Family Ties in Laxardal

  Gudrun’s Family and Husbands

  Main Characters in Gisli Sursson’s Saga

  Historical Tables

  Knorr

  Warship

  Icelandic Farm

  The Farmhouse at Stong

  Social and Political Structure

  Old Icelandic Year and Day

  MAPS

  The World of the Sagas

  Norway

  Borgarfjord

  Vatnsdal

  Laxardal

  Travels of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue

  Travels of Leif Eiriksson

  Travels of Thorvald Eiriksson

  Travels of Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir and Thorfinn Karlse
fni

  Saga Sites in Iceland

  Assembly Sites

  Preface

  JANE SMILEY

  The prose literature of medieval Iceland is a great world treasure – elaborate, various, strange, profound, and as eternally current as any of the other great literary treasures – the Homeric epics, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the works of William Shakespeare or of any modern writer you could name. Mysteries surround these stories – how were they composed and by whom? what were the motives of the authors? why were they written in prose when the currency of medieval literature was poetry? how did their contemporaries understand them – did they even read them, or did they hear them read aloud? But the questions fall away as we read the sagas and tales themselves. They are written with such immediacy and forthrightness and they concern such basic human dilemmas that for the most part they are readily accessible and seductive. Reading one creates the appetite for another and another. In the present volume, Penguin has drawn upon the newly translated and edited Complete Sagas of Icelanders to offer the English-speaking reader a rich selection of Icelandic prose. Long and short, complex and simple, fantastic and realistic – there is a taste of everything here, an abundant introduction to a world a thousand years separated from ours, both intensely familiar and intensely strange.

  The Icelandic sagas, in form and apparent purpose, were anomalous for their time, the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that is, the time of Chaucer, the Romance of the Rose and Dante. If English, French and Italian readers had had access to them in their own day, they might have found them stranger than we do. We have been trained by the form of the novel, which arose in England in the eighteenth century, to accept the significance of a prose narrative that concerns itself with the doings and opinions and fates of what we would call ordinary citizens, that is, men and women who live in communities of people who are more or less their equals, whose personal qualities determine the outcome of their intentions and whose stories constitute models of social and psychological behaviour. Much of the medieval literature we know of had an aristocratic, leisured audience. Icelanders wrote for each other, that is, a relatively small population of related and isolated (in the world-geographical sense) families who were all aware of who their ancestors were and how their ancestors had settled and developed the world that saga writers and readers lived in. Medieval Iceland shared with the modern world a considerable degree of social mobility and a considerable ambiguousness about how men (and women) of exceptional qualities (strength, talent, beauty, passion) could be fitted into the fabric of society. Such concerns arose in mainland Europe in times of social and economic disruption, for example during the Black Death, but less so than they did at times of social and economic stability; they were at the very heart of how Icelandic society created itself and sustained itself. Just as the settlement of Iceland in the ninth century prefigured the westward expansion of Europe into America five and six centuries later, the literature of Iceland written in the high Middle Ages prefigured the literature of the modern world.

  And yet, these stories are so clearly medieval.

  And yet, they are not.

  This is their fascinating paradox.

  A powerful man, Hrafnkel, makes an unbreakable vow that his horse is dedicated to his favourite god, and that he will kill anyone who rides the horse without his permission. He announces this vow to every one of his workers. One day some sheep are lost, and, of course, the only horse who will allow itself to be caught is the forbidden animal. When the man who attempts to ride the horse in secret finally dismounts, the horse gallops straight to his master and presents himself, dirty and done-in. Hrafnkel fulfils his vow, then attempts to soften the blow by offering to take care of the victim’s family, but they are so incensed by his attitude that they turn down his offer.

  Another powerful man, Thorstein, has a dream that his daughter will be so beautiful as to cause the death of two men. He attempts to evade this fate by having the child exposed, just as Laertes attempted to evade his death at the hands of Oedipus by having Oedipus exposed. Thorstein is as unsuccessful in his evasion as Laertes is.

  A beautiful and well-meaning woman, Gudrun, falls in love with a suitor she cannot have. Her frustration leads her into other, unsuitable marriages.

  Several couples live together in close quarters. Jealousies and tempers flare, and two men are killed. Conflicting loyalties and readiness for revenge interfere with the early resolution of the argument, and a man, Gisli, who might otherwise have lived a peaceful and prosperous farming life with his well-loved wife, is forced to live by his wits in exile and outlawry.

  These stories are familiar – not because we have read them before (though in some cases we have), but because they sound just like things that happen all the time. People are always making rash commitments and foolish choices, speaking unwisely, taking stubborn positions, ignoring the wise counsel of others, hoping to get something more on a gamble than what they are already assured of, refusing to submit or lose face. Like Hrafnkel’s horse, animals often seem to act with perverse intelligence. In some quarters of the world and in some periods these mistakes lead to unhappiness. In other quarters and other periods they lead to death and social devastation. These Icelandic stories are unique because their understanding of the consequences of foolishness and folly, especially in its relationship to character, is uniquely plain, unvarnished and direct.

  Typical saga style bespeaks an agricultural world where leisure was at a premium. The sagas and tales are full of work. The action takes place in a context of sheep-herding, horse-breeding, weaving, cooking, washing, building, clearing land and expanding holdings, trading by ship with mainland Europe and the British Isles. Disputes often begin humbly – in The Saga of Ref the Sly, for example, a man kills his neighbour’s shepherd so that his sheep can have access to his neighbour’s grazing. His motives go without analysis – greed needs no analysis. What is interesting to both writer and audience is what happens next and what the other characters say about it. Likewise, that a man like Egil Skallagrimsson should be a great poet as well as hot-headed, stiff-necked and dangerous also needs no analysis. Much more is to be learned from what happens to Egil than from investigation of the whys and wherefores of his character. Thus Icelandic sagas and tales seem far removed from modern literary subjectivity, and yet, the gossip and the comments of other characters supply a practical and readily understandable psychological context. Characters speak up. They say what they want and what their intentions are. Other characters disagree with them and judge them. The saga writer sometimes remarks upon public opinion concerning these events. The result is that the sagas are psychologically complex and yet economical in their analysis. Nothing like the courtly manners of the rest of Europe gets in the way of plain-speaking, and we seem to be hearing the true words of true everyday people.

  This, of course, is an illusion, especially in the context of the translation from Icelandic to English. The plainness of saga style is also highly ritualized. Similar incidents occur in similar ways throughout the body of the literature. The entire body of sagas and tales is a country unto itself, and no less idiosyncratic than any other literary country – it is only that the country has different expectations and customs, and they go in a different direction from that of other medieval literatures.

  There is no single saga that stands with other single works as an unalloyed example of greatness and universality, like The Divine Comedy, King Lear or the Homeric epics. A saga not included in this volume, Njal’s Saga, and two sagas included here, The Saga of the People of Laxardal and Egil’s Saga, make the strongest claims for greatness, but one of the unique characteristics of saga literature is its cohesiveness as a group of stories in which, although they are by different authors, their similarities are greater and more obvious than their differences. They are like an extended family of individuals who all look rather alike and all share basic values. Our enjoyment of Shakespeare’s or Dickens’s or Mozart’s works is n
ot significantly enhanced by reading or understanding the works of their contemporaries – the context is interesting but not essential to the average reader or listener. The reader of Njal’s Saga, though, can hardly understand or appreciate this great work out of the context of the other sagas. They surround it the way a landscape of fields surrounds the best, most fertile one – they are an essential part of its ecosystem, its plant pattern, its water pattern, its weather pattern. Its goodness is set off by their differing characteristics of sandiness, steepness, weediness. Medieval Icelandic literature is different from almost every other world literature – it is a literature in which individual authors seem to disappear, while the voice of an entire way of life seems to speak distinctly. In that sense, this anthology is a single work, a map of a world whose inhabitants knew it well and were quite self-conscious – Iceland was Iceland before France was France or England was England or Italy was Italy. In Iceland, everyone was employed in more or less the same enterprise. In Iceland, people customarily travelled about the countryside and were familiar with each other’s homes and regions. It is thus a literature of unity rather than diversity, where the inability of an individual to fit in is noticed, remarked upon, analysed and perhaps admired, but always dealt with in the end.