The Sagas of the Icelanders Read online

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  I came to Icelandic literature from Old English, and read it along with Old and Middle English works like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Canterbury Tales, as well as certain Old Irish works, like the exploits of Cuchulain. While I was interested enough in the other medieval works to read and study them, nothing drew me in like the Icelandic sagas. Their simultaneous strangeness and familiarity was a potent and never-ending source of pleasure to me, and further, it was clear that the saga writers knew perfectly well how to tell a good story, and that their techniques for setting the scene, describing character, following out a conflict and finding meaning in apparently meaningless action were highly sophisticated. There was, in fact, plenty for an aspiring novelist to learn from the saga writers. However scholars answer the questions of who they are and what they meant, a novelist can recognize a fellow artist at once, and in fact, the stripped-down narrative style and the focus on the individual and social consequences of conflict is a good beginner’s manual in techniques of plotting and characterization. In Icelandic sagas, characters have looks and habits. They also act and speak, sometimes about themselves, and others speak about them. In the end, that’s all you need to distinguish one character from another, even when all the names look and sound alike.

  The incidents that propel the action and reveal character are often mundane, but always quite specific. In The Saga of Hrafnkel Frey’s Godi, for example, Hrafnkel is lying in bed one morning after he has lost his original farm and established a new one, and one of his servant-women sees the brother of his old antagonist pass by with some other men. She rushes into the house and berates Hrafnkel for being a coward and a fool, and goads him into seeking revenge. Although he speaks little, his humiliation and anger are readily understandable, because her words are clear and relentless, and show him that he is held in contempt by at least some portion of his associates. In Gisli Sursson’s Saga, men set up a horse-fight, which leads to angry words and blows. In every saga, the fates of men turn on small moments and misjudgements, very distinctly rendered. That is a lesson for every novelist.

  Some sagas gain cohesion from being about one man, like Grettir the Strong or Gisli. A natural interest collects around the exceptional qualities of that man. Grettir, for example, twice swims a fjord in the winter that is so cold that he comes out covered with ice. These sagas have the coherence of biography, but give up social context. Other sagas, like The Saga of the People of Laxardal, attempt to follow out the consequences of rashness and folly as they extrapolate through a whole region. In these, a certain amount of dramatic force is dissipated as characters come and go. A novelist of any era finds that such choices are always with him or her – the temptation to take the simple route falsifies experience in one way, the temptation to take the complex route falsifies experience in another way. Prose narrative is prose narrative is prose narrative. Stripped of the most obvious idiosyncrasies of the authors’ individualities, Icelandic prose narrative takes on a kind of paradigmatic quality.

  That the Icelandic saga writers were using prose narrative to consider their history and their present situation also seemed obvious, and uncannily modern, to me. The saga writers lived in an unsettled age. One of the few known authors, Snorri Sturluson, possibly himself the author of Egil ’s Saga, was assassinated. This, too, seemed instructive. The apparently disinterested contemplation of historical events could and would shed light upon contemporary events – whole conflicts, from beginning to end, were examined. Human nature was revealed. A fault in the political structure (the lack of an executive arm of government) was diagnosed. The effects of spiritual and religious commitment were set into a context of unbridled violence and social turbulence. In 1262, the Icelanders came up with an answer – they placed themselves under the Norwegian king. To me as a citizen and a novelist, the worth of serious art as a form of social discourse seems evident in the enterprise of Icelandic prose literature.

  When I was studying Icelandic literature, translations were piecemeal and highly variable. Some were published in mass editions, others in expensive university press editions. There was no co-ordination, and so some translations were very literal and almost clotted, while others were so loose and fluent as to be easy to read but suspect. These problems have been solved by the editors of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, from which this selection was taken. These translations are uniformly accurate and readable. More importantly, they are gathered together in one informative volume. The reader may enter the literary world of medieval Iceland with ease and pleasure, and the literary works of the nameless saga writers may take their rightful place beside those of Homer, Shakespeare, Socrates, and those few others who live at the very heart of human literary endeavour.

  Introduction

  ROBERT KELLOGG

  I. THE AGE OF THE VIKINGS

  The later Middle Ages in Europe were a time of striking innovation in literature. In the second half of the twelfth century, the French poet Chrétien de Troyes gave a rich and permanent poetic shape to the old Celtic narratives of King Arthur and his court. With Dante’s Commedia and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the national literatures of Europe began to declare their independence of medieval Latin. The local dialects of central France, of Florence and of London established themselves as the rivals of the languages of antiquity. Similar movements occurred in the other countries of Europe, especially in Germany with the brilliant poetic narratives of Wolfram, Hartmann and Gottfried. Nowhere, however, was this literary activity more remarkable or in certain paradoxical respects more ahead of its time than in medieval Iceland, where nearly all the books that have survived in the language of the ‘Norsemen’ were written.

  The mention of medieval Norsemen summons images of pagan Vikings, in beautiful, far-sailing ships, who for two hundred years terrified the peaceful coasts of France and the British Isles. As far as it goes, this is an appropriate association. The Norsemen were not merely Viking marauders, however. A people of great organizational genius and maritime skill, they were traders, explorers, settlers, landowners and, on an increasingly large scale, able political leaders. The settlement of Iceland, which began about 870, was part of a larger movement of Norse expansion. While most of the first settlers came to Iceland from the west coast of Norway, a significant number came from Norse communities in Ireland and Great Britain, bringing people of Celtic origin with them. The city of Dublin had been founded and governed by Norsemen. York in England was a centre of Norse power. In France, King Charles III was forced to turn over the territory since known as

  The World of the Sagas

  Normandy to a Norwegian Viking named Hrolf (also called Rolf and Rollo), the great-great-great-grandfather of William the Conqueror. The Icelanders in their turn began settling in Greenland in the tenth century, and from there they went on to explore the coast of North America.

  The restless and expansive age of the Vikings lasted for about two hundred years. Their first notable attack on England came, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in 793, when the church on the island of Lindisfarne was plundered and some people were slain. But by 1000 a new cultural phase was under way, with the conversion of many Norsemen to Christianity, which made their raids on churches and centres of learning more difficult to justify. The introduction of ecclesiastical institutions into Norse culture – monasticism, literacy and the internationalist perspective of the church hierarchy – laid the foundation for a post-Viking educational system that was based on the reading of books.

  The growth of centralized religion and education was accompanied by the growth of larger, more centralized governments. The small regional kingships of early Viking society were being replaced in the eleventh century by powerful national monarchies, whose interests were not served by freebooting Viking raiders. Literacy made possible the conversion of rich ancient Viking oral traditions of myth and legend into written literature, as was also happening in Celtic Britain. It provided t
he means for recording recent events in the history of Scandinavia, especially the deeds of Norway’s charismatic king and saint, Olaf Haraldsson (reigned 1014–30), and his Viking Christian precursor, King Olaf Tryggvason (995–1000).* By the beginning of the twelfth century, writing in Iceland and elsewhere in Scandinavia was being extended from Latin to the vernacular language. And the circumstances were right for the production of a large, varied and innovative body of literature.

  II. FORMS OF ICELANDIC NARRATIVE

  In Iceland, the age of the Vikings is also called the Saga Age. About forty interesting and original works of medieval Icelandic literature are fictionalized accounts of events that took place in Iceland during the time of the Vikings: from shortly before the settlement of Iceland about 870 to somewhat after the conversion to Christianity in the year 1000. They were written mainly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but they concern characters and events in Iceland, and to some extent the larger Norse world, from three hundred years earlier. All of the sagas in this collection are historical fictions of this type, a form known in Icelandic as Íslendinga sögur (sagas of Icelanders) and often in English as ‘family sagas’. These works are the crowning achievement of medieval narrative art in Scandinavia, and when people speak of ‘the Icelandic sagas’ they usually mean the Íslendinga sögur.

  In spirit the Íslendinga sögur are much like epics. While women are more prominent and interesting characters in the sagas than in Homeric epic or Beowulf or the Song of Roland, the world of the sagas is still a man’s world. Such heroic virtues as honour, fortitude and manly courage count for a great deal, and the definition of heroes in a variety of situations is one of the main points. The sagas differ from epics in two important ways: formally, by being in straightforward, clear prose rather than verse, and culturally, by not being about kings and princes and semi-divine heroes but about wealthy and powerful farmers.

  Saga heroes occupy a social space on the edges of society. The heroes of three of the sagas, The Saga of Grettir the Strong, Gisli Sursson’s Saga and The Saga of Hord and the People of Holm, are in fact outlaws. Gunnar Hamundarson of Hlidarendi in Njal’s Saga is also technically a criminal when he is killed. Most of the saga heroes are just barely on one side or the other of the law, but it also seems to be true that the law itself is being tested along with the finest men. Epic and saga are enough alike to make a comparison interesting and instructive, especially in the degree to which both genres synthesize history, myth, ethical values and descriptions of actual life. Sagas differ from romance, the other great medieval narrative mode, by focusing attention on actual social types of people in a historically and geographically precise context, with little apparent interest in fantasy and the spiritual and psychological experience of what is sometimes called ‘courtly love’. There are

  Ages of Icelandic History

  lovers in the sagas, but far less frequently do they end happily ever after than do their counterparts in romance. Generically, the sagas stand not so much between epic and romance as between epic and that other great European narrative form, the novel.

  The word saga is related to the English word say. Its various meanings in Icelandic can be roughly understood as denoting something said, a narrative in prose. English has no precise equivalent, so saga often appears in the titles of Icelandic books untranslated, although ‘story’, ‘tale’ or ‘history’ would come close, with some combination of the three even closer. Literary scholars now distinguish several kinds of sagas, depending on subject matter or historical setting. In addition to the Íslendinga sögur, with which we are concerned here, there are chivalric romances (riddarasögur); legendary sagas of pre-Icelandic Germanic heroes (fornaldarsb’gur); lives of the kings of Norway (in the great collection called Heimskringla and other individual konungasogur); saints’ lives (heilagra manna sögur); and histories of ‘contemporary’ events (samtidarsogur) that took place in Iceland after the Saga Age, many of which are preserved in the huge collection known as Sturlunga saga and others in the lives of Icelandic bishops (biskupasdgur).

  Closely related to the Íslendinga sögur is a genre of short tales called Íslendinga pnettir (tales of Icelanders), six of which have been selected for inclusion in this collection. pattir (plural þœtir) means, among other things, ‘part’ or ‘chapter’, and the Íslendingapattirdo, whether they occur separately or as part of a larger work, give the appearance of being anecdotes that can perform a variety of functions within a larger work, such as illustrating a king’s character or providing an authenticating historical or learned detail. They occur mostly in large manuscript collections of kings’ sagas and often concern some kind of comic encounter between a humble Icelander and a king of Norway, frequently Harald Sigurdarson the Stern, in which an initial conflict is resolved.

  The characters in many of the þœttir are familiar to us from the roles they play in the sagas, and take on a special interest for this reason, as though they exist in a network of story that is larger than that encompassed by any single text or group of texts. The texts we have are, from this perspective, but a selection from the events of this larger saga world, in which ultimately every Íslendinga saga is connected to all the others.

  Whether a short narrative is titled a ‘saga’ or a ‘tale’ sometimes seems quite arbitrary, and while the categories of saga narrative are useful and the various kinds of sagas can be distinguished fairly easily, they do overlap. Individual works have their own character and are often somewhat ‘mixed’ in style. An example of a short and entertaining saga with many of the features of a ‘tale’ is The Saga of Ref the Sly. The hero’s name, Ref, means ‘fox’ in Icelandic, and he can be thought of as ‘the sly fox’, which King Harald the Stern had in mind when he gave him ‘the sly’ as a nickname. Like many of the tales of Icelanders, The Saga of Ref the Sly does not involve trolls or berserks or the supernatural for its entertainment, but Ref’s extraordinary skill and ingenuity in highly naturalistic settings in Iceland, Greenland, Norway and Denmark. Ref the Sly is unique among all the sagas in allowing itself the anachronism of a reference to writing (Ch. 6). Ref is asked by his uncle as he is leaving Iceland to have his adventures written down in case he does not come back. The rationalism and ingenuity of the story, the identification of the hero as a fox and the reference to writing as a way of preserving the hero’s exploits, all point towards the likelihood that the widespread literary tradition of Reynard the Fox is here given Icelandic attire.

  The Íslendinga sögur are, however, in some cases quite hospitable to elements found abundantly in the legendary fornaldarsögur, such as trolls, ghosts, berserks and magical enchantments. On the other hand, the seriousness of their intellectual purpose gives the Íslendinga sögur much in common with the sagas of contemporary Icelanders and the kings’ sagas. The freshest approaches to saga narrative in Icelandic scholarship today concern the fringes and overlappings of saga genres. The sagas are being seen as stylistically more self-conscious than we have realized, raising new questions of controlled parodies, in which stylistic effects may have been designed to produce humour and subtle, at times touching or nostalgic, reminders of a time and a sensibility from which the reader is for better or for worse now cut off.

  Prose as good as that which evolved into the classic saga style was rare in medieval European literature. It tended to appear later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Exceptions do exist, such as the Decameron of Boccaccio and (much closer in spirit to the sagas) the French Vulgate cycle of Arthurian romances. Still, the development of a prose fiction in medieval Iceland that was fluent, nuanced and seriously occupied with the legal, moral and political life of a whole society of ordinary people was an achievement unparalleled elsewhere in Europe.

  The most famous manuscript to survive in Iceland from the Middle Ages is not a saga. It is a collection of poems about Odin and the other gods and about the major characters in the heroic story of the Volsungs. Like several other old Icelandic books, the physical object is n
amed Codex Regius (The King’s Book). The manuscript itself was written about 1270, but is based on somewhat older written texts. The anthology of poems it contains has traditionally been known in English as the Poetic Edda. We do not know who compiled the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda nor very much about the history of the texts that it contains. The poems are arranged according to a plan and interjected prose passages provide narrative contexts for many of them. The metre and diction of these poems link them to a much earlier Germanic poetics, as illustrated in Anglo-Saxon, Old Saxon and Old High German poetry. Despite the antiquity of its roots everything points to the compilation of Codex Regius as being, like many of the sagas, an achievement of the thirteenth century.

  Another thirteenth-century work, as precious as the Poetic Edda, also concerns myth and poetry. It is believed to have been written by Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241) and is called Snorra-Edda in Icelandic. In English it is usually known as the Prose Edda. Intended no doubt as a kind of textbook, it begins with a retelling of the myths and legends found in the Poetic Edda, often amplifying and clarifying them. But then it develops in the second section, called The Poetics (Skdldskaparmdl), into a truly remarkable treatise on poetry, with examples of complex poetic metaphors that were based on the myths, as well as examples of poetic forms. Nothing like Snorra-Edda exists anywhere else in medieval European literature. These two separate works, one entitled Edda by its author, the other acquiring the name in modern times by association with Snorri’s book, illustrate the extent to which Icelanders of the thirteenth century felt an impulse to collect and preserve what they could of the culture of pagan antiquity. As were the Íslendinga sögur, the two books called Edda were antiquarian efforts to preserve a distant past through the perspective of a liberal and inquisitive impulse in thirteenth-century Christian scholarship. They illustrate likewise the balanced attention that was directed by thirteenth-century literary culture to prose and poetry. It was a golden age, in which many kinds of stories and literary forms were familiar to readers of the Íslendinga sögur.