The Sagas of the Icelanders Read online

  The genres of thirteenth-century Icelandic literature were not restricted to the sagas and eddas. The kinds of knowledge that formed the basis for a conventional medieval education in religion and the liberal arts were also set down in books. The Icelandic Homily Book (composed around 1200) mentions a number of learned medieval authors from whom ideas have been received: Pope Gregory the Great, St Augustine, the Venerable Bede, Alcuin, Fulgentius. There were Icelandic translations of Elucidarius by Honorius Augustodunensis and a Physiologus, as well as the works of other important authors. These translations appear in various collections, such as the fourteenth-century Hauksbók. In addition to these more commonplace elements of medieval intellectual life, some particularly Icelandic matters, close in spirit to the sagas, were also written early, and the Icelandic laws were among the first, in the early twelfth century. Since the adoption of a national constitution in 930, the laws of the Icelandic Commonwealth (pjodveldi) had been recited by the Lawspeaker (logsogumaSur), one-third each year for three years, at the national assembly, the Althing (Alpingi), which met on the plains of the Althing, Thingvellir, every June. The circumstances of their writing are described in a small book called Íslendingabók (The Book of Icelanders), written about 1130 by the priest Ari Thorgilsson (1068–1148), known as ‘the Learned’: in 1117 the innovation was decided upon at the Althing of having sections of the law written in a book during the following winter. Accordingly, at the home of Haflidi Masson, the laws were dictated by the Lawspeaker, Bergthor Hrafnsson, and written down under his supervision and that of other wise men. They were read the following summer to the unanimous approval of the Althing.

  Ari Thorgilsson was born shortly after the Saga Age and was therefore separated by only two or three generations from some of its most famous people. His great-grandmother was Gudrun Osvifsdottir, the heroine of The Saga of the People of Laxardal. His book is a concise history of Iceland from its settlement in the late ninth century (c. 870) to 1118, and it contains the main features of Iceland’s foundation story and subsequent history as it is told in a large number of the Íslendinga sögur. Ari, unlike their anonymous narrators, is very much an author in the modern sense. He cites in detail the oral sources of the information that he has written down, including such remarkable things as a list of the names and periods of tenure of the Lawspeakers, from Hrafn Haengsson in 930 to Bergthor Hrafnsson.

  As the founder of Icelandic historical writing, Ari was cited as an authority by other writers who in all likelihood derived little from him directly, aside possibly from his account of the conversion of Iceland to Christianity. One manuscript of The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue, for example, is bold enough to advertise itself as ‘the saga of Hrafn and of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue, as told by the priest Ari Thorgilsson the Learned, who was the most knowledgeable of stories of the settlement and other ancient lore of anyone who has lived in Iceland’. Some version of this saga of the poet Gunnlaug probably did exist in oral tradition in Ari’s time and he might well have told it. But there is no possibility that the version as we now have it was told by him in a text composed at least a hundred years after his death. As a rhetorical device, however, the citation of Ari adds to its interest and authority.

  After Ari’s Íslendingabók, a second important work of historical scholarship is the vast undertaking called Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements) which describes the settlement of Iceland and the establishment of the original families, region by region around the country. It mentions about 3,500 people by name (more than 430 of whom were original settlers) and the names of 1,500 farms. Landnámabók has existed in a number of versions, some of which are now lost. Some of its stories and the genealogies of Icelanders that are traced back to Norwegian royalty suggest the folk imagination at work. An early version of Landnámabók may have been begun at about the same time as Íslendingabók, in the twelfth century, but the earliest version still extant is credited to Sturla Thordarson (1214–84), the nephew of Snorri Sturluson, 150 years later. It reflects in both form and substance the influence of the Íslendinga sögur, with which it is contemporary, and draws on the same combination of oral and written materials.

  None of the Íslendinga sögur can be attributed to an author. Even when a thirteenth-century writer such as Snorri Sturluson or Sturla Thordarson is associated with a particular text, he largely functions as a collector or reteller rather than as an inventor of the story. In fact, there is no medieval source naming Snorri Sturluson as the author of Heimskringla, the great collection of kings’ sagas, although modern scholars follow the convention of attributing it to him. Even when we think we know an author’s name, his writing persona is that of the historian, who works in a style that is essentially indistinguishable from the anonymous norm. He derives his authorial authority not from the originality of his style or story but from his fidelity to the events, or to others’ accounts of them and their judgements on those who were involved – in other words, to what has been said. The sense of authorship, in so far as it exists in Icelandic prose, is far different from that of the great medieval poets. The works of Chrétien, Dante and Chaucer were new and exciting partly because of the way the poets inserted some version of themselves into the telling of their stories. This never happens in Icelandic narrative, which remains focused on the autonomous world of its people, ideas and events and not at all on the particular personality through which these have been shaped for presentation to the reader. Therefore a large field of potential irony is not there to be exploited in the sagas. Without a named and identified narrator, as in many novels and other narrative forms, there is no actual or potential gap in knowledge or sympathy between the narrator and the implied author, as for example between the pilgrim Chaucer and the author of The Canterbury Tales. The sagas, especially the Íslendinga sögur, leave us with the impression that the source of their art is a tradition that stretches back for generations. The anonymity of their authors has become a feature of their style.

  III. THE RHETORIC OF HISTORY

  There is rarely a disjunction in the art of the Íslendinga sögur between our sense of the events they describe and the method of their telling, as if their language were a clear window on to the world of the saga. Sagas never follow the example of Homer by opening ‘in the middle of things’. They attempt, as much as possible, to tell events in the normal chronological order of their occurrence. Occasionally a flashback will be necessary if the plot has divided into separate strands and two or more groups of characters need to be imagined acting simultaneously. This produces an inconspicuous narrative intrusion such as ‘Now we will go back to where the story was left earlier when…’ An exception to prove the rule is The Saga of the People of Ljosavatn, (not in this collection). Its structure is more experimental than most. In addition to incorporating three closely related pattir, without fitting them precisely into the chronology of the narrative, it also uses a subtly managed short flashback to describe an episode in the childhood of the two brothers, Gudmund the Powerful and Einar from Thvera:

  It is told of the brothers that when they were young, Gudmund had a bald foster-father whom he loved greatly. One day when he was sleeping outside in the sun, mosquitoes kept settling on his bald spot. Gudmund drove them away with his hand, thinking that his foster-father would be bitten.

  ‘Use your axe on his bald spot, brother,’ Einar said.

  He did so, aiming the axe so that it nicked the bald spot and made it bleed, but the mosquito flew off.

  The old man woke up and said, ‘It’s a hard thing when you take weapons to me, Gudmund.’

  ‘Now I realize for the first time that Einar’s advice to me isn’t well intended,’ he replied, ‘and this probably won’t be the last time.’

  This incident kindled a long-standing resentment between the brothers. (Ch. 16)

  Like the English word story, saga can refer either to a literary text or to the events themselves that are recounted in it. We can say that a story ‘takes place’ at a certain time a
nd in a certain place, in which case we are referring to the events, whether actual or imagined. Or we can say that a story moves us or holds us in suspense, in which case we are referring to the way it is told, that is to a literary text. This ambiguity is something we live with quite comfortably, resolving it almost unconsciously according to context. The Íslendinga sögur, however, blur this distinction between saga as event and saga as story more readily than most other forms of narrative do. It often happens, for example, that a character is said to be ‘out of the saga’ meaning both that he has no further relationship with the events being reported and that he will therefore not be mentioned again.

  The rhetoric of the Íslendinga sögur is designed to give the impression that they relate events exactly as they happened, or at least as people have said they happened. Contributing to this effect is the minimal sense of a narrative voice that is in any way distinct from the anonymous author’s. Neither the existence of a reader nor the presence of an analysable meaning beneath the surface of the story is acknowledged by the saga author. All is made to appear unified in the perfect fit of language, event and meaning. The saga authors were adept at creating humour, wit and subtle ironies in their characters and situations. None was more accomplished in this than the author of Njal’s Saga, the great masterpiece of saga art. A somewhat macabre sarcasm is one of his favourite rhetorical devices, and Skarphedin is a master of the form. He observes, after a series of household killings which had been carried out by the servants of his mother and Gunnar’s wife Hallgerd, that ‘Slaves are a lot more active than they used to be’ (Ch. 37), and that ‘Hallgerd does not let our servants die of old age’ (Ch. 38). But his irony can also assume a gentler, more tragic tone when he says of Njal, as he composes himself to die in the burning of his house, ‘Our father has gone to bed early, which is to be expected – he’s an old man’ (Ch. 129). The ironic double vision, which in the novel is located in the disjunction between narrative voice and author (and hence between narrator and reader) – producing richly moving and comic effects but nevertheless weakening our allegiance to the truth and stated values of the story – in the sagas infuses instead the language and actions of the characters.

  Saga composers were aware, however, that the events they narrated happened long ago; by drawing attention to this they did open a space between themselves and their story, explicitly acknowledging the temporal distance between the ‘then’ of the story and the ‘now’ of its telling. The motivation for doing so was sometimes to authenticate a story by pointing to the continued existence of some physical object mentioned. This device is used in The Saga of the People of Eyri, to add plausibility to one of the few references in the sagas to human sacrifice in Iceland: ‘It is still possible to see the judgement circle in which men were sentenced to be sacrificed. Within the ring stands Thor’s stone, across which men’s backs were broken when they were sacrificed and the stain of blood can still be seen on the stone’ (Ch. 10). Such a device can also enhance the apparent antiquarian precision of the saga by indicating that customs and cultures have changed between then and now. To explain how an Icelander in London could understand what Englishmen were saying, The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue informs us: ‘In those days, the language in England was the same as that spoken in Norway and Denmark, but there was a change of language when William the Bastard conquered England. Since William was of French descent, the French language was used in England from then on’ (Ch. 7). The remarkable thing about this bit of authenticating detail is not so much the idea that Englishmen stopped speaking English after the Norman Conquest, but that the topic should have occurred to the composer in the first place. While the manuscript’s attribution of the saga to Ari Thorgilsson is far-fetched, the saga composer here and elsewhere in the work shows an ability to sketch a believable historical context.

  A charming and surprising feature of saga style that probably began as an authenticating device is the inclusion in almost all of the sagas of poetic verses. In addition to the cultural and linguistic variety that poetry introduces, it is also a source of multiple difficulties, not least for the translator. In contrast to the poetic forms used in the Poetic Edda, which resemble traditional heroic poetry in the other early Germanic literatures, the poetry in sagas is notoriously difficult and is a poetic form that is confined to Scandinavia, particularly to Norway and Iceland. It was probably a challenge to people even in the thirteenth century, which is why Snorri Sturluson wrote the Prose Edda to explain and illustrate it. Poetry of the kind found in the sagas is known in English as ‘court poetry’ or ‘skaldic poetry’, from the Icelandic word skáld (poet). It has many metrical forms and schemes of internal rhyme and alliteration, the most common of which is called dróttkvatt measure. A reasonable explanation for the convention of putting poetry into the Íslendinga sögur is to see it as a carry-over from the practice of the somewhat earlier kings’ sagas, in which poetry and poets played a large part. In the Prologue to Heimskringla, his collection of kings’ sagas, Snorri Sturluson had this to say about poetry as a source of historical information:

  When Harald Fair-hair was king of Norway, Iceland was settled. At the court of King Harald there were poets, and people still remember their poems and the poems about all the kings who have since been in Norway; and we have taken the greatest amount of information from what is said in poems that were recited before the great men themselves or their sons. We consider everything as true that is found in those poems about their exploits and battles. It is the habit of poets to praise him most in whose presence they are; but no one would have dared to recite to him deeds which everyone who listened, as well as he himself, knew to be fantasy and falsehood. That would have been mockery and not praise.

  Poetry for Snorri was the best single source of information about the great events of the past. The inclusion of poetry in a king’s saga was the equivalent of the modern scholarly footnote, laying out the authority for specific details of the story. It was for this reason that an ability to understand skaldic poetry was important to the historian.

  In the Íslendinga sögur individual stanzas or small groups of them are composed by many of the characters as a comment on particular occasions or as an expression of personal feeling. These occasional verses (lausavísur) are the form that poetry most often takes in the Íslendinga sögur. But dróttKvatt stanzas can also be linked together in longer compositions: the more formal is the drapa (drápa), a poem that is divided into sections by one or more refrains; and the other is simply a sequence of stanzas, called a flokk (flokkur, i.e. group). In both the kings’ sagas and the Íslendinga sögur, these longer compositions are usually presented to kings, in the manner suggested by Snorri. The greatest Icelandic poet was Egil Skallagrimsson, a saga of whose life and adventures is included in this collection. Egil’s Saga ingeniously attempts to integrate his poetry (including three long poems) into the hero’s exciting Viking life.

  Many of the Íslendinga saga heroes were poets, in the sense that their sagas include poems said to have been composed by them. Language is often a field of conflict and competition, with poems and speeches serving as missiles that are intended to harm and humiliate. Some of the greatest fighters (Egil, Gisli, Grettir, Viglund) were poets. But four of the Íslendinga sögur are about men whose main claim to fame is as love poets: Kormak’s Saga, The Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Poet, The Saga of Bjorn, Champion of the Hitardal People and The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue. Both love poetry and heroic poetry are important themes in a fifth ‘poet’s saga’, The Saga of the Sworn Brothers. If this group deserves to be distinguished from the sagas of other poets it is on account of their focusing on the notion of language as a field of combat, with two rival poets contending for the hand of the same woman.

  There may be good reason for believing that the earliest of the Íslendinga sögur, including some of these poets’ sagas, used poetic verses in the spirit of the kings’ sagas, that is as sources of information and historical authority. But as the genre
evolved, the verses lost their antique flavour, which suggests that they were probably composed as a means of characterization as well. The saga style does not permit either interior monologue or a narrator’s paraphrase of a character’s thoughts, and the verses occasionally serve as the only available window into a character’s mind.

  Ari the Learned was not the only scholar whose authority was cited as a source or as a commentator on the significance of the saga’s events. There are several examples in the Íslendinga sögur. Here is a rich combination of authenticating devices in The Saga of Grettir the Strong, a saga of an outlaw and poet (which is to appear in Penguin Classics):

  The spear that Grettir had lost was not found for a long time, until the days that people still alive today can remember. It was found towards the end of Sturla Thordarson the Lawspeaker’s life, in the marshland where Thorbjorn was killed, which is now known as Spjotsmyri (Spear-Mire). This is taken as proof that Thorbjorn was killed there, although some accounts say that he was killed in Midfitjar. (Ch. 49)