The Sagas of the Icelanders (2 page)

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 not 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.

*

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.

ROBERT KELLOGG