Read The Sagas of the Icelanders Online
Authors: Jane Smilely
The Sagas of the Icelanders (4 page)
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.
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 and 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.