The Sagas of the Icelanders (49 page)

When Ketil flees King Harald in Norway, he and Unn head for the Viking kingdoms in Scotland and Ireland, rather than for Iceland; he is of high birth and does not intend ‘to spend my old age in that fishing camp’. After Unn loses her husband and son – both kings – in successive battles, she marries her daughters into the Orkney and Faroese nobility. Unn settles in west Iceland, as authoritative a family head as any male settler, holding sway over the community and dispensing land to her kinsmen, other settlers and even freed slaves – among them, incidentally, the Irish grandfather of Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, the heroine of the Vinland sagas. Although her gifts of land are inspired by Christian charity, they sow the seeds of conflict among later generations who will fight over boundaries and inheritances when

Laxardal

Family Ties in Laxardal

Gudrun s Family and Husbands

Iceland is fully populated. Not once but three times, fierce conflicts divide the community when half-brothers or foster-brothers clash (Hoskuld and Hrut, Thorleik and Olaf Peacock, Kjartan and Bolli), but we only see the full disintegration of Ketil Flat-nose’s line with the rivalry between Kjartan and Bolli for the love of Gudrun. All three players in this love triangle are descendants of Ketil, five or six generations removed.

Unn’s loss of husband and son and her attempts to shape her own fate establish certain themes that expand into Gudrun Osvifsdottir’s tragedy, her four marriages and love for Kjartan. Gudrun’s fate is also foretold in a dream, a familiar saga device. It is not the events of the plot as such that engage us, but rather its unravelling as a narrative of the predicament of individuals who are caught up in the relentless onward march of events and social change. Certainly the upheavals that Ketil Flat-nose’s descendants experience do not stop when the settlers make new homes for themselves in Iceland. As a young Viking Age mother, Gudrun brings up her son to wreak vengeance on his father’s killers, but she ends her life in Christian piety as an anchoress in a completely different ethical world.

The saga is symphonic in its structure, with subtle repetitions, parallels and echoes in gradually changing circumstances. And although the plot has striking similarities to the cycle of eddic poems about Brynhild, Sigurd, Gunnar and Gudrun, this is only one aspect of its literary context. The characterization highlights nobility, splendour and physical appearance, with a colour more akin to medieval romance than to brawny Viking heroism. Nonetheless, in their actions the male characters tend not to live up to the grandeur and hyperbole with which they are presented. At foreign courts their stature is aristocratic, but at home in Iceland they are farmers with few outlets other than words and smart clothes for their aspirations to nobility. This is a saga in which even slaves are high-born, descended from the kings of Ireland. The women in
The Saga of the People of Laxardal
are much more complex and memorable than the men, as if the men buckle beneath the weight of the heroic legacy they are forced to bear.

The Saga of the People of Laxardal
belongs to the earliest group of sagas and was written shortly after the middle of the thirteenth century. By focusing on divisive claims to land, authority and rank it seems to mirror the issues of the fierce civil war that raged while it was being written. Arguments have been put forward claiming that the saga, with its focus on women as leaders or instigators, its firm grasp of female psychology, its close attention to the details of women’s routine life and its insights into the position and lot of women – from the highest to the lowest ranks of life – must surely be the work of a woman author.

Many manuscripts of
The Saga of the People of Laxardal
have been preserved. The version in
Mb’druvallabók
(AM 132 fol., dated 1330–70) is the only intact vellum manuscript, and all printed versions have been based upon it, with minor amendments and variant readings from other manuscripts. The saga is translated here by Keneva Kunz from the version printed in
Íslenzk fornrit
, vol. 5 (Reykjavik 1934), with a few variant readings from Kristian Kålund’s critical edition (
Samfund til udgivelse af gammel nordisk litteratur
, vol. 19 (Copenhagen 1896)).