The Sagas of the Icelanders (8 page)

The one social rank that plays a large role in the sagas is that of the godi (see
Glossary
). In heathen times the godi had a duty to build and maintain a temple for worshipping one or more of the gods and to provide ritual feasts. The
Íslendinga sögur
describe Icelandic paganism, although we cannot help but wonder how much their authors knew about the subject. Several of the godis in the sagas are represented as being pious in their ritual duties. A remarkable saga is
The Saga of the People of Eyri
, which includes information about Icelandic antiquities that are described more fully than elsewhere. A pagan temple is said to have been built by an original settler, Thorolf Moster-beard who:

The most striking and memorable example of a godi as pagan priest is Hrafnkel in
The Saga of Hrafnkel Frey’s Godi
, who dedicated a horse to the exclusive use of the god Frey and himself and swore a sacred oath that no one else was permitted to ride it. When a good-hearted young man rides the horse to search for Hrafnkel’s lost sheep, the godi feels a compelling religious duty to kill him, providing the occasion for the conflict on which the plot is built. The outcome of the saga suggests that the author felt both a respectful curiosity about paganism and an obligation not to seem to approve of it. Two men in
The Saga of Hord and the People of Holm
, one a godi, the other an ordinary farmer, are described in their temples exchanging words with the gods; both die soon afterwards.

It is with the function of the godis as secular leaders that the
Íslendinga sögur
is most concerned. For a feud or legal case to be conducted with any hope of success a godi’s help and leadership were necessary. The office of godi, called the godord (
godorS
), could be inherited, traded, bought and sold, or divided among one or more men, although only one individual at a time could officially perform its functions. The country was divided into four quarters (
fjóðungar
) and the number of godis was fixed at thirty-nine: twelve in the northern quarter and nine each in the eastern, southern and western quarters. At the annual Althing these thirty-nine ‘full and original’ godis, along with nine others, three each from the east, south and west, served as the forty-eight voting members of the Law Council (
Lögrétta
), a legislative assembly. They reviewed the laws which the Lawspeaker recited, made new laws, set fines and punishments and were informed of sentences of outlawry and banishment that were passed by the courts in local spring assemblies. Four local assembly districts existed in the northern quarter, and three in each of the other quarters. Each year a Spring Assembly (
vorping
) was convened by the three ‘full’ godis who lived in each local assembly district (
sampingoðar
). After a constitutional reform around 965 the four quarters also had courts (
fjordungsdomar
) that met at the Althing, and the godis appointed judges for these courts from the farmers in their districts. Neither imprisonment nor officially administered execution was used as a punishment by the powers-that-be, although men declared outlaws were killed when they were captured. By comparison with other European societies in the Middle Ages, Iceland was unique in its reliance on legislative and judicial institutions, without an executive branch of government.

In local matters, the godis are represented in the sagas as performing countless informal acts of leadership and assistance to the farmers in their
districts. But their effectiveness derives more from personal power and position than from constitutional authority. An isolated community with essentially no foreign affairs to conduct or foreign armies to repel, Iceland of the Saga Age could function, even prosper (according to the sagas), on the ideology with which the first emigrants left Norway: freedom from central authority, especially in the form of a king. The operation of Icelandic society was perceived as being coextensive with Icelandic law. Local systems of welfare, for example such things as caring for orphans, compensating people for losses, assisting farmers in collecting damages awarded to them by the national Law Council, were carried out according to the law, with the assistance and guidance of the godis, but without the notion of a government being in charge: ‘… with law,’ Njal said, in what is now a proverb, ‘our land will rise, but it will perish with lawlessness’ (
Njal’s Saga
, Ch. 70).

The
Íslendinga sögur
began being written in a brilliant and tormented period of Icelandic history known as the Age of the Sturlungs (
Sturlungaöld
). The history of this critical time, from about 1220 to 1264, is told in the huge collection of contemporary sagas called
Sturlunga saga
(The Saga of the Sturlung Family). The Sturlungs were one of five great families locked in a struggle for power that led finally to the collapse of the old Icelandic Commonwealth. They derived their family name from the fact that they were the sons and grandsons of Sturla Thordarson, a chieftain who lived at a farm called Hvamm in the middle decades of the twelfth century. One of Hvamm-Sturla’s sons was Snorri Sturluson and a grandson was the great historian, his namesake Sturla Thordarson. The five feuding families became extremely powerful, capable of assembling armies of 1400 men and of amassing to themselves most of the godords. In the Age of the Sturlungs, learned people were assembling and writing down a priceless heritage of history and historical fiction, myth, legend and poetry. And yet at just this time the nation was witnessing unprecedented instances of violence, atrocity, abuse of power, meanness of spirit, arrogant violations of decency, not to mention of honour. One of many victims was Snorri, killed in his home on 22 September 1241, by a war party which included two of his former sons-in-law.

In the Sturlung Age, the Icelandic foundation myth, with a king at its centre and a stubborn refusal by independent and ambitious farmers to serve him, was a pattern for thinking about the relationship of Icelandic chieftains to the Norwegian crown four hundred years later. There are many such stories of Icelanders and the Norwegian kings in the kings’ sagas, in the
Íslendinga sögur
and in the closely related genre of
þœttir
. In addition to the dire effect of their feuds and power struggles, the great families of the Age of the Sturlungs also began accepting honours and official duties from the king of Norway. Finally in 1262–4, as an alternative to social dissolution and anarchy, the Icelanders formally agreed to become his subjects. The literary activity of the Sturlung Age, especially the
Íslendinga sögur
, must be connected with the military and moral adventures that were threatening to destroy the laws and values inherited from the noble and independent farmers of the Saga Age.

In general the kings of Norway were fascinating to the Icelanders, but the kings about whom most was written were Olaf Tryggvason and St Olaf Haraldsson, both of whom were descendants of Harald Fair-hair, with long and highly interesting sagas of their own, versions of which are included in
Heimskringla
. The Icelanders credited Olaf Tryggvason with having converted their nation to Christianity. He was also important as the forerunner of his namesake the saint, in the way John the Baptist had been the precursor of Christ. Energetic warriors and enthusiastic missionaries, both kings were killed in battle. They are frequently mentioned in the
Íslendinga sögur
, to some degree as markers by which to date events historically, but more because of their association with the entry of Christianity into the history of Iceland and of the Christian chieftain into the ethical world of the sagas. The conversion had added a complicating element, not only to Icelandic law but to the structure of society, with the bishops and other clergy increasingly under the discipline of a foreign church governance. This became a form of foreign influence, like that from the royal court of Norway, that produced much of the complexity and strain of the Age of the Sturlungs. The Christianity of the
Íslendinga sögur
is not this kind of large, complex and politicized institution; instead it is something simpler. It is more like a new view of human nature, which produces in some instances a subtle qualification of the traditional demands of honour, and in others a magical possibility of the divine will’s manifesting itself through miracle. A Christian perspective is one of the components of the ethical nature of idealized Icelandic leaders as they are presented in the
Íslendinga sögur.
Like their ambiguous relationships with the kings, and their search for a workable balance between the integrity of the individual and the preservation of law, the moral natures of the old saga heroes were a mirror in which people of the Sturlung Age could aspire, at least in imagination, to see themselves.

In selecting the sagas and tales of Icelanders to be included in this volume, the editors wanted to illustrate different characteristics of their art, and to suggest the varieties of experience that made up ‘the world of the sagas’. Iceland was the newest and most remote nation in Europe when the stories recorded in these sagas took place. It was first inhabited in the expansion of the Norse hegemony westward, and like other frontier societies it was a good place for people unhappy or in trouble at home to get a new start. The sagas describe, in the first few generations of what we think of as the Icelandic nation, a restless class of able and ambitious young men, on the move back and forth, largely concerned with making fortunes and earning reputations on a larger stage than Iceland offered. A hundred years later, the coming and going, within Iceland but more especially abroad, was associated with Christianity and the missionary activities of pious Icelanders and clergy from abroad. Iceland was by no means imagined as the centre of the world. An element of movement – travel, discovery and exploration – was an aspect of the earliest narrative literature in Icelandic, even before the
Sagas of Icelanders
were put into writing. It has seemed appropriate, therefore, to conceive of the selection in this volume as itself a journey into a saga world that can be characterized (not altogether metaphorically) in terms of the various spaces and locales these stories tell us about.

The first stage describes the emigration of important families from Norway to Iceland, often with a temporary stop in Britain. It is the single most enduring element of the foundation story of Iceland, and is mentioned in most of the sagas in this collection, nowhere more fully than in
Egil’s Saga
, where we see that even the patterns of movement as they become established in Icelandic society are an inheritance from a former life in Norway. The more or less constant movement over long distances by the younger men of an aristocratic family is contrasted to a deep and defining relationship with the particular place that is the inherited family seat.
Egil’s Saga
offers in greater detail the conventional story of a family’s inability or unwillingness to adapt to a form of government headed by a single national king.

A second convention of the emigration story is the symbolic token that determines the particular site where the new home or family estate is to be built in Iceland. In
Egil s Saga
it is the place where Kveldulf’s coffin comes ashore after his burial at sea. As famous as this place, Borg, becomes, it is matched in historical importance by Hvamm in
The Saga of the People of Laxardal,
which was built where Unn’s high-seat pillars had come ashore. Typically, leaving the old home in Norway is described in constitutional and political terms, whereas finding a home in Iceland is guided by a more magical agency that sanctions the foundation of new houses and the communities that surround them.
The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal
is unique in telling an emigration story that is determined entirely by this magic. Ingimund, the founder, is a loyal and valued friend of King Harald Fair-hair, but as the result of a Lapp woman’s magic he considers himself destined to abandon his property in Norway and head for Iceland, where she has hidden an amulet sacred to Frey, in a place from which only he can retrieve it. It is several years after his arrival before Ingimund finally finds his predestined homeland, the beautiful valley of Vatnsdal, where he builds a large temple and in the process discovers his amulet. He calls his farm Hof (Temple) in acknowledgement of the auspiciousness of this place.

The first generations of settlers had the task of adjusting the laws and traditions they brought with them to their new situation where, to an extent far greater than in Norway, they were lords of their own domain. They found suitable areas in which to live and divided them into workable farms among the people who had followed the founding chieftain to Iceland. This meant giving names to the mountains, valleys, fjords and headlands – as we see Ingimund do on his way to Vatnsdal, Aud on her way to Laxardal and Skallagrim when he explores Borgarfjord. In these sagas little stories explain the origin of place-names, and a close connection develops between features of the land and historical memory; in an oral culture these names serve as a ‘memory theatre’, reminding those who walk over it of the great stories associated with the places.

In the realistic novels and stories of the nineteenth century, there was a convention of beginning the way Nikolai Gogol does in
Dead Souls
: ‘Through the gates of the inn in the provincial town of N. drove a rather handsome, smallish spring britzka, of the sort driven around in by…’ An Icelandic saga could never begin this way. Particular, identifying places are too important to its art and thought, so in this respect the realism of saga style is closer to that of the twentieth century than the nineteenth. ‘The town of N.’ is both a coy way of suggesting that the author wants to protect the identity of his characters, who are real people, and, at the same time, of implying that it is really the typical rather than the actual in which universal human truths are to be found. The saga authors assume, however, that life manifests itself through the particular and that universality derives, paradoxically, if at all, from reconstructing particular men and places: ‘Herjolf was the son of Bard Herjolfsson and a kinsman of Ingolf, the settler of Iceland. Ingolf gave to Herjolf the land between Vog and Reykjanes’ (
The Saga of the Greenlanders
).

Another reason that ‘the town of N.’ would not be found in a saga about Iceland is that until the eighteenth century Iceland had no towns. The cosmopolitan blending of nationalities, the accumulation of wealth, together with the openness to commercial and artistic innovation and subtleties of class and manners – all of the things we associate with medieval towns elsewhere in Europe – had no place in Iceland. It is to the tales of the Icelanders, which characteristically take place abroad, or to separate episodes in longer sagas, that we must turn for anything like an urban experience – in Norway, Denmark or England, and often the scene is the court rather than the strictly urban neighbourhood. There is a wonderful market in
The Saga of the People of Laxardal,
where Hoskuld buys his concubine Melkorka, and a good street scene where Kjartan irritates the followers of King Olaf Tryggvason. Audun in
The Tale of Audun from the West Fjords
travels from Greenland to an unnamed town in Norway where he rents a room before going to see the king, and in another unnamed town in Denmark, he wanders the streets begging for food for himself and his bear. These urban scenes are a kind of moral holiday from the more problematic life within the constraints of Icelandic society.
The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue
largely takes place abroad, in kings’ courts and in more urban settings than would be possible in Iceland. It has, as a result, a sense of distance and romance. Gunnlaug, like Gisli and Egil, is a poet, but his verses are less directly related than theirs are to particular social situations, and suggest a freer, more purely emotional expression.

Because Iceland was exclusively rural, it was a conservative society, closed to the newly rich or the landless, one in which the ‘best farmers’ managed every aspect of labour, production and property, as well, of course, as defining and propagating appropriate social custom. The social, political and geographical centre of Iceland in the Saga Age and later was at Thingvellir during the Althing, which like so much of life in the sagas went on out of doors. An oral culture had no use for government archives and the files they contain. There were no contracts or records, deeds or proceedings that had any existence other than in the memory of witnesses. To see Icelandic society at work on the national level the scene moves from individual farms to the outdoor assemblies in the local districts and then, later in the summer, to Thingvellir.

In the settlement stage, effective leaders were cultivated who could attempt to settle disputes over territory and local authority and to tame a sort of ‘wild western’ high-handedness that was a feature of life in the new land. The finest saga of settlement is
The Saga of the People of Laxardal
, although it is much more than that, defining over several generations ideals of chieftaincy and heroic character. It is worth noticing, too, how large a role women play in it, and more complex and problematic ones in some respects than those of the men. We are not allowed to forget in this saga, or in
The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal
, that it was families who moved, not merely aspiring or desperate Vikings. Where the saga does its hardest intellectual work is in telling the stories of how the succeeding generations in these founding families tested each other and the laws of Iceland in their competition for power. The saga never tells us what it ‘means’, but its thought resides instead in the narration of events and in the particularities of character and event. We are not told that such-and-such a thing will always happen, or even that it will ever happen again, but rather that this is a case in which serious and responsible people of goodwill landed in a conflict that tested their characters and abilities, as well as the social structure of the nation. And it usually sounds true enough to what we know about people that we believe it and remember it.

Two of the sagas in this collection,
The Saga of the Confederates
and
The Saga of Hrafnkel Frey’s Godi
, are tightly focused on a single theme: the limits of individual wealth and authority of a chieftain. They are very different in tone, but both are less broadly conceived than are the regional sagas, and it is interesting to note that women play essentially no role in them. Although it is so limited in scope and setting, Hrafnkel’s saga is one of the masterpieces of saga art. Since both Hrafnkel and Odd, the protagonist of the comic
Saga of the Confederates
, are ‘taught a lesson’, some commentators have been tempted to assign a didactic purpose to these two sagas, as though we readers should somehow learn the same lesson: don’t let your conduct be guided by allegiance to a pagan god; or just because you are three times wealthier than the next wealthiest man in the land, don’t consider yourself the equal of the ‘best farmers’. The sagas are about the intrinsic superiority of chieftains, despite their excesses and follies. Each, through the special lens of its art, sounds true, without recourse to allegory.

*

There are places in Iceland that are neither fertile valleys and upland pastures nor the sanctified sites of assemblies. They are the uninhabited places, often in the interior, where outlaws take refuge, sometimes in the company of spirits only partly human. It did not take long for this demarcation of social space to develop, as Iceland evolved into a reasonably stable and conservative rural society. People who found the constraints of normal social life impossible to accept, whether for reasons of honour or of excessive animal spirits, were often condemned to exile. They sometimes chose, as did the hero of
Gisli Sursson’s Saga
, to attempt survival in the uninhabited places in Iceland. Like
The Saga of Hrafnkel Frey’s Godi
, this saga is another little masterpiece of characterization. Gisli is a great hero, a good and patient man, but one of too little good fortune.

The classical hero as a social and psychological type was under increasingly sceptical scrutiny as time went on in Iceland. A response to the military excesses of the Age of the Sturlungs may account for it. Even though many different literary conventions contribute to the characterization of saga heroes, so that there is considerable variety among them, they all occupy a liminal space that is barely on one side or the other of what normal Icelandic society can tolerate. Typically they acquire their skill at arms and their martial reputations in the larger world of action abroad, either (as in the case of Gisli) before they settle in Iceland, or as a conscious element in the education of the aspiring hero, or in the course of temporary exile.

Ref the Sly and Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue in different ways illustrate the Icelandic hero’s dependence on the wider scope of foreign society. As a poet, Gunnlaug relies on the larger Norse cultural scene to earn his reputation: even so, his competitive nature and outspokenness are barely contained within the fine line of royal tolerance. Emblematic of the neccessity for a foreign setting is the fact that Gunnlaug’s passionate ambition for superiority in love, in poetry and in feats of arms culminates in a duel that must take place outside Iceland, where it has been prohibited by law. It is because of these lively heroes that we read and enjoy the sagas so much. But we also learn what a dangerous game they play if they attempt to carry out a heroic career in Iceland itself, a place that is devoted to social tranquillity and to a virtual experience of the heroic through literature rather than to an actual one. When Ref the Sly is forced to leave Iceland, as mentioned above, his uncle encourages him to have a story written about his achievements, which serves to make the point that Icelanders will enjoy reading his adventures as long as they don’t have to experience them in reality.

At the end of
Gisli Sursson’s Saga
, when the characters are all accounted for, we are told that Gisli’s wife’s nephew, also drawn into Gisli’s outlawry, was able to go beyond the reach of Icelandic authority, and is on a ship bound for Greenland. Greenland was the new frontier of the Saga Age – rough, tough, but a lively and human place, where a man could make some money.
Eirik the Red’s Saga
illustrates the progress to Iceland, as a refuge from Norwegian law, and then to Greenland as a refuge from Icelandic law. As saga places, Greenland and the interior of Iceland were somewhat analogous to Finnmark in Norway, which figures in the early chapters of
Egil s Saga
. Such places outside conventional Icelandic society help to define what is meant by civilization, and also for us to distinguish between the forms of behaviour that can be tolerated in society and those, even at times heroic and noble, which are ‘beyond the pale’. Greenland is less magical and better suited to a fresh start in life than either the interior of Iceland or most other places of refuge abroad. The action of half a dozen sagas includes episodes in Greenland, and they all illustrate the vitality and renewal associated with the place. America as a saga place is so complex and special that it cannot be spoken of briefly. It is a world beyond Greenland, Finnmark or the interior of Iceland, a brave new world, within the reach of Norse seamanship, but beyond the grasp of its civilization.