Read The Sagas of the Icelanders Online
Authors: Jane Smilely
The Sagas of the Icelanders (6 page)
How the traditional poetry and the sagas came to be written down in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century is something of a mystery. We do not have an account of the circumstances and method, such as Ari gives for the writing of the laws. We do not know, for example, what division of labour might have existed between the people who gave a final shape to the texts and the scribes who wrote them down on vellum, made of calf-skin. None of the
Íslendinga sögur
has been preserved in an original draft or a saga author’s holograph. Most of the surviving texts were written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from originals or copies of them now lost, which were not necessarily a great deal older. Some are even later paper manuscripts, again based on lost vellum originals. Quite a few have come down to us in more than one distinct version, providing their editors with considerable worry and leading to learned debate. The single largest and most valuable collection of
Íslendinga sögur
is a mid-fourteenth-century manuscript known as
Modruvallabdk
, which consists of 200 vellum leaves and contains eleven sagas.
However the earliest manuscripts came about, it is apparent that some of them contain material that had existed in oral tradition for a long time. The
Poetic Edda
and the
fornaldarsögur
(some of which also contain eddic poems), include legendary characters and motifs based on historical figures from the fifth century. They appear in the oldest survivals of English and continental epic. Although it is scarcely possible to reconstruct much about ancient religious belief or ritual from the stories of the gods in the two eddas, they do preserve ancient imagery and motifs, as we know from their appearance in old stone inscriptions. For stories and poems to be transmitted through centuries of oral tradition, they have to make sense to their audiences from generation to generation, and to do this they must conform to the values, tastes and perceptions of successive new audiences. It is unlikely that fixed and unchanging texts, of the sort we are accustomed to in an age of printing, would survive this process from one performance to another, much less through centuries of cultural change. The oral sagas and poems of the Viking Age, to which reference is made in the sagas, were not exactly the same texts as those that were written down three hundred years later, although much about their art and content may have been similar.
The style of the
Íslendinga sögur
reflects their life in oral tradition. Their unadorned language and sentence structure are suited to the voice of a reader or storyteller, around whom an audience listens – in Iceland today it would be a radio audience. The sagas are formulaic in language and structure and yet full of suspenseful and exciting moments, great and small. The genre itself is different from anything else in medieval literature, and yet from saga to saga it follows the sort of tightly controlled rules that are associated with oral forms. Conventions govern the nature of plot, theme, characterization and narrative style, and yet those constraints somehow permit enough variation to make the greatest sagas distinct and distinctly memorable.
One convention by which the sagas develop a dense and plausible historical context is to introduce their major characters into an explicitly defined historical setting. Often this is accomplished with a rich background of genealogical information – more sometimes than the non-specialist reader can appreciate. The memory and transmission of these genealogies was apparently one of the cultural functions of the
Íslendinga sögur
. The genealogies were an important element of the network of story out of which the individual sagas came: they were a directory or map of Icelandic society. Their presence illustrates the obligation of these works to instruct as well as to entertain. Here is the opening chapter of
The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue
, from a slightly different manuscript from the one that was used for the translation in this collection:
There was a man named Thorstein. He was the son of Egil Skallagrimsson. Skallagrim was the son of Kveldulf, a hersir from Norway. Thorstein’s mother was named Asgerd, the daughter of Bjorn.
Thorstein lived at Borg in Borgarfjord. He was wealthy, a great chieftain, wise and gentle, and a moderate man in every way. He was not outstanding for size and strength as was his father Egil, but he was very powerful and well liked by everyone. Thorstein was a handsome man, with light-coloured hair and extremely fine eyes. He was married to Jofrid, the daughter of Gunnar Hlifarson. She had been married before to Thorodd Tungu-Oddsson and their daughter was Hungerd, who grew up at Borg with Thorstein. Jofrid was a woman of strong character.
She and Thorstein had many children, although few of them come into this saga. Skuli was their eldest son, the second was Kollsvein and Egil the third.
(Ch. 1) (my translation)
This genealogy tells us among other things that, socially and historically, Thorstein Egilsson will be the most important person in the saga. Although he is not the hero, it is appropriate to begin with him. His farm at Borg is mentioned in many sagas because it was the political and social centre of the district; from the time of the settlement until the time of writing the saga it was one of the most important farms in the nation. Some of the great men associated with the family at Borg are named explicitly in the manuscript used in this volume; for many Icelanders, those associations were well enough known from other sagas that they hardly needed stating. In this case, the noted ancestor was Egil Skallagrimsson, the poet/Viking hero of
Egil’s Saga
, where many of the characters of
The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue
are also mentioned, but that does not necessarily mean that one of the sagas is the ‘source’ of the other. We can readily imagine that such cross-references were an authenticating device of saga rhetoric in oral tradition, an element of the ‘saga network’ against which any particular saga or tale was composed and understood by its audience. For example,
Njal’s Saga, Eirik the Red’s Saga, The Saga of the People of Laxardal
and
The Saga of the People of Eyri
all trace some of their characters back to Olaf (Oleif) the White and his wife Unn (Aud) the Deep-minded, who founded one of the greatest dynasties of the Saga Age.
The abruptness and plainness of the saga opening is also typical. Thorstein is introduced in the absolutely standard saga way: ‘There was a man named Thorstein.’ The use of patronymics in the introduction of saga characters, especially the prominent and powerful ones, sometimes sets up a genealogical chain, as here, identifying fathers’ fathers and so on several generations back. Stylistically, these chains are easy and natural in Icelandic but seem a little awkward in English translation, where a few extra words are sometimes necessary.
The description of Thorstein’s character and appearance is also a narrative convention, although it derives an added significance here from the contrast of the son with his father. He is not so big and powerful as Egil and yet much easier to get along with; he has inherited the good looks and pleasant disposition of the two Thorolfs, Egil’s brother and uncle. And for those who know the story of the men of Borg, this genealogy, taken together with the personal description, serves as a form of characterization. Thorstein’s wife Jofrid is characterized with a single Icelandic word:
skörungur
, translated here as ‘a woman of strong character’. That one word, however, raises suspense. Many of the women in the sagas, like the women in Greek tragedy and in the nineteenth-century novel, play large and interesting roles. ‘A woman of strong character’ is bound to be an intelligent, independent and courageous person, although we do not know, from the word
skörungur
itself, how she will be outstanding, or even whether she will be a force for good or for evil.
The precision with which historical context is established at the opening of an
Íslendinga saga
is a requirement of the genre. This can be accomplished by referring to one of the original settlers or the king of Norway, usually, but not invariably, the semi-legendary King Harald Fair-hair (
c
. 860–930), the first national king of Norway, who is the central figure in the foundation myth of Iceland. We have already noticed Snorri’s allusion to this myth in the Prologue to
Heimskringla
and it is a story repeated often in the sagas, as in this example from
The Saga of Hord and the People of Holm
(not in this volume):
Most of Iceland was settled in the days of Harald Fair-hair. People would not endure his oppression and tyranny, especially those who belonged to aristocratic families and who had ambition and good prospects. They would rather leave their property in Norway than suffer aggression and injustice – whether from a king or from anyone else. Bjorn Gold-bearer was one of these. He travelled from Orkadal to Iceland and settled South Reykjadal, which was between the rivers Grimsa and Flokadalsa, and lived at Gullberastadir.
Other sagas that open with Harald Fair-hair and the story of families leaving Norway to settle in Iceland include
Gisli Sursson’s Saga, The Saga of Hrafnkel Frey’s Godi, Kormak’s Saga, The Saga of the People of Svarfadardal
and
Viglund’s Saga
. In
The Saga of Grettir the Strong, The Saga of the People of Eyri
and
The Saga of the People of Laxardal
, the reference to Harald comes just a few sentences into the saga. The most interesting and extensive story of Harald and the founding of Iceland is told in the first twenty-seven chapters of
Egil’s Saga
, when Egil’s father and grandfather resist the king and depart for Iceland. It is with Harald Fair-hair, in fact, that Ari Thorgilsson had begun
Íslendingabók
:
Iceland was first settled from Norway in the days of Harald Fair-hair, the son of Halfdan the Black, at the time… that Ivar, the son of Ragnar Shaggy-breeches, killed St Edmund, the king of England, which was
870
years after the birth of Christ, according to what is written in his life.
The Saga of the People of Floi
begins in an unusual and instructive way, with a genealogy of Harald. It demonstrates what a liminal figure he was in Icelandic story, standing at the juncture of two great eras, and consequently of two different fictional worlds. Because he was in effect the initiating force of the Saga Age, his family tree reaches back into another world, that of the eddas and the legendary
fornaldarsögur
. According to the genealogy in
The Saga of the People of Floi
, his great-great-grandparents were Brynhild and Sigurd the Volsung, who slew the dragon Fafnir. They are central characters in
The Saga of the Volsungs
and in many of the eddic poems. Five generations back from Sigurd, according to the saga, was Odin, who ruled Asgard.
The historical precision of the
Íslendinga sögur
is matched by the detail and accuracy of their geographical reference. The sagas tell of people and events that are primarily located in a specified district of Iceland. Although it extends over nearly all of Iceland and is something of an exception to this rule, the main actions of
Njal’s Saga
occur primarily in the south.
Egil’s Saga
and
The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue
are, as we have noted, located primarily at the farm Borg in Borgarfjord in the west, although the scene does shift, as it does from time to time in most other sagas, to adventures in Britain and Scandinavia.
The Saga of the People of Laxardal
reflects its geographical setting in its title, as do a dozen other
Íslendinga sögur
.
The sagas tell stories that fall into a rather simply schematized general pattern. After an introduction of the main characters in their geographical and historical settings, the saga tells of a conflict that arises out of what are usually the events of everyday life in Iceland. Conflicts grow out of marriages, divorces, inheritances, sporting events, horse-fights, robberies, the destruction of property, thoughtless words, frustrated loves and jealousy, taunting and goading, disputed fishing rights, even rights to beached whales. The conflict may begin with the action of a rash or overbearing person, but then it grows until it reaches a climax, sometimes quite terrible and bloody, and producing a countering act of vengeance. Saga plots are often tragic, involving men of goodwill pitted against each other, sometimes even members of the same family. In the end there is a reconciliation. Longer sagas manage several of these feud plots, either interlaced with each other or concatenated.
All classes and stations of Saga Age society become involved. It is, however, a relatively homogeneous society by medieval standards. There is no royalty or courtly culture, no clerical hierarchy, no urban trade and commerce, no armies. It is a conservative rural society composed of some powerful leading men (
hofdingjar
, sing.
hbfdingi
) at the top; freemen farmers (
bandur
, sing.
bdndi
), in various ways dependent upon the
hofdingjar
, hired labourers, both transient and permanently attached to one farm; and slaves. (These designations cannot be translated with complete satisfaction. ‘Chieftain’, which is the usual translation
ofhöfdingi
, does not seem entirely appropriate in such a highly evolved society as medieval Iceland; and the title ‘farmer’ does not do justice to the fact that some of the farms over which the
bandur
ruled in the Saga Age, and for some centuries afterwards, were as large as whole villages. The ‘farmer’ may have had as many as fifty or sixty men working for him and a household of over a hundred persons.)