Read The Sagas of the Icelanders Online
Authors: Jane Smilely
The Sagas of the Icelanders (7 page)
The society described in the
Íslendinga sögur
comes about as close as medieval society ever did to the middle-class society of eighteenth-century Europe, in which the novel arose as an important narrative form. The society imagined by the
Íslendinga sögur
is as precisely observed as those of Daniel Defoe and Jane Austen. The quality that underlies the social realism in these two similar fictional worlds is the ability to view the lives of normal human beings as serious and problematic. Even weddings and business partnerships could involve them in behaviour for which they were morally and socially accountable and from which, without ever being lectured to, the reader has things to learn.
The intense focus of the sagas on the incidents of everyday life is the reason that some of the most acute observation on their plots and settings has come in recent years either directly from social scientists or from literary scholars who have been influenced by their methods and insights. Whether the actual society of tenth-century Iceland was in fact as uniform, coherent and conventional as the one presented in the
Íslendinga sögur
may be doubted. Still, modern methods of ethnography, political science and legal and social history are usefully applied to rationalizing and generalizing the representation of society in the sagas. In particular, such an approach enables us to understand the behaviour of the characters as going either with or against the cultural norms in such matters as compensation for an injury, conflict resolution, gift-giving, gender roles, hospitality, family loyalty and personal honour. From the sagas we learn not only the history and geography of Saga Age Iceland in minute detail, but also precise details of prices, money, ships and boats, the layout of houses and outbuildings, weapons, clothing, sports, agricultural practices and domestic manufacturing.
Honour (
sœmd
) is to the conception of character in the sagas as feud is to the plot. Honour does not consist merely of avoiding shame or disgrace. It is the more powerful desire for approbation, good reputation, distinction. Its social function is to forge and maintain bonds of kinship, marriage,
friendship and political alliance. Its narrative function is to keep the saga moving forward, in accordance with ethical rules that give the feud plot a sense of heroic inevitability. Men are drawn into the plots through the operation of social laws over which they have little individual control. As the sagas’ emphasis on genealogy attests, the extended family (
œtt
) was a more important social and historical institution in medieval Iceland than it is in most modern Western societies. The branches of blood-relationship that govern the inheritance of property also govern the degree of obligation a man has to seek compensation for injury done to a kinsman. A man’s closest relationship according to the laws is (1) his father, then (2) his son, (3) his brother, (4) his father’s father, (5) his son’s son and so on all the way to (14) the son of his mother’s sister. Viewed in this way, the Icelandic extended family is ‘ego-centred’, with a man’s relationship to it changing as other members come into the family or leave. This is indicated by the ‘I’ at the centre of the chart.
A person’s more immediate family or household often included relationships outside the
œtt
, with important implications for honour. Many saga characters have ‘foster’ relationships, in which an adult (usually a male, as the head of a family) will assume responsibility for raising another person’s child. The foster-father is regarded as the social inferior of the child’s actual father, although on some occasions the ‘inferiority’ is more theoretical than actual. These relationships with foster parents and their families are often profound and loving and play a conspicuous role in many sagas. A somewhat similar kind of voluntary relationship can be formed between two young men in ‘sworn brotherhood’, a sort of foster relationship with each other.
Honour is an aristocratic and chivalric concept appropriate to a warrior class. In many societies it is manifested outwardly, in such things as rank, title and dress. In the
Íslendinga sögur
, however, a lively sense of honour is maintained by a society of farmers that functions largely without such institutional distinctions. Honour is a social construct. It is bestowed by the community as a reward for moderate and generous behaviour as much as for warlike derring-do, although strength and courage in fighting are greatly admired. The pursuit of honour is also internalized in individual characters in ways not easy for us to comprehend. While a desire to earn or to preserve honour in a social conflict is a saga hero’s most notable trait, a character’s conception of what his (or her) honour demands will sometimes strike us as idiosyncratic, exaggerated and humorous. One of the most profoundly complex instances of this is the character Egil Skallagrimsson: his particular
The Duty of Revenge and the Right to Inheritance
The duty of revenge was inherited in the Saga Age, in exactly the same way as claims to inheritance and property, according to a clear pattern of succession. This simplified chart is based on
Grágás
(Grey goose), the law book of the Commonwealth, and Preben Meulengracht Serensen’s
Saga and Society
(1993).
blend of Viking ferocity, greed and sensitivity to the requirements of his honour is closely associated in
Egil’s Saga
with his poetic genius.
But neither an exaggerated sense of Viking honour nor any other social consideration is sufficient to account for his character or that of any other complex saga hero. Egil’s verbal gifts extended, for example, to the composition and interpretation of magic inscriptions. With poetry he could perform magical curses as well as cures, even though usually doing so in a socially defined context, such as avenging some real or imagined slight. The patron of all poets was Odin, who was sometimes known as the one-eyed god. According to
Völuspá
(The Sibyl’s Prophecy) in the
Poetic Edda,
in a stanza that is also quoted in
Snorra-Edda,
Odin gave away his eye in order to drink from the underworld well of the wise god Mimir and thus to acquire wisdom. Egil is not only the beneficiary of Odin’s gifts of poetry and magic, but also to some small degree an embodiment of the god. Odin’s temperament is too vast and his powers too enormous to be accommodated fully in human form of course, nor does the saga suggest the identification of the god with his worshipper, but that mythic presence is a component of Egil’s nature which shapes and qualifies its more purely social dimensions.
In Chapter 55 of
Egil’s Saga
, the hero illustrates something of this mythic nature as he mourns the death in battle of his brother Thorolf, who was fighting for King Athelstan of England. As Egil sits in King Athelstan’s hall he seems to sink into a terrible grief. ‘He wrinkled one eyebrow right down on to his cheek and raised the other up to the roots of his hair. Egil had dark eyes and was swarthy. He refused to drink even when served, but just raised and lowered his eyebrows in turn.’ When the king begins to understand that Egil is depressed because he has no compensation for his brother, he gives him a large arm ring. ‘When Egil sat down, he drew the ring on to his arm, and his brow went back to normal. He put down his sword and helmet and took the drinking-horn that was served to him, and finished it. Then he spoke a verse.’
The mythic component of saga characterization is not easily distinguished from its more rationalized elements, such as the inheritance of family traits, conformity to recognized social and personality types, or even a plausible individual eccentricity. Also the slightly mad, touchy poet may have been a literary type, judging from the protagonists of the other poets’ sagas. The mythic element does not usually involve, as it does with Egil, conformity to aspects of a particular mythic being. Freydis, for example, in
The Saga of the Greenlanders
is a character larger than life and more evil: she brings some of her nature with her from a world of myth and legend rather than from her social or psychological situation. And yet it would be difficult to identify a specific literary prototype illustrated in her character as Odin is for Egil. Perhaps because the important male saga characters are located in significant social and ethical contexts, the mythic component of their characterization is less apparent than is the case with some of the most powerful and memorable women. A fuller and more interesting characterization than Freydis is that of the beautiful, headstrong and wicked Hallgerd, the wife of Gunnar of Hlidarendi in
Njal’s Saga
. Like Freydis, however, Hallgerd comes into the saga with qualities suggestive of an uncanny nature. In the opening scene Hallgerd is playing with some other girls on the floor of the hall, where her father Hoskuld is holding a feast. His half-brother Hrut is the, sitting next to him.
Hoskuld called to her, ‘Come over here.’
She came at once, and he took her by the chin and kissed her. Then she went back.
Then Hoskuld said to Hrut, ‘How do you like this girl? Don’t you find her beautiful?’
Hrut was silent. Hoskuld asked again.
Then Hrut answered, ‘The girl is very beautiful, and many will pay for that. But what I don’t know is how thief’s eyes have come into our family.’
Hoskuld was angry at this, and for a while there was coolness between the brothers.
(
Ch. 1
)
The hint of mythic characterization provides a device for building suspense with a prophecy of future events. It illustrates, too, the extreme importance of dialogue in the narrative art of the sagas, which permits the narrator himself very little leeway in commenting on characters or plot. The characters are not often quoted at length, but their remarks do much of the interpretative and thematic work of the saga.
Another brilliantly conceived female character comes into her story with a prophecy. That is Gudrun Osvifsdottir in
The Saga of the People of Laxardal:
They had a daughter named Gudrun. She was the most beautiful woman ever to have grown up in Iceland, and no less clever than she was good-looking. She took great care with her appearance, so much so that the adornments of other women were considered to be mere child’s play in comparison. She was the shrewdest of women, highly articulate, and generous as well.
(Ch. 32)
When she enters the saga this extraordinary woman has had four dreams during the previous winter. They are accurately interpreted for her by a kinsman of hers, the great chieftain Gest Oddleifsson, who has some ability to see into the future, and they foretell the nature of her four marriages. Conceiving of character as to some extent informed by a pattern of events foreordained affects our response to the plot as it unfolds. The outlines have been foretold, so what remains is to see in detail how that anticipated effect comes about. Gudrun’s force of personality and her complex response to her frustrated love for Kjartan Olafsson, whom she does not marry, lead her into a bloody-mindedness that is reminiscent of another Gudrun, the mythological Gudrun Gjukadottir, the heroine of
The Saga of the Volsungs
and of half a dozen poems in the
Poetic Edda
. From the same myth, however, an even more likely precursor is the Valkyrie Brynhild, who alone of the characters is by nature the equal of the hero Sigurd and yet who is by circumstances deceived into marrying the second-best man Gunnar. In her misery at having been betrayed by the hero she trusted she orders her husband to have Sigurd killed. Brynhild is not the Gudrun of
The Saga of the People of Laxardal
, of course, but a precursor in the world of myth to which the historical figure can be understood as conforming in certain ways. Most saga characters have traits that cannot be explained naturalistically and that remind us of events in the Eddas and the
fornaldarsögur
, although in most large ways this mythic dimension has been displaced by a conception of human behaviour that is entirely plausible in its social context.
Like any great fictional character Gudrun Osvifsdottir is defined and determined by the whole work of which she is one part.
The Saga of the People of Laxardal
has many strong women characters besides Gudrun, including Unn the Deep-minded, the founder of the dynasty in Iceland; Melkorka, the Irish princess and slave, whose illegitimate son Olaf Peacock becomes one of the most illustrious men in Iceland; Olaf’s wife Thorgerd, the daughter of Egil Skallagrimsson; her daughter Thurid; and Olaf Tryggvason’s sister Ingibjorg. In some ways these women are all more effective and reliable than their illustrious, charismatic and inconsiderate husbands and lovers. This too is a pattern one might find in the myth of the Volsungs. The most loving relationships in the saga are between men and women of different generations: mothers and sons, fathers and daughters. And the moral force behind many of the killings also originates with the women.