by Martin Regal
Snorri’s appearance and character are described in one passage (Ch. 15), but the real delineation of his personality progresses as the story unfolds, through his words and actions. His first move in the quest for power is deception. Returning from abroad after a brief but obviously very successful trading journey, he conceals his wealth and manages to trick the family farm out of the hands of his uncle and stepfather Bork without doing anything except waiting for him to make a false move. Bork underestimates Snorri and, blinded by greed into acting stupidly, easily falls prey to his scheme. In the main action of the saga Snorri always acts with caution and circumspection, but also with courage and resolution when that is called for. Slowly and methodically he takes advantage of every occasion to strengthen his position, without taking any unnecessary risks until his authority has been consolidated. One of Snorri’s characteristics is that he always seems to be in full control of his emotions. In this respect he is a clear contrast to his sister Thurid and also to such male characters as Thorarin from Mavahlid and Bjorn the Champion of the Breidavik People. Thorarin is so quiet and peaceful that he is slandered for being unmanly, but when put to the test he demonstrates both courage and fighting skills, to the surprise of everyone, including himself. He is a poet, and in his verse he comments on the violent events he becomes involved in and his own reactions to them. It is his mother who eggs him on, while his wife Aud is even more peaceful than he is. When her hand is cut off as she and other women try to stop a fight,
she even tries to hide the fact. These people are cast as totally innocent and sympathetic victims of an evil plot, and Thorarin reacts as an honourable man must do. However, his only way out of the difficulties is to seek the assistance of chieftains, and he is well connected. All the same, in the end he must leave the scene, and it is interesting to note the detachment with which the saga concludes: it simply states that Thorarin leaves for Norway, and the same year goes from there to the British Isles: ‘Thorarin does not come into this story again.’ Not a word is said about his wife or the other people in Mavahlid. What is of interest in the saga is the power play among chieftains; lesser people can enter the scene for a while, engage interest and be portrayed with great care, but when they have played out their role they are no longer of any concern.
Another character who plays an important role for a while, Bjorn the Champion of the Breidavik People, is also a poet. Stubbornly he persists in his visits to Thurid at Froda, expressing his love for her in beautiful stanzas (see in particular verse 24). He is contemptuous of danger and even death, yet is so brave that he always manages to defend himself even against overwhelming odds. In many respects he is favoured by fortune, but unlike Thorarin he does not mend his ways when he returns from his first outlawry. Repeated attempts to get rid of him prove unsuccessful, and the final encounter even leaves him with Snorri’s life in his hands. However, at that point he realizes that the game is lost, that Snorri is too big for him to handle, and he consents to leave the country for good. He is none the less presented in such a favourable and sympathetic light – and perhaps viewed that way by generations of listeners to tales about him – that he cannot be dismissed entirely even when he has left the front stage. His strength and luck seem to live on in his son Kjartan of Froda river, while the folktale near the end of the saga, where we meet him again, portrays him living on as a leader of people in a mysterious ‘other world’.
Numerous other minor characters are given a good deal of attention in their own right. Snorri’s father-in-law Styr, for instance, merits a vivid description with an underlying reference to the great part he plays in The Saga of the Slayings on the Heath, an earlier work. Episodes which feature in both sagas, such as his dealings with his brother Vermund and the Swedish berserks, are treated more rationally in The Saga of the People of Eyri, with a keener observation of his character and above all a touch of humour.
When Snorri moves from Helgafell for unspecified reasons, we are only given a hint in the final chapter as to how he overcame initial resistance and gained a superior position in his new district. However, he has clearly assumed the role of a major chieftain by Chs. 57–62, where he acts with determination in dealing with a band of robbers in Strandir, and solves the problem effectively, justly and above all memorably. The episode can be read as an exemplary tale about the importance and social role of chieftains, although the text itself draws no such general conclusions. In the course of the saga, therefore, there has been a development towards a well-ordered society in which the strong chieftain, wise and moderate but at the same time determined and unwavering, plays a crucial role as a stabilizing force. While Gisli Sursson’s Saga ends in destruction, the saga about his nephew describes the development of a new order that can be read as a metaphor of the society of law and order about which the Icelanders must have dreamt during the tumultuous times of the thirteenth century (perhaps even earlier), and which they surely must have hoped to have achieved with the treaty they made with the King of Norway in 1262. Such an interpretation would be consistent with the assumption that The Saga of the People of Eyri was written around 1270. As in many other sagas, the conversion to Christianity around AD 1000, as depicted in literature, can be seen as symbolic of another watershed more than two and a half centuries later, when Icelandic chieftains began to accept and seek the protection of royal power. After the conversion, all disturbances of the peace that occur in this saga, whether mythical or social in nature, are settled by the authority of the clever and determined chieftain.
The author of Gisli Sursson’s Saga moulds his material into a well-integrated whole with the apparent main purpose of giving voice to the system of values that inspired Gisli, and therefore concentrates single-mindedly on his tragic fate. The salient characteristic of The Saga of the People of Eyri, on the other hand, is its decentralization of focus. Although it turns out to be coherent when all the strands have been pulled together, its open form of narrative allows different voices expressing varying values to be heard. This structure must have been created by a skilled writer who worked with diverse oral tales and wanted to combine them and make them serve his own purpose without subduing their voices altogether. This saga therefore presents the reader with many voices orchestrated by a detached view of the traditional ideology and the old society. The saga might have been written a decade before Njal’s Saga. It takes a similarly broad view of society, but just as Snorri the Godi is less sentimental and more governed by self-interest than Njal, Snorri’s saga is more detached and even cynical in its attitude to politics and power. Ultimately, Njal’s Saga demonstrates the futility of man’s attempts to govern his affairs rationally, while The Saga of the People of Eyri firmly believes in reason and intelligence as crucial forces in a political game that serves the interests of the strong chieftain at the same time as ensuring peace and balance in society as a whole.
IV. THE SECRET OF THE SAGAS
The sagas in this volume abound in qualities that appeal to the modern reader. The dignity and integrity of the main characters is a strong feature, but they draw a firm line between self-respect and comic self-importance, and are liberally laced with both humour and less transparent dramatic ironies. Ultimately, their success as narratives lies without doubt in the great restraint exerted by the narrators. While they are particular about the concrete details of major events they never tell us too much, always leaving gaps for us to fill and questions to answer. We see this in the descriptions of the most important killings in Gisli Sursson’s Saga, when Vestein and then Thorgrim are secretly murdered. In both cases the accounts are concrete and detailed, yet the focus is so narrow that it blocks out as much as it brings into view. We are merely left to wonder about the nature of the relationship between Thordis and her Norwegian suitors: was it conversational, romantic or overtly sexual? How intimate was the ‘affair’ between Asgerd and Vestein? Was it really an affair or did she only ‘have a crush’ on him? People in the nineteenth and the late twentieth centuries differed widely
in their judgements on these points, but that tells us more about the readers than about the saga. Turning to The Saga of the People of Eyri we see this narrative restraint applied from another angle, where things almost invariably go as Snorri has planned although we are not informed of those plans in advance. We are never told the details of the love affair between Bjorn and Thurid and only gradually and through hints is it confirmed that he is the real father of her son Kjartan. We learn to know the characters through what we hear and see, and only occasionally do they express their feelings openly. We never know what is deepest in their minds, and therefore have to judge them for ourselves, just like people we meet in our everyday lives. This withholding of information has a parallel in the style, in its concreteness, frequent understatement and the wry incisiveness of remarks made in the dialogue.
This introduction has argued that the difference in the age of these sagas – Gisli Sursson’s Saga in all likelihood being a few decades older – is reflected in their respective portrayals of man and society. Such is the objectivity or inscrutability of the method of narration, however, that we can never be absolutely sure how much of the differences between the two sagas stems from differences in the traditional material and above all in the characters of the authors themselves. But on one point it is easy to agree: both these sagas are the work of writers with great imaginative and narrative powers.
NOTES
1. The social is inextricably linked to the religious in this saga, and therefore the founding of the district assembly and the building of a temple in Ch. 4, despite the note of antiquarianism that they strike, have a deep significance for the story, as do the conversion to Christianity and the building of a church at Helgafell, which is briefly described in Ch. 49.
2. While there is no doubt about the importance of the conversion for the development of Icelandic society, the general image of the settlement and its causes as presented in the sagas is more likely to be a creation of the thirteenth century and its political conflicts than an accurate rendering of historical fact. The picture of the harsh rule of Harald Fair-hair in Norway, which was supposed to have driven the settlers of Iceland to seek freedom in a new country, could have been influenced or even have arisen while their descendants many generations on witnessed the consolidation of the Norwegian monarchy in the period during the reign of King Hakon Hakonarson (1217–63). Iceland’s conversion to Christianity, on the other hand, has many affinities with the end of the Icelandic Commonwealth and the acceptance of Norwegian sovereignty in 1262–4; both events signify the coming of a new order, and the second completes what the first had begun. The country’s adaptation to the common ideology of medieval Europe was not complete while it had no king.
3. These significant families were headed by members of the Sturlung family, who amassed great wealth and power in the thirteenth century. From their ranks came great writers, scholars and men of authority and property, such as Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241) and his nephews Sturla Thordarson (1214–84) and Olaf Thordarson (d. 1259). Heroic traditions and saga writing seem to have flourished in the western quarter of Iceland. In these parts the monastery of Helgafell on the Snaefellsnes peninsula and Snorri Sturluson’s farm at Reykholt in Borgarfjord were probably the most important centres of saga writing, although other places certainly played a role.
4. Readers ought to be warned that the text is not very well preserved. The manuscript version translated for this edition dates from the fifteenth century. There are two other versions of medieval origin, one of them only a fragment, the other only preserved in eighteenth-century copies. None of those versions can be traced farther back than the fourteenth century. Gisli Sursson’s Saga is commonly considered to have been composed on the basis of oral traditions around the mid thirteenth century or even a decade or two earlier, but we must accept the fact that the original written version is irretrievably lost. There are significant differences between the two main versions, especially in the introductory section, and scholars do not agree which is a better representative of the first, hypothetical written version. It is most likely that both have been altered by scribes who left their individual imprint on the new versions, and these changes sometimes affect the interpretation of important events.
5. When Gisli Sursson’s Saga was written the Icelanders had been Christian for more than two centuries, and there is no reason to believe that the author was not a good Christian. The events of the saga take place in pagan times, but in the final chapter we are told that Gisli’s and Vestein’s widows are baptized and go on a pilgrimage. However, the saga does not focus on religious issues, and no conflict can be detected between Christian and pagan ethics. Indeed, it is only in some of the stanzas that any influence from religious literature can be found.
6. The term ‘eddic’ is used of the poetry found in the Elder Edda or Poetic Edda, an Icelandic collection of narrative poems about pagan gods and legendary heroes written in the thirteenth century. Most of the poems derive from oral tradition.
7. Peter Foote, ‘An Essay on the Saga of Gisli and its Icelandic Back-ground’, in The Saga of Gisli, trans. George Johnston (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, University of Toronto Press, 1963) pp. 93–134. Quotation on p. 108.
8. The Saga of the People of Eyri has been somewhat better preserved than Gisli Sursson’s Saga, although the text also has to be based on versions that can be dated to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These are preserved in incomplete vellum manuscripts or fragments, but what is lacking can be filled in with texts from much later paper copies. There do not seem to be any significant variations in content among these versions, although a chapter is lacking in the latest one. On the other hand, there is considerable variation in the wording, and we just do not have access to the text as it was originally phrased on vellum in the second half of the thirteenth century.
9. The traditionally accepted name of the saga is therefore a misnomer, and ‘The Saga of the People of Thorsnes’ would be more appropriate.
10. Modern scholarship has concluded that there were no buildings in Iceland in pagan times that functioned exclusively as temples; rather, big halls at the farms of godis were temporarily hallowed for sacrificial feasts. Their size could have been influenced by the intention to use them for this purpose, however. The description of the temple is probably based on literary sources, which in turn seem to be reconstructions modelled on church buildings. It is certain that there was a local assembly at Thorsnes, but it is more doubtful whether it was established as early as in the lifetime of Thorolf Moster-beard.
11. Roland Barthes, ‘L’effet de réel’, Communications, 11 (1968), pp. 84–9.
Further Reading
GENERAL
Andersson, Theodore M., The Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins: A Historical Survey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964).
—, The Icelandic Family Saga: An Analytic Reading (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).
The Book of Settlements (Landnámabók), trans. Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1972).
Byock, Jesse L., Feud in the Icelandic Saga (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
—, Medieval Iceland: Society, Sagas, and Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Clover, Carol J., The Medieval Saga (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).
—, and John Lindow (eds.), Old Norse–Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide, Islandica xlv (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
Hallberg, Peter, The Icelandic Saga, trans. Paul Schach (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962).
Hastrup, Kirsten, Culture and History in Medieval Iceland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
Íslendingabók (The Book of the Icelanders), trans. Halldór Hermannson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1930).
Jesch, Judith, Women in the Viking Age (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1992).
Jochens, Jenny, Women in Old Norse Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
Ker, W. P., Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature, 2nd edn. (London, 1908; rpt. New York: Dover, 1957).
Kristjánsson, Jonas, Eddas and Sagas: Iceland’s Medieval Literature, trans. Peter Foote, 3rd edn (Reykjavik: Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag, 1997).