The Sagas of the Icelanders

by Smilely, Jane

  Such an apparently painstaking effort at recording variant accounts, citing the evidence of a place-name and tracing the relationship between a distant historical past and the ‘present time’ is a characteristic feature of saga style, an aspect of a narrative art which aspires to counterfeit reality. But the question also arises of the extent to which this style reflects an intellectual feature of the saga’s method as history, as it does in Snorri’s kings’ sagas. The question itself may be seeking a distinction where none existed when the sagas were being written. The Íslendinga sögur create fictional worlds

  * * *

  An occasional verse (lawavisa) from Chapter 58 of Egil’s Saga

  The technical features of the typical drdttkvatt stanza are illustrated in this verse, which is by Egil Skallagrimsson. It has eight lines (visuori), each with six syllables. The lines are rhymed in three ways: alliteration, half-rhyme and full-rhyme.

  The sounds represented with bold letters are in alliteration (stuiluri). There are two alliterating sounds (stuðlar) in the odd lines and one (the ‘head letter’ or hofudstafur) that comes at the start of the even lines: stórt, stáli and stafnkvígs (the höfufistafur) in lines 1–2. The sounds represented with italics are internal rhyme. They are either half-rhyme (skothending) as in þél and stál i or full rhyme (adalhending) as in stafnkvígs and jafnan.

  þél högr stórt fyr stál i

  With its chisel of snow, the headwind,

  stafnkvigs á veg jafnan

  scourge of the mast, mightily

  út með éla meitli

  hones its file by the prow

  andær jötunn vandar

  on the path that my sea-bull treads.

  en svalbúinn sel ju

  In gusts of wind, that chillful

  sverfr etrar vanr peiri

  destroyer of timber planes down

  Gestils álft með gustum

  the planks before the head

  gandr of stál fyr brand i.

  of my sea-king’s swan.

  The greatest difficulty in understanding dróttkvardi, at least for the beginner, may be its departure from conventional prose word order. For example, the logical order of the words in this verse would be this: Andarrjotunn vandar hSggr stórt pelfyr stdli medela meitliútdjafnan veg stafnkvigs, ensvalbúinn seliju gandr sverfr eirar vanr of stál peiri Gestilsdlft med gustum fyr brandi. To convey some idea of the challenge faced by the translator of such verse, here is a very literal and somewhat nonsensical rendering of the rearranged words:

  ‘The opposite-rowing giant of the mast strikes hard, a file before the prow, with a chisel of sudden hail out on the smooth road of the young prow bull, and a cold wolf of wood files mercilessly with it about the prow of Gestil’s swan with gusts before the decorated prow board.’

  What makes this verse far from nonsensical in the original language is its use of a form of metaphor called kenning. Kennings consist of two parts: one which calls a thing by the name of something that it is not and then a second part which modifies the first in such a way as to make it poetically appropriate. Here ‘giant’ (or ‘enemy’) is one half of a kenning for ‘wind’, a thing that a giant is not. But when ‘of the mast’ is added to ‘enemy’, ‘enemy of the mast’ becomes a good metaphor for ‘wind’. Going through the rearranged phrases of this verse we might paraphrase it:

  jötunn vandar = giant (enemy) of the mast = wind; andarr = rowing in opposition: wind rowing in opposition = headwind

  pelboggurstórt = a file strikes hard

  fyr stdli = before the bow stem

  md meitli = with a chisel; éla = of sudden hail: a chisel of sudden hail = a storm

  út á jafnan veg = out on the smooth road

  stafnkvígs = prow + young bull’s; young prow bull’s = ship’s: ship’s smooth road = the sea

  en svalbúinn = and a coldly dressed

  gandr = wolf (enemy); selju = wood (of which the ship is made): enemy of wood = wind

  sverfr eirar vanr = files without mercy

  of stál peiri = around the prow with it (i.e. pél, the file)

  Gestilsdlft = Gestil’s (a sea king’s) swan = ship

  medgustumfyrbrandi = with gusts of wind before the decorated prow board

  * * *

  which are largely consistent with those of Íslendingabók and Landnámabók, including the settlement of Iceland, the establishment of a national government, the testing of its laws and constitution, the discovery of Greenland and North merica and the conversion to Christianity. Many of those great events can be confirmed by archaeology and the testimony of historical writing in other languages. By and large they must have happened more or less as they are said to happen in the fictional worlds of the sagas. They constitute a story, a national myth, within which the more local and detailed stories of the individual Íslendinga sögur take shape.

  IV. THE AMERICAN ADVENTURE

  For readers interested in North America, few historical events in the sagas arouse greater curiosity than do the Icelandic settlement of Greenland and the discovery of America. The settlements in Greenland lasted for about 500 years, beginning with Eirik the Red’s arrival from Iceland in 985–6. They perished by gradual stages in the fifteenth century, apparently on account of increasingly cold weather and the difficulties of sailing in ice-filled waters to and from Iceland and Norway. Archaeologists have excavated the remains and even the earliest of them are as impressive as Icelandic sites of the same period. A movement is now under way to reconstruct some of the Viking Age buildings in Greenland, as has been done in Newfoundland and, of course, Iceland. In the Saga Age, Greenland was an independent country with a population at the height of its prosperity of about 4,000. It had an annual national assembly like Iceland’s at a place called Gardar. An extremely interesting and well-told episode in The Saga of the Sworn Brothers takes place at the assembly at Gardar. Six other Íslendinga sögur have episodes set in Greenland.

  The story of the discovery and exploration of America is told in two works, Eirik the Red’s Saga and the shorter Saga of the Greenlanders. These differ from each other in a number of details, Eirik the Red’s Saga agreeing more frequently with other written sources, such as Heimskringla. Neither work is among the best sagas, and yet in their blending of myth and historical tradition they are typical of the genre. Modern archaeology, especially the work of Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad in the 1960s at L’Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland, has confirmed that explorers from Greenland and Iceland spent time in North America and constructed buildings of the sort found in Iceland. The Saga of the Greenlanders attributes the first sighting of America to a merchant named Bjarni Herjolfsson, who in about 985 went off course on his way to Greenland, whereas Eirik the Red’s Saga gives the credit to Eirik the Red’s son Leif, who made the discovery through a similar accident about 1000. Altogether, The Saga of the Greenlanders describes six trips to America, including Bjarni’s sighting and an extensive expedition by Leif. Eirik the Red’s Saga mentions only three, the most thorough of which was made by Thorfinn Karlsefni, a very able Icelandic merchant who also figures importantly in The Saga of the Greenlanders.

  The sagas describe three different landscapes from north to south along the American coast, Helluland (Stone slab land, probably southern Baffin Island or northern Labrador), Markland (Forest land, southern Labrador) and Vínland (Vine land, possibly the St Lawrence Valley, but more likely the coast of New England). Written evidence indicates that the Greenlanders maintained a connection with Markland as a source of timber until at least the fourteenth century. With Vinland, however, contact seems to have been lost after the explorations of Leif and Karlsefni in the early eleventh century. About the country we know very little with precision, although we do know that it was not an invention of the two sagas. Well before they were written Vinland was mentioned by Ari in Íslendingabók and even earlier by Adam of Bremen in his History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen of about 1075. Both The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the
Red’s Saga describe a land that has wine grapes, maples and self-sown grain (probably wild rice). They report that the weather in Vinland was warm enough for cattle to graze outside all winter, pointing to both a southerly location in New England or Long Island and a milder overall temperature than exists today. (There is much other evidence, including the demise of the settlements in Greenland, that the northern hemisphere experienced a radical cooling off in the fourteenth century.) The accounts of Vinland include descriptions of a fierce native population, whom the sagas call Skraeling jar (the origin of this word is obscure: it may be related to words meaning ‘wrinkle’ or ‘shrink’, possibly referring to the treatment of animal skins; it is translated in this edition as ‘natives’). The same word is used of the natives of Greenland, who must have been a quite different people.

  The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red’s Saga blend to an equal extent the navigational and geographical accuracy for which they are famous with stories of magic and the supernatural. Both employ all of the standard authenticating techniques of the Íslendinga sögur, together with other features of saga style. Both are associated with King Olaf Tryggvason and the conversion of Greenland to Christianity. Leif Eiriksson, in fact, had reluctantly accepted from the king the difficult duty of converting Greenland when he took the voyage that resulted in his lucky discovery of Vinland. His father Eirik was a hard-bitten old Viking, who was banished from Iceland and who resented Christianity. He had several children, the most memorable of whom – aside from Leif – was an illegitimate daughter named Freydis. She is the epitome of evil in The Saga of the Greenlanders, being responsible for killing a number of her fellow explorers and for personally taking an axe to five women whom her men had refused to kill. Somewhat more benignly but no less mythically, in Eirik the Red’s Saga she frightens off an attacking band of natives by running after them, even though she is pregnant, and then, when surrounded by them, picking up a sword from a dead Greenlander, pulling one of her breasts out of her clothing and slapping it with the naked sword. The natives were terrified at the sight and ran to their boats and rowed away. Almost as good a woman as Freydis was evil, Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir was the wife of Thorfinn Karlsefni and the mother of Snorri, the first person of European ancestry to be born in America. She has been described as the true central character of these sagas. After a pilgrimage to Rome, she lived out her life as an anchoress in Iceland, and from her were descended several of the early bishops of Iceland. What precisely these extreme examples of good and evil in the Vinland sagas, as well as other instances of magic and the paranormal, might have to do with the coming of Christianity to the north, the saga composer (as usual) does not tell us.

  V. A FICTION OF SOCIAL REALISM

  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.