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.
VII. A STURLUNG AGE ANATOMY OF POWER
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:
... established settlements for his crew and set up a large farm by the cove Hofsvog which he called Hofstadir. There he had a temple built, and it was a sizeable building, with a door on the side-wall near the gable. The high-seat pillars were placed inside the door, and nails, that were called holy nails, were driven into them. Beyond that point, the temple was a sanctuary. At the inner end there was a structure similar to the choir in churches nowadays and there was a raised platform in the middle of the floor like an altar, where a ring weighing twenty ounces and fashioned without a join was placed, and all oaths had to be sworn on this ring. It also had to be worn by the temple priest at all public gatherings. A sacrificial bowl was placed on the platform and in it a sacrificial twig – like a priest’s aspergillum – which was used to sprinkle blood from the bowl. This blood, which was called sacrificial blood, was the blood of live animals offered to the gods. The gods were placed around the platform in the choir-like structure within the temple. All farmers had to pay a toll to the temple and they were obliged to support the temple godi in all his campaigns, just as thingmen are now obliged to do for their chieftain. The temple godi was responsible for the upkeep of the temple and ensuring it was maintained properly, as well as for holding sacrificial feasts in it.
(Ch. 4)
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.
VIII. THE WORLD OF THE SAGAS
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, whi
ch 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.
The Sagas of the Icelanders Page 6