Örnólfur Thorsson

The prose literature of medieval Iceland is a great world treasure - elaborate, various, strange, profound, and as eternally current as any of the other great literary treasures - the Homeric epics, Dante's Divine Comedy, the works of William Shakespeare or of any modern writer you could name. Mysteries surround these stories - how were they composed and by whom? what were the motives of the authors? Why were they written in prose when the currency of medieval literature was poetry? How did show more their contemporaries understand them - did they even read them, or did they hear them read aloud? But the questions fall away as we read the sagas and tales themselves. They are written with such immediacy and forthrightness and they concern such basic human dilemmas that for the most part they are readily accessible and seductive. Reading one creates the appetite for another and another. In the present volume, Penguin has drawn upon the newly translated and edited Complete Sagas of Icelanders to offer the English-speaking reader a rich selection of Icelandic prose. Long and short, complex and simple, fantastic and realistic - there is a taste of everything here, an abundant introduction to a world a thousand years separated from ours, both intensely familiar and intensely strange. show less

This book was a monster. Not including the index and so on, 724 pages. The introduction/preface/whatever section alone was 60-odd pages. Woof.

Sagas are very different from a lot of other Olde Timey literature (and I’ve read my fair share) because it’s not like the Iliad or King Arthur or anything like that: they’re not about semi-divine heroes and kings and larger-than-life characters. Yeah there are some kings, but they’re mostly supporting cast. Mostly we hear about farmers show more who’ve done well for themselves. Much more relatable people than Achilles or Lancelot. And a lot of the action springs from simple, everyday misunderstandings. In that way the sagas are a lot closer to home than other epics could ever be. However… these everyday people do have a very different attitude toward casual murder. i.e. “Olvir drank too much ale at the feast; this made Egil angry so he took his sword and stabbed him in the belly until it came out his back. But no one liked Olvir much anyway.” Stuff like that. And believe me, that paraphrasing is not as far off as you may think. You have to remember this is a people whose idea of a fun summer vacation was to sail to other countries, burn things, steal things, and kill anyone who tried to stop them.

Some of it is mundane, “why did they bother writing this down?” stuff, but in the midst of the intertangled webs of kinship and allegiances and blood-feuds of people named Thordis, Thorbjorn, Thorstein, Thorkel, and so forth (Thor was a popular god; ‘Thor’ becomes a popular name prefix – how many Marys and Marias are there? And isn’t Mohammed the most popular name on earth?), which can be tough to keep straight, there are many humorous gems. There’s a bit where this guy is attacked by “two brothers who were both named Ulf.” WHAT?!?! “Hi! I’m Ulf, and this is my brother, Ulf.”

Some of these folks are quite well traveled. There’s a guy named Bolli who goes all the way to Constantinople and gets work burning things and killing things on behalf of the emperor (It’s ok if you do it for a politician). And naturally I was interested to read the accounts of the first trips to the Americas and meeting the ‘skraelings’ (what they called the Native Americans). Everyone knows Leif Eirikson, but his sister Freydis? She was a bit of a maniac. But a badass maniac – a fight went down and she was being pursued by a group of natives so she took her shirt off and started waving a sword around. The Native Americans decided to leave her alone. She also started some trouble between the two factions of her own expedition and, when none of her men would kill the five women that were in the other faction, she grabbed an axe and took them all out herself.

Another thing that I found surprising was how structured and detailed their legal code was. It’s tempting to think of them as a bunch of rowdy Vikings who kinda just did whatever they felt like, but no. They brought suits and accusations, had courts, assemblies, sentences and fines, the whole deal. To be totally honest, though, most of their legal proceedings centered around when it was acceptable to kill someone and who you had to pay off afterwards. Frankly I’m kind of amazed anyone’s been left standing. An interesting cultural insight all around. show less

My thoughts on the individual sagas as I read through:

Egil's saga: Egil is a massive jerk, but maybe that's part of the point. Highlights are his drunken 3-year-old shenanigans and vomiting on a guy who insulted him. I've read this before as a standalone saga.

Vatnsdal saga: This starts off with a far more conventionally heroic hero. Knowing that these sagas are quasi-historical however, I can't help but wonder whether the main family protecting their community from practitioners of show more "witchcraft" might be a justification for all the people they murdered in order to stay in power. Conspiracy!

Laxardal Saga: Supposedly the crown jewel of Icelandic literature. Slow to get going. Makes me think twice about crossing Icelandic women - you want to divorce her for wearing breeches? Be prepared for her to wear breeches as she comes to stab you in bed! The main action of the story is an unfortunate feud which develops between foster-brothers surrounding a marriage. We also get Snorri the Godi who I'm pretty sure features in other sagas - he's a bit of a wily one!

Bolli Bollasons Tale: Some extra content focusing on one of the main characters from the above saga. A short episode detailing Bolli's trip to the north and the trouble he got into.

...okay I didn't get around to reviewing every tale, but I did read them all. Great stuff, but I'm all saga'd out for a while now! show less

Pretty much the first thing that struck me about these sagas is how immediately accessible they are – I have read medieval texts before (even if not very many), and usually (i.e., unless one happens to be a medievalist) it takes a lengthy introduction and extensive notes for any modern-day reader to even get the point of any tale from that period, not to mention any deeper significance or wider-ranging connotations. Not that one should expect a penetrating exploration of the conditio show more humana from those tales, but they are rousing good read, and I doubt there are many medieval texts out there of which one can say that.

The Penguin edition which I read, titled The Sagas of the Icelanders, does have a lengthy introduction that covers all kinds of aspects of Icelandic sagas: their historical context, the role they played in the society of their time, the poets and their audience, it even offers an analysis of various formal elements commonly found in those tales. It is all extremely helpful, and without a doubt did considerably enrich my reading experience of the sagas – but you could just as well simply skip all the introductory stuff and jump right into the tales themselves, and would likely enjoy them just as much as I did after dutifully having made my way through all the editorial material. This is no small feat, for texts that are almost a thousand years old to be able to grip a twenty-first century reader on such a basic, simply-enjoying-the-story level.

Which is most emphatically not to say, however, that those sagas read like contemporary texts. I feel a bit uncertain about the translations – with texts this old I am always somewhat worried that the translators might sacrifice precision to readability, creating a false sense of familiarity in a misguided attempt to make an ancient text accessible to a modern-day reader and producing what is effectively a streamlined version of the original. Not being particularly proficient in Old Norse, I really cannot say whether this is the case here, but my entirely subjective and completely uninformed impression was that the translators of the Penguin edition did a pretty good job at making the sagas immensely readable while still retaining their essential strangeness to a reader in the early twenty-first century.

The area where this strangeness made itself felt most keenly (for me at least) was neither in the matter-of-fact attitude towards supernatural occurrences that most of these tales show (with the extent of the supernatural element varying greatly, from the simple use of runes for healing to outright visions of ghosts and the battling against mages that would not be out of place in any Sword & Sorcery tale) nor in the sometimes weird customs of the Northlanders (I remember a particularly large WTF moment when someone attempted to kill his house guest because he had drank too much of his host’s ale, and nobody seemed to think that the least bit excessive), but in the way subjectivity is treated throughout all of this tale – or rather, is not treated at all, as subjectivity is something does not really happen here.

There is no interiority to the characters in these sagas, no inner space in which their thoughts and emotions could resound, no psychological motivations, in fact no psychology at all. The people the Icelandic sagas tell of are pure exteriority – we get to know their actions, but never their thoughts or feelings, everything is told from a strict outside perspective. Possibly it is that which gives events in the sagas their distinctive air of inevitability, of its protagonists marching down a prescribed road with unwavering fatalism – a fatalism, however, that is not all perceived as tragic, at least not by the protagonists of the tales; it might be very different for a listener / reader who in a way has to supply the emotions here, using the sagas as some kind of projection surface.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that the characters in these tales are flat or two-dimensional just because they are lacking an inner space – they emphatically are not; quite to the contrary, many of them are very memorable and multifaceted. They derive their plasticity from other sources, their personalities do not resonate in an inner, but an outside space, namely that of their interpersonal relationships. The Icelanders in these sagas appear to define themselves mostly by way of their relation to other people – their family, their clan, their neighbours. It is their actions and interactions that give them resonance, seeing themselves reflected in others rather than reflecting on themselves like a more contemporary subjectivity would.

It is easy to see how for a subject that defines itself by how it relates and appears to other, fame would play an important role, and by extension how the sagas themselves would serve that purpose. Even with all the supernatural elements, the sagas at their core are historical writings, chronicles that serve the remembrance and propagation of the names of Iceland’s famous men. This also gives them a slighty metafictional slant, an underlying consciousness that the deeds reported are already destined to become part of a saga even as they unfolding.

This selection from Penguin is missing what seems to be considered as the best of the sagas, Njal’s Saga, but otherwise presents a very generous selection, containing among famous ones like Eigil’s Saga and the Vinland Sagas also some lesser-known ones and several short tales; all presented in texts that appear to be excellent translations from authoritative sources with an extensive introduction and the occasional footnote where it is necessary. The only issue I had was the weird placement of maps and genealogical tables right in the middle of text (rather than at paragraph breaks) but that is just a minor distraction from an overall very much recommended edition. show less