One of the pleasures of owning a Kindle, for the Viking enthusiast, is the ability it gives you to own a whole saga library and carry it around with you in a small package. One of the sagas I keep snug in my device is the marvelous Laxdæla Saga. In preparation for my trip to Høstfest in Minot, I thought I’d re-read it, because it’s a remarkable work, full of points of interest.

I should have remembered this, but Laxdæla Saga includes a proverb we still use today: “…Trefill saw that better was one crow in the hand than two in the wood.” I don’t know if this is the source of the English saying, but it wouldn’t surprise me. There’s another proverb I like too, less well known: “The counsel of fools is the more dangerous, the more of them there are.”

Laxdæla is often called a woman’s saga, because the central character is a woman, and a lot of business centers on women’s clothing and ornaments. I guess many scholars think it was written by a woman, and I’ll admit that’s not out of the question.

That central female character is Gudrun Osvifsdatter, a woman of remarkable beauty and force of personality, who gets married several times—to almost every eligible man around except for the one she loves. Although, as you’d expect in a saga, the story starts a couple generations before her birth, and continues through her old age, it’s her tragic love for a man named Kjartan Olafsson that forms the center of the story (you may remember them and their family from a brief appearance in my novel West Oversea).

It might be called a love story, but it’s a love story in the old style, born in a world where romantic love was not considered the jewel of life and a justification for most any kind of behavior, but was instead seen as a sort of madness which interferes with the normal business (and peace) of the family and community.

Kjartan tells Gudrun that he wants to voyage abroad to see a bit of the world before settling down to marry (it’s pretty much obligatory for all saga heroes to do this. In every case, he meets some king—usually whoever’s in charge of Norway at the time—becomes the king’s very favorite person in the world, and is offered high honors and office if he’ll stay with him. The young Icelander always refuses with thanks, saying he must return to his father’s farm). Gudrun at first demands to come along. When Kjartan won’t hear of that, she insists that he come back to her within three years.

Unfortunately, it’s Olaf Trygvesson (whom you’ll remember from The Year of the Warrior) ruling in Norway at the time, and he makes Kjartan a hostage until all Icelanders agree to convert to Christianity. This keeps him away past the deadline, and his best friend and cousin Bolli, otherwise an admirable guy, takes the opportunity to woo Gudrun himself, setting the stage for Kjartan’s death, his own, and an ongoing feud.

The most wonderful thing about Laxdæla Saga is that the characters are vivid, complex, and fascinating, but we almost never get a look into their thoughts. We know them purely from their actions, which often surprise us, but seem nevertheless believable.

That’s epitomized in a famous passage toward the end, when Gudrun’s son asks her which of her several husbands she loved best.

“Then Gudrun said, ‘To him I was worst whom I loved best.’”