It occurred to me just today that I owe you a saga reading report. I read one from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, as is my custom, during the Elk Horn Iowa event, and I forgot to tell you about it. This one was ‘The Saga of the People of Floi’ (Flóamanna saga). It’s not an example of high saga art, but it does not lack for interesting moments.

Although (like so many sagas) it starts with an overview of several generations of genealogy, its unquestioned hero is a man with the complex name of Thorgil Scar-leg’s-stepson (Ørrabeinsstjúps). (Among his ancestors is Aslaug, wife of Ragnar Lodbrok, whom fans of the Vikings TV series will recall). Thorgils satisfies the requirements for young saga heroes by going abroad to have adventures which are suspiciously similar to the adventures of other saga heroes (though at one point a man named Olmod the Old Karrason shows up, whom you may recall as a character in my novel The Year of the Warrior. This is the only non-Heimskringla reference to Olmod I’ve ever seen).

Then, having won the daughter of a king of Ireland as a wife, Thorgils returns in triumph to his home in Iceland. (The author has him generously bestow this Irish wife on a friend, to clear the deck for another wife, probably more historical.) There’s also an intriguing incident involving a “tub-duel,” where two men get into a large tub and fight with clubs – though Thorgils himself brings a sword, which is decisive if not very sporting.

We are informed that Thorgils was an early convert to Christianity, and later followed Erik the Red to the new Greenland colony. The stories involving Thorgils’ faith smell a little off to me, especially one where, during his Greenland voyage, Thor appears to him and demands a sacrifice. Thorgils refuses. Then he realizes that he has an ox that belongs to Thor on board, and so he throws it overboard. (That strikes me as an account of an actual maritime sacrifice, revised in spin doctor mode to satisfy a Christian audience.)

His ship is wrecked in Greenland, and he and his party suffer greatly before they can get help from other settlers. When Thorgils’ wife dies leaving him with a baby boy, he performs an action that has endeared him to feminist saga scholars ever since (Jane Smiley references it in The Greenlanders): he cuts his nipple, squeezing out first blood, then serum, then milk. And so he nurses his own son, to whom (we are told) he was particularly devoted thereafter.

In the end he can’t get along with Erik the Red (understandably), and returns to Iceland, dying a bitter and poor old man.

The Saga of the People of Floi is comparable to the Saga of Egil Skalagrimsson in telling a lively story about an unpleasant man. But it lacks the artistry of that work (which was very likely written by Snorri Sturlusson himself). Nevertheless, it’s both intriguing and highly memorable.