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. Continue reading Laxdaela Saga