Tag Archives: Icelandic sagas

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Finnbogi the Mighty’

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It is my custom sometimes, during Viking events, to read sagas from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders instead of something off my Fire device, as if that made me more historically authentic. This past weekend, at the iFest in St. Paul, I read The Saga of Finnbogi the Mighty. Finnbogi’s Saga is not one of the great ones, but it does (as Sherlock Holmes used to say) present certain points of interest.

All the sagas tend to settle into what I would call tropes (scholars no doubt have a better term for them). But the later sagas become both implausible and predictable. Finnbogi’s Saga contains a number of boilerplate elements, combined with what seem to be genuine family anecdotes.

We begin in fairy tale (or even mythological) mode with the familiar theme of the abandoned child. The hero’s father, miffed at his wife, orders her to “expose” their next baby (that means to leave the child out on a hillside for wild animals to kill; it was a common choice for deformed babies or ones whose parents couldn’t afford to raise them). Sorrowfully she does so, building a sort of hollow cairn on a scree-covered hill and leaving the child inside. Of course a poor couple discover him and raise him as their own. They name him “Urdacott” (Scree-cat). However, no one believes this strong and handsome baby could be theirs – from the beginning people suspect who the real father is. Eventually, the real father’s brother convinces him to accept the boy. Later on, Urdacott is fortunate enough to rescue a shipwrecked Norwegian merchant who – when he later dies – leaves both his wealth and his name – Finnbogi – to the boy.

Then young Finnbogi, like most saga heroes, sails off to Norway (this is in the time of Jarl Haakon), proves his strength and courage in various fantastic adventures, and gains the jarl’s favor along with more wealth. After that he goes home to Iceland, where his exploits gradually become more prosaic. He gets involved in a long feud but is eventually reconciled with his enemies.

An intriguing element here is that Finnbogi’s final feud is also dealt with in another saga, Vatnsdal’s Saga. Some scholars believe it was composed in response to Finnbogi’s negative portrayal in that story.

There was a scene that amused me in the section describing Finnbogi’s time in Norway. In one adventure, Finnbogi comes up against a dangerous bear that’s been marauding in a certain neighborhood. The local residents begin their countermeasures with a legal proceeding:

So it came about that Bard called together an assembly, outlawed the bear, and placed a price on his head.

The bear is in fact treated as semi-human. It would be fun to draw the conclusion that people in those days thought of bears as a wilder kind of human being, but I suspect it’s just a narrative device.

I also noticed that in a couple cases, over the course of the feuding, people are killed, but nobody bothers to prosecute for homicide, because the victims didn’t have enough status to make it worth anyone’s trouble. A reminder that the majesty of the law becomes injustice when everyone isn’t equal in its sight.

Not a great saga, The Saga of Finnbogi the Mighty is nonetheless intriguing in many ways.

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Where do legends come from?

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Robin Hood on a horse, ca. 1475. Wikimedia Commons.

As you may recall, I am peripherally involved in the world of Viking scholarship – not as a real researcher, but as a lowly translator. I am also, of course, a creator of historical fantasy, which means I’ve had to learn a few things. Not as much as I think I’ve learned, of course, but a few things. And, of course, I have ideas.

Here’s one of them.

The scholarly controversy over how the Icelandic historical sagas should be understood, as I’ve often mentioned, is about how much we can believe of what the sagas tell us. Many historians won’t use the sagas at all, because they were written after a period of oral transmission. And a lot of historians are very suspicious of oral tradition.

For instance, I often come across a statement like this: “Historians disagree whether King Harald Fairhair of Norway ever actually existed.” They mention that there are no clear mentions of him anywhere except in the sagas.

For some historians, in fact, it seems that a mention in a saga is proof of non-existence.

Which makes no sense to me.

One comes across the same argument with figures like King Arthur and Robin Hood. “There are legends about these characters,” the historians say. “Therefore, we’re sure they never existed.”

“Why?” Walker screams.

Historians seem to think that legends spring out of the human mind, ex nihilo. As atheists think the universe was created – by nobody, out of nothing.

It makes more sense to me that legends probably come from something. Perhaps something trivial, perhaps they happened to a different historical character – but they came from something.

What historians don’t seem to remember is that in this real world they write about, actual things do happen. Sometimes they’re quite exciting things. People remember them, and repeat them to others.

At the Green Bay Viking festival, a friend told me a story about building a working guillotine on commission, and nearly chopping his hand off. I’ve been retelling that story ever since.

It happened. Interesting things do happen in real life.

Why should the default explanation for a good story be that somebody just made it up?

Reading

Njal’s saga, on the ground

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Another post in between reviews. I searched for “Icelandic Sagas” on YouTube and came up with this video by Dr. Matthew Roby of the University of Iceland. I’ve posted one of his other videos, about Egil’s Saga, here before. What I like about these videos is that he describes the action on the actual historical sites.

This one is about Njal’s Saga, which may be the greatest of the genre. It certainly deserves the attention it’s gotten.

I’m bemused by the Icelandic pronunciations. I was never aware before that Icelandic words ending in “L” get a “K” sound added. That’s just the sort of thing you’d expect from the Icelanders, who do their best – it seems to me – to make their language as unlearnable as possible.

This situation creates a problem for people like me, who produce what is (laughingly, in my case) known as “popular” literature. I’ve maintained the custom of including a character list in my Erling novels. In that list, I include my suggested pronunciations. These pronunciations, you may have noted, bear no resemblance to how Dr. Roby pronounces them.

It’s essentially an insoluble problem from my point of view. If I went to the trouble of learning how to pronounce Old Norse as Dr. Roby does (something I’m not inclined to do in my limited time), I’d be offering pronunciations that a) nobody would bother with, b) listeners would not understand, and c) are not even precisely what the Vikings used, as scholars admit the language has changed somewhat in the last thousand years.

So I give my suggested pronunciations, based (more or less) on contemporary Norwegian speech. This is mostly the way English-speaking scholars pronounce them in lectures, and they’re more or less comprehensible to other English speakers.

It’s a makeshift.

So much of fiction is a makeshift.

So much of life is a makeshift too, if it comes to that.

Fiction, Reviews

Saga reading report: ‘The Saga of Hord and the People of Holm’

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Southeast across Hvalfjörður toward the mountains north of Þingvellir (left) and Esja (right), November 21 09:00 Iceland, November 2007 Photo by me user debivort (or friend, with permission given to upload and license freely). CC BY-SA 3.0.

Back to the sagas, from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. Today’s report is on “The Saga of Hord and the People of Holm.” This is one I’d never heard of – perhaps because it’s so perfectly typical of the form that it doesn’t stand out a lot. This is a saga of which we only have late copies, and it certainly shows the effects of generations of artistic embroidery.

Hord Grimkelsson is a young man of good family, living in the neighborhood of present-day Reykjavik. We’re told that he was a late bloomer in terms of his development, but eventually he grew into the kind of tall, strong, handsome figure a saga demands. He develops a close relationship with his foster-brother, who is his constant companion to the end. And he has a sister with a strange background – rejected by her father, forced to live with beggars for a while, then finally returned to her own family with a chip on her shoulder. She will impact the story eventually, in a bloody way.

Eventually, Hord joins a merchant expedition. One interesting element of the story is an encounter Hord’s friend Geir has in Bergen, Norway (which did not actually exist as a town, I’m pretty sure, at that time). He runs into one of King Harald Greycloak’s men, who tries to steal his vararfeldir cloak (vararfeldir was a woolen cloth with short threads woven through the fabric, to produce a fleecy appearance). Defending himself, Geir kills the king’s man, which forces the whole crew of Icelanders to flee to Gotland, where Hord marries the jarl’s daughter. (This sounds like a romantic invention, but may actually have been true, as the wife returns to Iceland with him and bears his sons.)

What’s interesting about this cloak incident is that it seems to be inspired by a famous episode in Heimskringla, the kings’ sagas – a much more genial anecdote explaining King Harald’s nickname. In that story, the king himself chats with an Icelandic merchant, who complains that no one is buying his wool cloaks. The king then asks him to give him one of them. He wears it, and of course it becomes the height of fashion. The merchant is then able to sell off his whole stock at a good profit.

In any case, Hord and his companions finally return to Iceland, where he proceeds to live prosperously for some years, until he gets involved in a feud. His enemies use witchcraft to ruin his luck, and he and his household end up holding out on an island in the Hvalfjord, until their final violent end.

Some sagas, such as Egil’s and Grettir’s, seem to be written by authors with enough honesty, or understanding of human nature, to admit that their heroes are partly responsible for their own tragedies. But more commonly, the hero is portrayed as pretty much blameless, victim to either fate or witchcraft, the only things that could overcome so outstanding a man. That’s how I read “The Saga of Hord.” The unvarnished record looks pretty ugly – to survive on a desolate island, Hord and his people steal valuable supplies and foodstuffs from the people in the area – and this is in a marginal economy. Hunting Hord down was a matter of survival for his victims.

Sagas are commonly loaded with characters, many of whom come complete with genealogies. This makes it hard for English readers to keep track of the players. I found this one heavier loaded than most in that way. Hord fills out most of the conventional saga tropes – he digs for treasure in a grave mound and overcomes the revenant there, who curses the sword Hord takes from him. He visits foreign courts where the lords entreat him to stay with them because of his noble qualities. And all his failures are blamed on bad friends or supernatural forces.

In fact, I’d say “The Saga of Hord” probably qualifies as a good representative saga. It’s not the cream of the literary form, but it checks most of the boxes.

Authors

Snorri’s place

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Tonight, in the absence of any ideas from my corner, here’s a short video from the great Jackson Crawford, filmed at Reykholt, the home of Snorri Sturlusson, the great Icelandic saga author, poet, and chieftain. Crawford explains some things about Snorri’s life. And death. Which happened right there. That pool is geothermally heated, by the way.

Have a good weekend.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue’

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In those days, the language in England was the same as that spoken in Norway and Denmark, but there was a change of language when William the Bastard conquered England.

The passage above (whose historical truth is disputed by some scholars) represents one of the moments of particular historical interest in The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue, a saga which is not particularly notable in terms of artistry (in my opinion, though saga scholars rate it one of the best – no doubt for reasons readers in translation, like me, can’t well appreciate).

Most of us are familiar with the character Grima Wormtongue in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. This saga would seem to be the source of that name, since the word “orm,” common (I think) both to Old Norse and Old English, can mean worm, serpent, or dragon. However, in the saga, no moral judgment is implied by the name. I wish some information were provided as to why the nickname was bestowed in the first place, but all we’re told is that our Gunnlaug was named after an ancestor called the same thing. I assume it could mean something like “smooth-tongue,” or even “shrewd tongue,” since dragons were thought to be very crafty.

As one reads Gunnlaug’s Saga in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, as I am (or in the book I’m pushing in this review, the Penguin Collection, Sagas of Warrior Poets), along with other sagas about skalds, one can’t help noticing similarities. Not little similarities in style or theme, but great big similarities that look more like plagiarism. It would appear that when a saga writer wished to write the saga of a skald, he had a ready-made template to follow, and most of them did just that. This increases my respect for the author of Egil Skallagrimsson’s saga (very likely Snorri Sturlusson), for resisting that temptation.

The story goes as prescribed – Gunnlaug Illugasson is tall, handsome, and a fine warrior and poet from his youth. He wants to go abroad as a merchant, but persuades his father to arrange his betrothal to a girl named Helga. The contract calls for her to wait for him three years. At the court of Jarl Eirik in Norway (who’s mentioned, but doesn’t appear as a character, in a couple of my novels) he encounters his rival Ravn. Again following the formula, the two men are polite to one another before the ruler, but privately come to hate each other. Gunnlaug stays abroad past the deadline prescribed in the marriage contract, and Ravn rushes home to claim Helga – who bitterly resents it. The saga departs from the script a bit when the first fight between the two men turns into a general melee which ends with everybody but the principals getting killed. This calamity, the saga writer informs us, is the reason why dueling was abolished in Iceland.

Both men agree to go back to Norway and fight there, but (for some reason) Gunnlaug delays for some time before finally meeting Ravn in a duel fatal to them both. The saga ends with a touching coda telling how Helga mourned Gunnlaug the rest of her life, even though married to a third suitor.

I found Gunnlaug’s Saga a bit of a disappointment, and not only for its boilerplate quality. The main obvious failing in the narrative (in my view) was the omission of a martial resume for the hero. The usual pattern is to tell how he fights in wars for his lord or lords, becoming a formidable fighting man. Gunnlaug fights only one duel in the course of his travels, with a berserker – and he wins that not by skill but by overcoming magic. I felt this was a critical failure in character development.

However, the pathos of the ending was pretty moving.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Bjorn, Champion of the Hitardal People’

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I’m assuming very few of you are going to go out and buy The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, but I continue with my reading reports as I work my way through the volumes. I’m still on the poets’ sagas, and it occurred to me (and I should have remembered this) that most of the big ones are included in the Penguin volume, Sagas of Warrior-Poets. And the translations there are perfectly good.

My latest saga is the Saga of Bjorn, Champion of the Hitardal People. We have only an imperfect text for this one, since the first five chapters have been lost, as well as a page and a half out of the middle. The missing first chapters are fairly adequately supplied by text from a shorter version included in the Separate Saga of Saint Olaf by Snorri Sturlusson. About the second lacuna nothing can be done. But enough remains to provide an interesting tale. Scholars believe this to be one of the earlier sagas to be written down.

Bjorn Arngeirsson’s story begins in a way reminiscent of Laxdalasaga. Bjorn goes out into the world to make his fortune, but not before he and his father arrange his marriage to the lovely Oddny. The agreement is that he must come back to Iceland before five years have passed, or else the deal is canceled. Bjorn goes out and has adventures, including fighting a duel on behalf of King Valdemar (Vladimir) of Kiev, which earns him the tile of “Champion.” But he suffers a wound that prevents his returning home as soon as he’d like. Meanwhile his childhood enemy, another poet named Thord Kolbeinsson, travels back to Iceland and reports that Bjorn is dead. Thord then takes Oddny for his own wife.

Once Bjorn returns, a long succession of mutual offenses follow. Aside from personal hatred, one suspects an element of professional jealousy – the way the saga tells it, Bjorn is superior both as a man and as an artist, and Thord can’t forgive that. However, I imagine the story could be told just as well from the other point of view. Unlike the Saga of Hallfred, the last one I reviewed, Christianity seems to have little influence on this cycle of violence. People try to make peace, but these two men share an implacable hate.

There are interesting elements from the historian’s point of view. Bjorn, knowing that Thord has been at King (Saint) Olav’s court and will have slandered him, goes personally to set the record straight – showing considerable courage. (Olav acts just as I portray him in my novels, urging Bjorn to give up Viking raiding as an un-Christian activity.) There’s an interesting scene involving baths – the saga says that baths in tubs are “the only kind” that were available in Norway at the time. I assume the reference is to the custom of sauna bathing in Iceland (where thermal springs are plentiful). I’d always thought the Norwegians took steam baths too – but I’m not sure this saga can be trusted on historical details. The bath scene involves the wearing of garters by men, a subject of some contention among reenactors. It ends with Bjorn in possession of one of Saint Olaf’s own garters, which in time will become part of the bishop’s regalia in Iceland. Descriptions of shields in a battle scene are clearly anachronistic – the writer assumes a shield with arm straps and a point, which weren’t commonly in use at the time of these events.

Another interesting point comes up when the men are gathered at the Thing to work out a legal settlement between Bjorn and Thord. They actually go to the trouble of making up competing lists of all the lampoons each man has written about the other. When it’s found that Thord has written one fewer, he’s allowed to compose another on the spot so that they’ll balance.

A matter that’s mentioned, but rather underplayed in the saga, is the question of who is the actual father of Thord’s son Kolli. If I’m not mistaken, I I believe this is given more attention in Laxdala Saga (and in my novel West Oversea.)

The Saga of Bjorn, Champion of the Hitardal People is a flawed and somewhat artless story, but of considerable interest to the saga scholar.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Skald’

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A scene from a production of “Hallfred Vandraadeskald” presented by the Norwegian National Theater in 1908. Photo property of Nationalteatret.

Another Icelandic saga, read by me in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. (Unfortunately, I can’t find another translation in print anywhere.) I’m reading through a section of skald’s sagas, from which you may infer that The Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Skald is another story of a poet.

Hallfred’s Saga bears some (actually a lot of) similarity to Kormak’s Saga, the subject of my last saga review. Like Kormak, Hallfred falls in love with a girl at home in Iceland, fails to show up for their wedding, and harasses any other suitors who appear. Also like Kormak, he sails abroad to make his fortune as a Viking.

But this is where his story distinguishes itself. Hallfred ends up at the court of King Olaf Trygvesson (whom you may remember from my novel, The Year of the Warrior). Hallfred seems to be a predecessor to every song writer who ever nagged record producers in Nashville or Las Angeles. The king has other things on his mind than listening to songs, but he finally agrees to give Hallfred a hearing, calling him a “troublesome skald” (vandræðaskáld). In the event the song pleases Olaf, who accepts Hallfred as one of his court poets.

But this happens at the peak of Olaf’s evangelistic zeal.  Receiving the king’s offer (actually a threat) of baptism, Hallfred makes a counterproposal. He wants Olaf himself to be his godfather, a singular honor. Like a squeaky wheel, Hallfred gets what he wants. But his relationship with the king is an uneven one. He seems to have trouble getting the swing of Christianity. He falls out of favor when he invokes the old gods or falls into heathen customs. Then the king sets him to various tasks to regain favor, opening up opportunities for the kinds of adventures that always show up in sagas.

Although Hallfred’s saga is not one of the best in terms of its artistry, it is interesting for the picture it gives of the religious transition in Iceland in the 11th Century. As compared to Kormak’s Saga, one senses the pressure of the new faith as it alters people’s mores. Hallfred’s attentions to another man’s wife are treated more seriously here, less as merry pranks, and his family urges him to let it all go. In the end even Hallfred decides to leave the woman’s husband alone.

One of the saga’s main weaknesses is that, although it’s based on Hallfred’s own poems, the saga writer appears to often misunderstand them. Poetic allusions (always very thick in Viking poetry) are mistaken for statements of fact. Thus, a man uses a heathen sacrificial trough as a weapon, highly unlikely in real life. Or Kormak’s great enemy is named “Gris,” which means pig. I would suspect that’s an insulting name Hallfred bestowed on him, rather than the name he actually carried. (Pigs enjoyed higher status among the Vikings than they do with us, but I’ve never heard of any Viking actually named “Pig.”)

In short, The Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Skald is a flawed saga which contains, nonetheless, numerous points of interest for the saga enthusiast.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Kormak’s Saga’

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Kormak, as this old illustration shows, was not shy about public displays of affection, even with married women.

When the brothers put out from their place of anchorage, a walrus surfaced beside the ship. Kormak fired a weighted staff at it, hitting the animal, so that it sank. People thought they recognized Thorveig’s eyes when they saw it. The animal did not surface from then on; and it was reported of Thorveig that she was dangerously ill, and people say that she died as a result.

When we think of troubled poets today, we tend to imagine languid aesthetes wasting away with alcoholism or drug addiction. Troubled poets in the Viking Age seem to have been rather different sorts – pugnacious types and psychopathic killers. We discussed the greatest of them, Egil Skallagrimsson, a little while back. Today our topic is a lesser poet in a lesser saga, Kormak’s Saga, as published in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, but available in other formats as well.

Kormak’s name, I might mention, is the same as the Irish name Cormac. This is yet another testimony to the heavy infusion of Irish and Scottish elements into Icelandic society and culture (the same is true of the saga hero Njal’s name, which is the Irish Niel). Like Egil, Kormak is big and strong, though less ugly.

Kormak first notices Steingerd Thorkelsdatter of Tunga when he catches a glimpse of her foot through a doorway. Immediately he dedicates a poem to the foot, and when he sees the rest of the girl he’s not disappointed. He pursues her, and their marriage is arranged. However, when the wedding day occurs, he doesn’t show up. Yet when her family tries to marry her off to other men, Kormak routinely makes war on them – in some cases killing them. This behavior looks like prolonged adolescence and fear of commitment to the modern reader, but the saga explains it as the consequence of a witch’s curse. One looks in vain here for the kind of psychological insight we find in Egil’s Saga.

The most interesting character in the saga, in fact, is not Kormak himself but Bersi the Duelist, who dominates the middle part of the story. Though a famous man-killer, he’s far more sympathetic than Kormak, something like the Old Gunfighter trope in Western movies.

Kormak’s Saga is believed to be one of the oldest ones that’s been preserved, but that’s no guarantee of artistic quality. The episodes in the story appear to have been reconstructed (rather freely) from hints in the poems the hero left behind. And the hints look very much as if they’ve been misinterpreted a fair amount of time. Many of the incidents, frankly, make little sense.

Kormak’s Saga is interesting for its age, and also – in particular – for accounts of dueling customs in the Viking Age. As a piece of art, it’s fairly middling.

I should mention that a couple of Kormak’s love poems include pretty explicit descriptions of sexual organs.

Fiction

Egil’s Saga: On the ground

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In the video above, Dr. Matthew Roby discusses Egil’s Saga (which I reviewed the other day), filming at some of the precise Icelandic sites where the action occurred. I found it atmospheric and fascinating.

I was also interested to note that the large blue book from which he reads Egil’s poem to his dead son is the very volume I’ve been reading myself (thanks to Dale Nelson’s generosity) from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders.