I struggle to describe Killer-Glum’s Saga, as it really left no strong impression on me. Most great sagas feature some kind of powerful motivation for the main character – vengeance or a woman’s love or the righting of some great wrong. Killer-Glum has none of those things. He’s just a guy who goes through his life, and happens to have a talent for man-killing.
The saga writer seems to sense this lack, because he begins Glum’s tale with a trope borrowed from a thousand sagas, folk tales, and fairy tales: The hero starts out as his father’s least promising son, showing no initiative and often being taunted for his laziness. But when it comes down to cases, he proves extremely adept at fighting and killing, and before long he is the most powerful man in his district. We are told that he maintained this power for an unusual length of time. But eventually his enemies get the best of him, and he loses his property and has to move elsewhere. In the end he is converted to Christianity and dies in old age.
There are many incidents here, and a hundred characters to try to keep track of, but not much of a central narrative line. The situation is not improved by the fact that the text is somewhat corrupt.
One interesting scene did strike me – at one point Glum’s son kills a man, and Glum wants that fact not to be known. So he compliments a thrall on doing the killing, repeating the praise so may times that the stupid thrall begins believing it himself. Early medieval brainwashing.
My final evaluation is that Killer-Glum’s Saga is not one to read if you’re new to saga reading. This one is for the saga buffs; it demands a little effort.
An awful image of Erik the Red, from the 1688 book, Gronlandia, by Arngrimur Jonsson. Good, free pictures of Erik are hard to find.
I’m not sure whether this is good news or bad news, but my productivity on this blog is likely to be reduced a little for the next five months. I’ve snagged a new translation job, one that promises to be a bit of a challenge.
I can’t tell you what the job is at this point, because it’s a private thing for a scholarly project, and nobody has given me permission to talk about it. If I find out differently, I’ll let you know.
But I will say I’m translating a very long biography from Norwegian to English. I’m not actually certain I can meet the hoped-for deadline. But I’m gonna try my best. That means less time reading for pleasure, and fewer reviews on this blog, I fear.
What I’ll post instead of reviews I have no idea.
But tonight I’m going to post about Viking names.
As you may have noticed if you’ve read about the subject, Vikings used what’s called the “patronymic” in naming. A patronymic is not a family name in the sense we undertand them, but simply an indicator. Thorvald’s son Erik is called Erik Thorvaldsson. Erik’s son Leif does not inherit the surname Thorvaldsson, but is rather called Leif Eriksson (you may have heard of him). The surname is just a pointer – I’m talking about this Leif here, not that other Leif over there.
But the Vikings also liked to add nicknames. This brought the identification to what we information professionals like to call “a further level of granularity.” Which means it involves more detail; it’s more specific. Erik Thorvaldsson was known as Erik the Red, which was likely to single him out even better than the patronymic did.
But an interesting thing sometimes happens with these nicknames (though not in Erik’s case). Sometimes they replaced, in practice, the person’s original name. Take for instance Thorleif Skjalg, the father of Erling Skjalgsson, hero of my Viking novels. (Skjalg probably means “squint-eyed.” I like to think of Charles Bronson.) Thorleif Skjalg was so identified with his nickname that his son ended up being known as Erling Skjalgsson rather than as Erling Thorleifsson. And Erling went ahead and named one of his own sons Skjalg. So the nickname became a proper name.
Another example is Snorri Goði, a historical personage who appeared as a character in my novel West Oversea. (Goði is Icelandic for Priest or Chieftain.) His original name, according to the sagas (he appears in several), was Thorgrim. But even as a child he proved so difficult to handle that he got the nickname Snorri, which means (I believe) tangled or complex (related, I further believe, to our English words snare and snarl). And the name Snorri went on to become a fairly common Norse name. (The first European child born in America, according to the sagas, was named Snorri Thorfinsson.)
There was a king named Dumb. He ruled over the gulfs that stretch north across Helluland and are now called Dumbshaf after King Dumb. He was descended from giants on his father’s side, a good-looking people and larger than other men; but his mother was descended from the tribe of trolls….
When I made my one visit to Iceland involving more than a stopover in the airport, I took a day trip out to the Snæfellsnes peninsula, to see locations I’d be using in West Oversea, which I was working on at the time. At one point we visited the construction/statue shown on the cover of the book shown above (which is not the one I’m reviewing). Our guide told us this was a guy named Bard, who did things like wading across fjords. I’d never heard of this Bard, and it meant nothing to me at the time.
Years later, Bard came up again in some material I translated for Saga Bok Publishing (not likely, alas, ever to see publication now). Bard, it turned out, was the subject of one of Iceland’s legendary sagas – a late saga full of folkloric elements.
The saga opens with the regrettably named King Dumb mentioned in the quotation above. Dumb and his wife have a son named Bard, the hero of this saga. Bard is, for a time, foster son to the giant Dofri, for whom Dovre Mountain in Norway is named (Dofri features in certain legends concerning the youth of King Harald Fairhair, legendary uniter of Norway, which Snorri Sturlusson quite understandably omitted from Heimskringla), but eventually, unable to get along with that same King Harald, he emigrates to Iceland and settles on the Snæfellsnes. Later, unable to live at peace with lesser men, he retires to dwell in a cave in the mountain, becoming a legendary figure (“the god of Snæfell”) who comes at the nick of time to rescue friends when they are in need. In time he has a son named Gest who is effectively identical to himself and performs the same kinds of feats.
In the end, Gest goes to Norway to meet King Olaf Trygvesson. The king exhorts him to adopt the true faith, but he resists. Later, in a scene reminiscent of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an armored troll (or giant) shows up at Olaf’s court and challenges him to send a hero to claim his (the troll’s) treasure. Gest accepts the challenge, traveling in company with a priest, who eventually baptizes him. But Gest (perhaps because of his other-worldly family roots) cannot survive long as a Christian.
It’s a peculiarity of the Icelandic sagas that the genre did not generally improve with time. Later sagas (and Bard’s Saga is one of the latest ones we have) lack the verisimilitude and psychological insight of the classic sagas. Bard’s Saga is interesting for its legendary elements, and also for the geographical assumptions that seem to be in play (the author appears to think North Norway and Greenland are close to each other).
We tend to think of Norse mythology as a sort of closed canon, as in Christian theology. Stories like Bard’s Saga offer abundant clues to whole branches of pre-Christian belief that are remembered, if at all, only in fragmentary or distorted form.
The father and son parted with little love lost between them. Many people wished Grettir a safe journey, but few a safe return.
I have finished reading The Saga of Grettir the Strong, in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. I have much to say about it, though I fear a lot of it strays into the deep grass.
My main takeaway from the saga, as I stated yesterday, is that the real-life hero, Grettir Asmundarsson, seems to have been a psychopath, very likely suffering from PTSD. Even in a book written in the 14th Century, his status echoes ancient tribal attitudes. The heroes of ancestral times were not admired for their moral virtue. A remnant of this world view remains, in residual form, even in our English language. Our word “great” has two meanings. The common one (in our time) is that of “important” or “admirable.” But its older meaning was “large.” We still speak of a Great Hall or a greatcoat. In the same way, old heroes like Sigurd the Dragon Slayer could massacre whole villages of innocent people and still be considered heroes and great men. Because greatness was about magnitude, not virtue. Likewise, Grettir is a hero because he does things in a big way, whether it’s killing men or lifting heavy objects.
Reading the saga from a historical perspective, I noted that most of the episodes where Grettir comes off as heroic by our standards – a virtuous hero – are implausible scenes involving either invulnerable berserkers or supernatural creatures like witches or ghosts. Even the scenes of Grettir’s death, which are likely to have some factual base, are embroidered with elements of witch’s curses, which the saga writer found necessary in order to explain his invulnerable hero’s death at the hands of common men. (Though in an odd interpolation, Grettir finds a friend who’s even stronger than himself. No actual magic is attributed to this character, but one gets the feeling he’s not entirely human.)
The only plausible episode where Grettir exhibits mercy is one calculated to advance his own interests. He spares the life of a son of Snorri the Godi [Chieftain] (an important saga character who makes a brief appearance in my novel, West Oversea), who has come out after him as a sort of bounty hunter. Grettir understands that winning Snorri’s friendship through letting his son live could win him a powerful friend, something he badly needs by now.
Indeed, one remarkable thing about Grettir’s saga is the fact that he had all kinds of prominent connections – “Almost all the chieftains in the country were related to Grettir… either by blood or by marriage.” He’s related to the Norwegian royal family too. And yet he can’t seem to catch a break with the law. (For all I’ve written and said about the importance of the Law to the Norse, your father’s status and who you knew counted for a lot. Rich men’s sons could usually find a way to wiggle out of legal scrapes with their skin intact, even as today. The fact that Grettir couldn’t make this old boy network work for him, seems to have convinced his family and friends that he must have been under some unique curse).
There’s a hint of character development in the later chapters, when Grettir, formerly entirely reckless of consequences, now searches for a way to attain a peaceful life. He’s been outlawed, which means he can’t leave the country and is legal prey for killing. In the end, he will hold the record for survival in an outlaw state – 20 years (though there’s some inconsistency about that figure in the text here). He holes up on the natural fortress of Drangey island, where he fights off repeated attacks. It’s at this point that he becomes a more sympathetic character. He’s terrified of the dark and of being alone – though he knows from experience that few men are to be trusted. Still, I couldn’t help wondering what his killers’ real story is – Grettir has been living by robbery, and he never hesitated to use violence. Stealing sheep and other food could have serious consequences in a marginal economy The charge that his killers employed witchcraft is not impossible (at least technically – I don’t believe their magic actually worked), but it seems to me more likely the witchcraft stuff was added by the author (who was possibly related to Grettir) in order to make his hero more sympathetic. No small task, with this guy’s record.
An element in the saga which I’d never noticed before (perhaps it was bowdlerized in previous translations I’ve read, or maybe I just forgot) is a couple sexual situations. In one scene, which would have played better in the 14th Century than it does today, a serving woman makes fun of Grettir’s physical endowment, so he rapes her to teach her a lesson. In another, he spends some time sharing a house with a woman whose husband is away, saving her from a monstrous troll woman who’s been ravaging the farm. He leaves a souvenir behind:
Towards the end of that summer, Steinvor from Sandhaugar gave birth to a boy named Skeggi. At first he was said to be the son of Kjartan…. Skeggi was distinguished from all his brothers and sisters by his strength and build. By the age of fifteen he was the strongest person in north Iceland, and then his paternity was attributed to Grettir. Everyone thought he would grow into an outstanding man, but he died at the age of sixteen and there are no stories about him.
In sum, the Saga of Grettir the Strong is a powerful and memorable tale, and an amateur psychologist like me can spend unlimited time picking out clues concerning its underlying facts. That game can go on forever, because there’s no way to prove them wrong.
Snorri Sturlusson dictates to an amanuensis, in a woodcut for “Heimskringla” by Christian Krogh.
You may find this hard to believe, admiring me as you do, but I’ve gotten lazy. I watched a video about sleep problems on YouTube recently, and it occurred to me that instead of lying in bed as I am wont to do in the morning, trying to get back to sleep (and generally failing), I should just get up and work on my novel. Maybe I would a) get to sleep more easily at night, and b) actually make progress on this Erling book. My work so far has been mostly thinking about it and plotting.
And what do you know? It worked. I’m sleeping better and I’m actually getting text written. I’ve made progress every day this week. Yesterday I wrote a big scene that even kind of gave me chills. One of the worst things about indolence is that you forget the rewards inherent in the labor.
It’s also a little embarrassing, like one of those times when you’re a kid when you’re trying to do something the way you think it should be done, and your parent says, “I think you should try it this way.” And you say no, because you know how you want to do it. And finally, in desperation, you try it their way, and it turns out they knew more than you did. Proving you’re not as grownup as you thought you were.
Even when you’re over 70 and your folks are dead.
Anyhow, I like how the book’s coming at this point. I was looking for a fantasy element to interweave in the plot, because historical fantasy is what I do, after all, and I think I found just the thing. It comes from northern folklore and feeds into a theme I wanted to explore in the book anyway. Creepy, and with just a touch of contemporary commentary.
From Dr. Jackson Crawford, a list of introductory books for those interested in Viking studies. The list is deficient, of course, as it doesn’t mention my novels or Viking Legacy. Nevertheless it is not without value.
What’s the best Icelandic saga? You asked yourself that just the other day, didn’t you? Yoav Tirosh says it’s the Brennu-Njáls saga largely because that title could be taken two ways.
It’s the story of a couple fun-loving vikings who want to take over their district. Everything goes swimmingly until someone dies, there’s a power struggle, and then some zealots off the one guy everybody loves. Blood-relatives or not, those zealots are going to have to pay. Lars talked about it more in an earlier post.
Tirosh praises some of the saga’s virtues and suggests the duality in the title clues us into the story’s greatness, because Brennu-Njáls can mean either Burnt Njáll and Njáll the Burner. It’s the story of the burner and the burned, both embodied in one character.
And therewithal Bardi nameth witnesses, and gives forth that he putteth from him Gudrun, Biorn’s daughter “and for this cause,” says Bardi, “that thou art by a great deal too much of a miser for any doughty man to put up with having thee for a father-in-law; nor shalt thou ever have back from me either dower or jointure.”
I figured it was time to read the Eyrbyggja Saga again, and that was before I even knew I’d be speaking to the Icelanders in a week. I like Laxdaela Saga a little better, because it has stronger characters, but the two sagas are often paired, as they share a general locality and several major players.
The big problem with reading any saga is keeping the actors straight. Every saga volume should include a detachable card with a list of characters on it (this is a particular problem with ebooks). And since about 2/3 of the characters have names that start with “Thor,” the struggle is real. I’ll confess that, supposed expert that I am, I lost track of who was who much of the time, and only guessed the teams by who they were fighting against.
Eybyggja means “the Eyr builders,” or the people who settled at Eyr. Eyr is a locality in northwest Iceland, and I visited the area on my one Icelandic trip. The gist of the narrative is that proud men tend to step on each others’ toes, and in an honor culture that leads to bloodshed. Accident leads to insult, and insult leads to blows or seizure of property, and then honor is offended and the killing starts. This continues unabated until the death of the mighty chieftain Arnkel. With him out of the way, his rival Snorri the Chieftain (or Priest, a character who appears in my novel West Oversea) gains power. Snorri is clearly not regarded as highly as Arnkel by his neighbors (or by the saga writer), but it must admitted his sometimes devious schemes tended to promote peace, and the area finally gets some rest from killing under his influence.
The really fascinating thing about Eyrbyggja Saga is its fantastic elements. There are a lot of ghosts in this story – the Norse kind of ghost, which is corporeal like a zombie (but does not, it should be noted, eat brains). Nevertheless these ghosts have a malign influence wherever they walk, and people tend to sicken and die – or even be assaulted – when they encounter them. There’s Thorolf Halt-foot, a malicious and greedy old man whose body must at last be burned to stop him walking. There’s Thorgunna the rich widow (who appears in West Oversea while still alive). There’s Thorir Wooden-Leg and his crew, who also appear in West Oversea. They provide the saga with a somber flavor that makes it unforgettable.
Appended to this edition (William Morris’s translation) is also The Story of the Heath-Slayings, a fragmentary saga which features (again) some of the same characters, at least in bit parts. The section we have largely involves a raid by northern farmers against southern farmers (for revenge, of course). The story advances by choreographed stages (reminding me, for some reason, of The Magnificent Seven), and also leaves a strong impression on the reader (or at least on this reader).
I’m not sure I recommend William Morris’s version. His intentions were good, if I understand them correctly – to use a lot of antique diction and obscure words to give an impression of the flavor of the Icelandic originals. But frankly, the sagas are hard enough to follow as they are, without all those obsolete words. Eyrbyggja is not the greatest of the sagas, but it’s one the saga fan will not want to miss.
I’m scheduled to give a lecture on the Icelandic sagas for a Sons of Norway lodge next month. Consequently, in an unaccustomed spasm of integrity, I thought I ought to check out the latest scholarship, since the information I’ve been operating on is a decade old or more. I chose The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga, by Margaret Clunies Ross. I think I chose well.
I had learned from my efforts translating Torgrim Titlestad’s work (still awaiting publication in English, dash it all) that there has been some upheaval in saga studies of late. This Cambridge Introduction concentrates mostly on different aspects of saga studies from those Titlestad does (he’s mostly interested in the use of sagas in historiography), but it reinforced the impressions I got from him.
During the 20th Century, scholarly interest concentrated mostly on what are often called “the Icelanders’ sagas” (designations of categories seem to be a continuing problem in the field), the famous “wild west” stories of individuals and families involved in feuds and lawsuits, sometimes over generations. But Ross reminds us that there are in fact many different kinds of sagas – the sagas of ancient times, the chivalric sagas, the saints’ lives, the historical sagas, etc. Scholars are beginning to appreciate the other genres, and to admit that a) the earlier sagas aren’t necessarily better, and b) they’re not sure which ones are earlier anyway. As in biblical studies, textual critics in the 20th Century got a bit grandiose in their certainties about the evolutions of textual variants and which variants have priority. Scholars today are becoming a little less snobbish, and are broadening their range of tastes.
I enjoyed The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga. Recommended for anyone looking for a fairly accessible, up-to-date guidebook.
Among the great joys of life, at least for me (I’ll admit that my joys are somewhat circumscribed), getting a nice book for free is among the chief… examples.
Today when I got home from work (late) I found three volumes like this on my porch, all the way from Norway.
They are the volumes published so far of the Saga Bok translation of the Flatøy Book, which has never been translated in full before – into any language, I believe. Saga Bok is engaged in producing a Norwegian version in full, in seven volumes. But the first three volumes constitute a distinct unit, with a different writer than the rest. This is the chief historical section of the work, and invaluable for a historical novelist like me.
Written in the 14th Century, Flatøy Book was originally compiled for the last king of Norway, who died before it was finished. At that point Norway was united with Denmark. In the 17th Century the book was relocated to Copenhagen, where it remained until 1971, when Iceland got it back, to great national rejoicing. It did spend a number of years in Norway, though, in the home of the scholar Tormod Torfæus (1636-1719), who lived at Avaldsnes, Karmøy, where my great-grandfather was born. Torfæus used it as a source for his great Latin history of Norway. So I feel some kinship with the book.
An English edition is planned, but I won’t be involved in that project. An Icelandic translator will, quite properly, handle that important job. But in the course of my ongoing translating relationship with Saga Bok I employed my ninja negotiating skills to request and receive these volumes.
