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.