The Sagas of the Icelanders Read Free

was assassinated. This, too, seemed instructive. The apparently disinterested contemplation of historical events could and would shed light upon contemporary events – whole conflicts, from beginning to end, were examined. Human nature was revealed. A fault in the political structure (the lack of an executive arm of government) was diagnosed. The effects of spiritual and religious commitment were set into a context of unbridled violence and social turbulence. In 1262, the Icelanders came up with an answer – they placed themselves under the Norwegian king. To me as a citizen and a novelist, the worth of serious art as a form of social discourse seems evident in the enterprise of Icelandic prose literature.
    When I was studying Icelandic literature, translations were piecemeal and highly variable. Some were published in mass editions, others in expensive university press editions. There was no co-ordination, and so some translations were very literal and almost clotted, while others were so loose and fluent as to be easy to read but suspect. These problems have been solved by the editors of
The Complete Sagas of Icelanders
, from which this selection was taken. These translations are uniformly accurate and readable. More importantly, they are gathered together in one informative volume. The reader may enter the literary world of medieval Iceland with ease and pleasure, and the literary works of the nameless saga writers may take their rightful place beside those of Homer, Shakespeare, Socrates, and those few others who live at the very heart of human literary endeavour.

Introduction
    ROBERT KELLOGG
     

I. THE AGE OF THE VIKINGS
     
    The later Middle Ages in Europe were a time of striking innovation in literature. In the second half of the twelfth century, the French poet Chrétien de Troyes gave a rich and permanent poetic shape to the old Celtic narratives of King Arthur and his court. With Dante’s
Commedia
and Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the national literatures of Europe began to declare their independence of medieval Latin. The local dialects of central France, of Florence and of London established themselves as the rivals of the languages of antiquity. Similar movements occurred in the other countries of Europe, especially in Germany with the brilliant poetic narratives of Wolfram, Hartmann and Gottfried. Nowhere, however, was this literary activity more remarkable or in certain paradoxical respects more ahead of its time than in medieval Iceland, where nearly all the books that have survived in the language of the ‘Norsemen’ were written.
    The mention of medieval Norsemen summons images of pagan Vikings, in beautiful, far-sailing ships, who for two hundred years terrified the peaceful coasts of France and the British Isles. As far as it goes, this is an appropriate association. The Norsemen were not merely Viking marauders, however. A people of great organizational genius and maritime skill, they were traders, explorers, settlers, landowners and, on an increasingly large scale, able political leaders. The settlement of Iceland, which began about 870, was part of a larger movement of Norse expansion. While most of the first settlers came to Iceland from the west coast of Norway, a significant number came from Norse communities in Ireland and Great Britain, bringing people of Celtic origin with them. The city of Dublin had been founded and governed by Norsemen. York in England was a centre of Norse power. In France, King Charles III was forced to turn over the territory since known as

     

     

     
    The World of the Sagas
     
    Normandy to a Norwegian Viking named Hrolf (also called Rolf and Rollo), the great-great-great-grandfather of William the Conqueror. The Icelanders in their turn began settling in Greenland in the tenth century, and from there they went on to explore the coast of North America.
    The restless and expansive age of the Vikings lasted for about two