The Sagas of the Icelanders Read Free Page A

hundred years. Their first notable attack on England came, according to the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, in 793, when the church on the island of Lindisfarne was plundered and some people were slain. But by 1000 a new cultural phase was under way, with the conversion of many Norsemen to Christianity, which made their raids on churches and centres of learning more difficult to justify. The introduction of ecclesiastical institutions into Norse culture – monasticism, literacy and the internationalist perspective of the church hierarchy – laid the foundation for a post-Viking educational system that was based on the reading of books.
    The growth of centralized religion and education was accompanied by the growth of larger, more centralized governments. The small regional kingships of early Viking society were being replaced in the eleventh century by powerful national monarchies, whose interests were not served by freebooting Viking raiders. Literacy made possible the conversion of rich ancient Viking oral traditions of myth and legend into written literature, as was also happening in Celtic Britain. It provided the means for recording recent events in the history of Scandinavia, especially the deeds of Norway’s charismatic king and saint, Olaf Haraldsson (reigned 1014–30), and his Viking Christian precursor, King Olaf Tryggvason (995–1000). * By the beginning of the twelfth century, writing in Iceland and elsewhere in Scandinavia was being extended from Latin to the vernacular language. And the circumstances were right for the production of a large, varied and innovative body of literature.

II. FORMS OF ICELANDIC NARRATIVE
     
    In Iceland, the age of the Vikings is also called the Saga Age. About forty interesting and original works of medieval Icelandic literature are fictionalized accounts of events that took place in Iceland during the time of the Vikings: from shortly before the settlement of Iceland about 870 to somewhat after the conversion to Christianity in the year 1000. They were written mainly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but they concern characters and events in Iceland, and to some extent the larger Norse world, from three hundred years earlier. All of the sagas in this collection are historical fictions of this type, a form known in Icelandic as
Íslendinga sögur
(sagas of Icelanders) and often in English as ‘family sagas’. These works are the crowning achievement of medieval narrative art in Scandinavia, and when people speak of ‘the Icelandic sagas’ they usually mean the
Íslendinga sögur
.
    In spirit the
Íslendinga sögur
are much like epics. While women are more prominent and interesting characters in the sagas than in Homeric epic or
Beowulf
or the
Song of Roland
, the world of the sagas is still a man’s world. Such heroic virtues as honour, fortitude and manly courage count for a great deal, and the definition of heroes in a variety of situations is one of the main points. The sagas differ from epics in two important ways: formally, by being in straightforward, clear prose rather than verse, and culturally, by not being about kings and princes and semi-divine heroes but about wealthy and powerful farmers.
    Saga heroes occupy a social space on the edges of society. The heroes of three of the sagas,
The Saga of Grettir the Strong, Gisli Sursson’s Saga
and
The Saga of Hord and the People of Holm
, are in fact outlaws. Gunnar Hamundarson of Hlidarendi in
Njal’s Saga
is also technically a criminal when he is killed. Most of the saga heroes are just barely on one side or the other of the law, but it also seems to be true that the law itself is being tested along with the finest men. Epic and saga are enough alike to make a comparison interesting and instructive, especially in the degree to which both genres synthesize history, myth, ethical values and descriptions of actual life. Sagas differ from romance, the other great medieval narrative mode, by focusing attention on actual