The Sagas of the Icelanders Read Free Page B

social types of people in a historically and geographically precise context, with little apparent interest in fantasy and the spiritual and psychological experience of what is sometimes called ‘courtly love’. There are

     
    Ages of Icelandic History
     
    lovers in the sagas, but far less frequently do they end happily ever after than do their counterparts in romance. Generically, the sagas stand not so much between epic and romance as between epic and that other great European narrative form, the novel.
    The word
saga
is related to the English word
say
. Its various meanings in Icelandic can be roughly understood as denoting something said, a narrative in prose. English has no precise equivalent, so
saga
often appears in the titles of Icelandic books untranslated, although ‘story’, ‘tale’ or ‘history’ would come close, with some combination of the three even closer. Literary scholars now distinguish several kinds of sagas, depending on subject matter or historical setting. In addition to the
Íslendinga sögur
, with which we are concerned here, there are chivalric romances (
riddarasögur
); legendary sagas of pre-Icelandic Germanic heroes (
fornaldarsb’gur
); lives of the kings of Norway (in the great collection called
Heimskringla
and other individual
konungasogur
); saints’ lives (
heilagra manna sögur
); and histories of ‘contemporary’ events (
samtidarsogur
) that took place in Iceland after the Saga Age, many of which are preserved in the huge collection known as
Sturlunga saga
and others in the lives of Icelandic bishops (
biskupasdgur
).
    Closely related to the
Íslendinga sögur
is a genre of short tales called
Íslendinga pnettir
(tales of Icelanders), six of which have been selected for inclusion in this collection.
pattir
(plural
þœtir
) means, among other things, ‘part’ or ‘chapter’, and the
Íslendingapattir
do, whether they occur separately or as part of a larger work, give the appearance of being anecdotes that can perform a variety of functions within a larger work, such as illustrating a king’s character or providing an authenticating historical or learned detail. They occur mostly in large manuscript collections of kings’ sagas and often concern some kind of comic encounter between a humble Icelander and a king of Norway, frequently Harald Sigurdarson the Stern, in which an initial conflict is resolved.
    The characters in many of the
þœttir
are familiar to us from the roles they play in the sagas, and take on a special interest for this reason, as though they exist in a network of story that is larger than that encompassed by any single text or group of texts. The texts we have are, from this perspective, but a selection from the events of this larger saga world, in which ultimately every
Íslendinga saga
is connected to all the others.
    Whether a short narrative is titled a ‘saga’ or a ‘tale’ sometimes seems quite arbitrary, and while the categories of saga narrative are useful and the various kinds of sagas can be distinguished fairly easily, they do overlap. Individual works have their own character and are often somewhat ‘mixed’ in style. An example of a short and entertaining saga with many of the features of a ‘tale’ is
The Saga of Ref the Sly
. The hero’s name, Ref, means ‘fox’ in Icelandic, and he can be thought of as ‘the sly fox’, which King Harald the Stern had in mind when he gave him ‘the sly’ as a nickname. Like many of the tales of Icelanders,
The Saga of Ref the Sly
does not involve trolls or berserks or the supernatural for its entertainment, but Ref’s extraordinary skill and ingenuity in highly naturalistic settings in Iceland, Greenland, Norway and Denmark.
Ref the Sly
is unique among all the sagas in allowing itself the anachronism of a reference to writing ( Ch. 6 ). Ref is asked by his uncle as he is leaving Iceland to have his adventures written down in case he does not come back. The rationalism and ingenuity