Medieval Iceland has left us a unique, rich and varied literature, of immense historical importance and some of it of the very highest literary quality.[1] It preserves memories from the pre-Christian North, drawing up a coherent picture of the realms of gods and other supernatural powers in the heavens and beyond the farthest horizon in the world of the giants. And it tells of the lives, conflicts and journeys of people down here on earth in the lands that the Scandinavians encountered on their travels from the beginning of the so-called Viking Age in the ninth century until the time of writing in the thirteenth century. The texts contain a wealth of verses placed in the mouths of heroes and chieftains, men and women, their metre chosen according to their existential status. On the one hand, mythological beings and heroes of ancient times speak in simple metres of irregular lines loosely held together by alliteration (called “edda poems”) and, on the other, for mortal men of the recent past and contemporary times there is “skaldic verse,” where virtually every syllable is balanced by line length, alliteration and rhyme, using ornate diction and imagery with poetic synonyms (heiti) and periphrases (kennings) whose meaning was fed by a knowledge of tales and ideas about the gods as people envisaged them in the heavens.[2]
By common consensus, the jewel of Old Icelandic literature are the so-called family sagas, also known as the sagas of Icelanders. These are prose accounts of the lives and feuds of chieftains and farmers, free men and slaves, in the first century and a half after the settlement of Iceland, which began to take place shortly after 870; sagas about people in the middle years of the Viking Age who traced their descent back to Norway and the Viking colonies in Ireland and the British Isles. A significant part of the population consisted of captives of war and slaves bought at the markets in Dublin and elsewhere. This previously uninhabited island in the North Atlantic provided the venue for an attempt to build the first “new society” for which there was no precedent in “the old world”—a widely dispersed rural “free state” with no king, no towns, not even villages. Settlement was by locality—a valley, for instance—, with a chieftain’s manor and smaller farms around it.[3]
The outcome was what is known as the Icelandic Commonwealth—an ordered multicultural society with a sophisticated oral law code presided over by an elected “lawspeaker” (lögsögumaður) and a regular system of courts and assemblies, both regional and national. Power lay in the hands of a limited number of hereditary chieftains (36-48), though their power in turn depended on their retaining the support of their client free farmers. The high point of the year was the annual national assembly around midsummer, the Alþingi, where people gathered from all parts of the country to discuss matters of common interest, hold court sessions, and decide national policy. A notable case, and one that features in several of the sagas, was the “democratic” conversion to Christianity in the year 1000.[4]
This early Icelandic society was entirely oral; its laws, genealogies, traditions, etc. were preserved and operated without any support from books and writing. People practised their Gaelic Christian and Norse pagan religions and explained the world as it appeared to their naked eyes by telling myths about the heavens and the earth, by transforming the everyday into momentous events that had taken place in the long-distant past. This oral lore in turn underlay the diction and imagery of the professional poets—the skálds—who plied their trade for rich rewards among the kings and earls of northern Europe, in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, England, Ireland, the Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland.[5]
This utterly original social experiment of the Viking Age is captured in the family sagas in a new artistic form that comes closest to the novel as it later developed, with complex characterisation and a naturalistic but immensely flexible style that is fundamentally different from what we find in medieval religious writing and the heroic and courtly literature of continental Europe—forms that of course reached Iceland just like other countries in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The sagas present a glorified picture of Iceland’s past at a time when the country was descending into the discord and anarchy of civil war in the thirteenth century, with opposing factions competing for the support of the king of Norway—to whom the Icelandic chieftains eventually submitted and swore allegiance in the years 1262-64. By now the written culture and learning of the Church was firmly established in the country and there is reason to believe that it was the chieftain Snorri Sturluson (1178/9-1241) who first among secular Icelanders realised how book culture might be harnessed in the service of the oral poetic and narrative art, something he had been trained in and exercised from a young age, growing up at Oddi in the late twelfth century among young men destined for the priesthood.
Snorri was a poet and chieftain with ambitions to get in with royal circles in Norway, an ambition which eventually led to his downfall. He can be seen as a kind of Steve Jobs of his times, since Snorri’s originality lay in combining the knowledge and technical expertise of others to create previously unknown types of intellectual properties—only in Snorri’s case it was literary genres rather than Macintosh computers and iPhones. In his Edda, Snorri collected and collated the oral mythological learning of the court poets and presented it in systematised form in a book; and in Egils saga, probably the first of the family sagas and closely associated with Snorri, he adapted existing forms of historiography, principally lives of kings, to present the traditions of a family from Norway that rises up against the despotism of King Haraldur hárfagri (Harald Fair-hair) at the end of the ninth century and flees to Iceland. Here in Iceland the warrior-poet Egill grows up under the watchful eye of his magician foster mother, the slave woman Þorgerður brák, and is composing verses from his earliest childhood. Egils saga presents us fully formed with the durable stereotype of the independent, hard-drinking, uncompromising, silver-tongued poet in Odin’s image, and set a trend that swept the country like the “tower craze” in the Italian city San Gimignano in the Middle Ages in which every family had to build itself a tower, preferably taller than the one of the family next door. After the “publication” of Egils saga, any chieftain worth his salt had to have the origin story of his own part of the country written, telling of the first family to settle there and its descendants down past the Conversion. The masterpieces of Icelandic literature, Laxdæla saga, Njáls saga, Grettis saga and others, can be viewed as status symbols, the equivalent of luxury limousines parked on a rich man’s drive.[6]
Thus people used the sagas to construct for themselves a shared self-image reflecting their values and ideas and which went together to form a coherent story world that is unique in world literature. The same characters turn up again and again and families trace themselves from saga to saga, creating a great integrated network of events, kinships and people of every type, men, women, young and old, all subject to similar ethical rules and religious ideas, many of them so memorable and portrayed in such clear lines that we feel we know them as well as we know the people who live around us.[7]
The world of the family sagas extends out into the saga world of other literary genres that tell about kings and earls and heroes of the Viking Age and their journeys about Europe. This world stretches from the edge of the frozen seas to the north to Garðaríki in the east (now the Baltic states, Russia, Belorus and the Ukraine), to Mikligarður (Constantinople/modern Istanbul) in the south, and south and west from the homelands to France, Ireland and the British Isles, and west by way of the Orkneys and Shetland to the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland (where in 1502, on the Cantino Planisphere, named after Alberto Cantino, courtier of Manuel I, king of Portugal, what was once Norse settlements were marked by a flag as Portuguese territory). This Viking diaspora leads eventually to Helluland, Markland, and on southwestwards to Vínland (“Wine Land”), where wild grapes grow in the lands of strange and hostile natives on the southern shores of the Gulf of St Lawrence in Canada—lands where centuries later French explorers also found wild grapes and left the names Baye de Vin and Isle de Bacchus. In other words, the settings of the sagas cover the entire world, land and sea, travelled by the Vikings centuries earlier, traditions brought together in the fountainhead of all Icelandic saga literature, the Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements), a record unique in world history of the founding and original settlement of a previously unpopulated part of the world of the size of Iceland.[8]
The sheer grandeur of the artistic outpouring that created this literary world in Iceland stands comparison with the wonder that was the golden age of classical Greece, the world in which Plato, Aristotle and their contemporaries laid the foundations of science and Western culture. Or perhaps a better comparison would be Renaissance Florence, where Dante Alighieri looked to the past for inspiration and created the first known authorial work of western literature—not unlike what Snorri had done a century earlier, only without the world outside learning of this flash of genius until many centuries later.
Iceland’s status in the modern world rests largely on the sagas and poems set down on vellum in the Middle Ages. It was on this literature that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Icelanders based their claims to being a distinct and individual people, claims that eventually led to the establishment of an independent republic in 1944. By good fortune there was no need to dispute authority over the land with other people who did not themselves identify with this “cultural legacy” as we would now call it, in the way the Jews now have to do in Israel. The old Icelandic sagas were written in a language that all ordinary Icelanders could still understand and that scholars could trace back to the Middle Ages (and beyond). And they were set in surroundings that were there before everyone’s eyes. Among the first to realise the significance of the connections between story and landscape in Iceland were men like William Morris and William G. Collingwood—nineteenth-century English founders of cultural tourism through their journeys about the country and visits to saga sites and the natural wonders of the landscape, and their accounts and paintings of what they had seen.[9]
The sagas and poems were unlike anything that the other nations of Scandinavia had produced and consequently well suited to bolster Icelanders' self-confidence and desire to reclaim their former freedoms and independence. The unique achievements of the writers of medieval Iceland stood comparison with the best that global culture had to offer. Icelanders could bask in the glow of this long-extinct intellectual volcanic outburst with its nationalistic connection with the past, just as happened in other countries. “Land, nation and language” lay at the heart of how people viewed themselves, a slogan given meaning and justification by the ancient literature. From this same soil sprang Iceland’s lasting contribution to the rich stew of the world’s languages, the words “geysir” and “saga” being the only loans from Icelandic found commonly in other languages. We may consider what causes such rare, brief flowerings in the lives of cultural groups: What lay behind the fact that a few generations of philosophers in Athens changed the world with their thinking? How is it that the Florence of Dante, Boccaccio and Leonardo da Vinci breathed new life into European culture? And how was it that Snorri Sturluson and his nephew Sturla Þórðarson, almost alone and single-handed, managed to take the art of writing and mould it for utterly original artistic purposes?[10]
Iceland achieved its independence in stages—a constitution granted by the Danish king in 1874; home rule in 1904; national sovereignty in 1918; and finally full independence in 1944 with the establishment of the Republic of Iceland. At each stage in this process voices were raised demanding the return of the physical legacy of Iceland’s golden age, the manuscripts of the ancient sagas, from the Arnamagnæan Collection and Royal Library in Copenhagen. These manuscripts came to represent the freedom the Icelanders had reclaimed from the Danish Crown. With the establishment of the republic, these demands reached such a pitch that Sigurður Nordal, then professor of Icelandic studies at the University of Iceland, was appointed Icelandic ambassador to Denmark, with the “manuscript affair” at the top of his agenda. The matter reached a happy conclusion on the last day of winter 1971, when the first two manuscripts, the Codex Regius of the edda poems and the sumptuous Flateyjarbók, were unloaded at Reykjavík harbour from the Danish frigate Vædderen—providing, coincidentally, a valuable precedent for many post-colonial nations in their efforts to reclaim their own cultural legacies from the repositories of colonial overlords. In the minds of many Icelanders, the return of the manuscripts marked the final fulfilment of the struggle for independence. In the cheering on the quayside led by the then prime minister, Jóhann Hafsteinn, the age-old anti-Danish sentiment evaporated from the national soul like dew in the summer sun—the final end to centuries of Danish winter. The day was declared a public holiday in schools and workplaces, the event was shown on television, the first live outside broadcast in the country’s history, and for the next decades all official visits to Iceland culminated with a trip to the manuscript exhibition at the Árni Magnússon Institute to view these cultural treasures. Nowhere else in the world have ancient literary manuscripts occupied a comparable role in the cultural life of a nation.[11]
So what lay behind this literary golden age in medieval Iceland? How was it that just a few generations of writers managed to create an incomparable story world out of limited literary models when they first took up their pens to write in their vernacular language? Iceland and New Zealand were the last landmasses on earth of any size to be populated by humans. Iceland was settled in the ninth century, New Zealand a few centuries later by the people who are now considered the country’s native inhabitants. Both lands had been visited sporadically from much earlier on. The difference is that in Iceland people acquired the techniques of writing early enough to be able to record the oral accounts about the first inhabitants while they still felt reasonably confident of the accuracy of these traditions and could still trace their lineages back to the very earliest settlers in all parts of the country. Central to this was that they were able to correlate their native chronology, based on the regnal years of kings and the periods in office of their lawspeakers, with the chronology used by the Church. In New Zealand, nothing of the history of the original settlers was written down until after European culture reached the islands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even though the origin stories of the Maoris are accompanied by long genealogies, they are in no way comparable to the explicitly dated starting point and settlement accounts in the Icelandic texts, material that first started to be written down on skin early in the twelfth century, in the times of Ari the Learned (Ari fróði) and Kolskeggur the Learned. Nowhere other than in Iceland is it possible to go from district to district in the footsteps of the first men and women who travelled the same areas, following the written accounts of the landscape they saw, the names they gave to places, the routes they took, and the things they did.
We can, for instance, go in search of the birthplace of the first children to be born in Iceland. The Book of Settlements tells of a daughter born to Helgi the Lean and his wife Þorbjörg Island-Sun during their first spring in the country. This birth hallowed and consecrated the land, similar to when the Icelandic immigrant community in Canada celebrates the birth of the first child born in the new settlement, in a little shelter from a blizzard just after the land-claim on the shores of Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba. Helgi and Þorbjörg named their daughter Þórunn and the text says she was born on Þórunnarey, and even if we do not know the exact location we know it was an island in the river flowing into Eyjafjörður. If the birch scrub has not completely disappeared as a result of the depredations of sheep and charcoal burners, we can picture the land as it was when it was first seen by human eyes. Nowhere else have the first inhabitants of a country had the good fortune to adopt a new religion and the art of writing so soon after the settlement that they were able to record their entire history themselves, rather than having the story from a strange and obscure mythical origin collected by people from outside—missionaries, anthropologists, ethnologists—who have not themselves grown up within the native culture and so cannot know it from the inside.[12]
In recent decades, concepts like nationality and self-image and attitudes to history have undergone a radical reassessment in academic circles. But a reassessment among academics does not automatically translate into a change in public attitudes, and nineteenth-century ideas about the past continue to lead a good life. Icelanders are still very fond of seeing themselves as an independent and classless nation whose existence is built on having in the distant past rejected royal power and sailed off to Iceland to escape the tyranny of Haraldur hárfagri. This supposed self-imposed banishment forms a recurrent theme in the sagas; we find it, for instance, in a famous speech at the Alþingi opposing the predations of the Norwegian Crown and refusing the request of the evangelizing king Ólafur Haraldsson (St Olaf) shortly after the conversion to be ceded the island of Grímsey off the north coast of Iceland. The business ventures of Icelandic entrepreneurs in the years before the banking collapse of 2008 were compared vaingloriously to the Viking expeditions of old, a comparison that turned out to be uncomfortably appropriate when the dust settled and the cost of the plunder became apparent; and after the collapse politicians in Iceland moralised that the reconstruction of the country should rest on a national Viking foundation of equality.[13]
Wherever we look, at all times, how a people sees itself is shaped by its image of the past, an image that invariably gets exploited for the benefit of politics and business. So people often play fast and loose with the past, depending on the interests they are trying to promote.
But interpretations of this kind do nothing to alter the fact that the settlement of Iceland was a real historical event of unique importance, not least because of the ancient literature it eventually led to. This literature describes the settlers’ first encounters with an untouched environment and draws up a broad picture of the lives, loves and fates of the first inhabitants and their views of the supernatural, their own selves and the world around them. A society comes into being. The people who now live in Iceland or speak of going “home” to Iceland from wherever they might have been living abroad require a sense of communality based on shared experience, memories and values. In this the land itself plays a big part and speaks to people through the literature.
Circumstances are very different from when the old Romantic conception of a golden age in the distant past held sway, of a noble race of glorious heroes seeking Iceland as a place where they could guard their freedoms. Such ideas served well enough in their own time, but modern-day Icelanders no longer view the heroics of the old warriors with unqualified admiration; nor do they see themselves as a nation of independent farmers, the direct descendants of the men and women who settled the country a thousand years ago. The nation is not, and never has been, homogeneous, any more than any other country: it only exists that way as a concept. People from all parts of the world have now chosen to make Iceland their home and become part of the Icelandic nation, and these people naturally desire their part in the cultural legacy of the ancient age alongside those living there already. False notions of cultural nationalism cannot be allowed to exclude recent immigrants to Iceland, any more than anyone else, from taking an interest in the multifaceted immigrant culture that was there from the outset. The official view of society has changed since the cultural life of the nation was dictated by educated, middle-aged men who could identify themselves with the chieftainly class of the ancient Commonwealth. Women take a full and active part in public life, the religious life of the nation has diversified, and many things that were previously invisible have now come to the surface. An encouraging example is the movement for gay rights of which the people of Scandinavia have been in the forefront; this new attitude stands out starkly against the prejudice of former times which we find in the saga accounts of the chieftain Guðmundur the Powerful, whose relationships with men form a theme in several of the sagas.[14]
Traditionally the Icelanders liked to see themselves reflected in their ancient literature as a race of fair-haired, barrel-chested, sword-bearing Vikings. This national self-image no longer applies. And quite properly so: a country’s view of itself needs constant debate and revision to ensure that it does not become fixed in old and outdated modes of thinking.
In scholarship, as in all other areas of society, the past is shaped by the present. In the seventeenth century the Swedes discovered the old Icelandic sagas of legendary Swedish kings and warriors—Hrólfur kraki and the like—and used them to concoct a glorious past that was intended to reinforce the ideological basis behind the Swedish monarchy of the time.[15] In the nineteenth century it suited nationalistically inclined Norwegians and Germans to talk up the idea of a strong and unbroken oral tradition in ancient times in order to claim a part in the medieval Icelandic texts, which they viewed as having roots going back to even more ancient times in Norway and ultimately to the broader Germanic cultural area. Icelandic scholars favoured the opposite course, placing the emphasis on the centrality of the author—the Icelandic author—in the writing; to them this was Icelandic literature.[16]
With the growth of pan-European sentiment after the Second World War and the increasing popularity of the idea of a common European self-image, scholarship was forced to re-examine nationalistic attitudes to history. This impetus has reinforced a grants policy that encouraged research that sought to promote the shared in the mental world of Europeans. Rather than investigate literary history within the borders of countries individually, the emphasis was placed on showing how literature at all times had been nourished by an intellectual life without borders—as with folktales, the most international stories of them all. In this sense we are fully justified in viewing old Icelandic literature as a part of a common European literary tradition and in speaking of Snorri as a European, in placing the formation of nation states in Scandinavia in the context of the development of the Church and royal power elsewhere in Europe, etc. Academic research along these lines has tended to be well regarded by European grant and funding bodies.[17]
By reducing the emphasis on national considerations, scholarship has achieved a certain balance. Nobody any longer claims that an oral tradition can survive unaltered for centuries within a particular language area and preserve original stories verbatim from ancient times. And it is fully accepted that ideological and cultural currents flow from country to country, triggering new ideas independent of nationality and being worked on and adapted in the light of local conditions, flexible to personal interests and each individual’s point of view.[18]
However, the unique and the original always arouses greater interest than the general and the common. So critics have generally focussed on what distinguishes Old Icelandic literature from the literatures of other peoples rather than on the many features they share with continental religious, scholastic and courtly models. The general, however, is every bit as necessary as the individual for life to operate smoothly. For instance, we take it for granted that people in Iceland learned to build roads and bridges and houses as soon as the economic conditions were in place to emulate technological developments in such matters elsewhere in our part of the world. But even this was not inevitable. In many parts of the world it has proved impossible to create comparable conditions or to educate aboriginal peoples to the point where they can undertake projects of this kind under their own auspices, in spite of well-intentioned and often effective development aid. In Iceland the creation of a modern society succeeded largely as a result of the ideological groundwork laid down during the Enlightenment and in the independence movement of the nineteenth century, and in this a significant part was the high regard paid to learning and education, an attitude that people traced all the way back to ancient times. The Romantic notion of a golden age of great practical and mental accomplishments in the past provided an inspiration to look for progress in the present. It is a truth both old and new that in order to have belief in themselves and come to grips with the tasks that life puts before them, people need to have an aim and a purpose in their lives.
A thorough rethinking of our ideas about the settlement age and the old literature in the spirit of our times is long overdue. Among those who came to Iceland in the original wave were men and women of different levels of society and origins and with a range of religious ideas.[19] By evening up gender ratios and giving greater weight to the multiculturalism among the settlers we can revise the old standard image with its admiration primarily directed at the weapon-bearing Nordic Viking standing proud in the prow of his ship, striding fearlessly into battle, and “putting his faith in his own might and main.” This was the prototype that the infant Egill envisaged as his glorious future in Egils saga, and this model was later inculcated into boys in Iceland once they were old enough to cherish hopes of finishing up as hard-drinking, silver-tongued poets standing up to the authorities abroad and at odds with God and man but friends to their friends—telling tales of their prowess in the good old days, as Egill had done in his high old age as he tottered about blind and worn under the watchful eye of his stepdaughter Þórdís at Mosfell, nursing fond thoughts of having his silver scattered among the crowds gathered at the Alþingi and stirring them up against each other.
In line with the Zeitgeist of our times we like to look beyond the centrality of the men who most determined what was committed to writing in the Middle Ages and consider the part of the nameless men and women who transmitted traditional learning for centuries without ever putting quill to parchment. And it gratifies our enthusiasm for multiculturalism to highlight the international origins of the first Icelanders in Norway, Ireland and Britain. The early history of Iceland can act as an inspiration to make newcomers welcome and allot them a part in the multicultural past that connects with the present through the land itself and the main language spoken in the country. The probability is that the forgotten women of Icelandic history were, many of them, of Gaelic origins, as the written sources and genetic research indicate. Women without doubt played a major part in the transmission of the edda poems like “Völuspá” and many of the heroic lays. In that context we need to bear in mind that the systematic presentation of the mythological material in Snorri’s Edda and the repeated references in there to phenomena visible in the sky are evidence that the edda poems were a part of a system of myth and knowledge that people used to explain to themselves the world as it appeared before their naked eyes.[20]
The first learned astronomical texts from the Mediterranean area were translated into Norse during Snorri’s lifetime. Like all peoples, the Icelanders had observed the heavens and were well aware of the special status of the planets, following the course of the sun and moon across the sky, seen from our standpoint down on earth. At the time the planets, like the days of the week, bore the names of the pre-Christian gods—Týr, Óðin, Þór and Freyja, known to us now as Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus. The translators also knew and referred to the traditional Norse names of the constellations, as in “Andromeda, daughter of Sepheus, wife of Perseus, sits in the Milky Way in the place we call the Wolf’s Maw” (úlfskjaftur, referring to the Hyades in the sign of Taurus).
The scholastic learning transmitted within the Church served Snorri as the inspiration and model for one of the most original ideas of the European Middle Ages—that of bringing together in a book the poetical and mythological lore that he had grown up with and acquired during his oral training while he was preparing himself for his future career as a poet and politician. At the beginning of Snorri’s Edda the Swedish king Gylfi goes to meet the gods disguised as an old man in order to find out why they are as wise and powerful as they are. Gylfi is confronted by an illusion cast by the gods but gets to ask them questions about the world. In their replies the gods tell him about the creation of the cosmos and the ordering of all things, with numerous references to phenomena “in the sky.” For instance, in the sky one can see the white, translucent “ash Yggdrasill” and many other “places” (staðir) and “halls” (salir) associated with different divine beings. Finally the gods tell how the world will perish and send Gylfi on his way. The illusion immediately dissipates and Gylfi is left standing on open ground, where he sees the world as it appears to our human eyes.
It is possible to read Snorri’s lore such that he used the sky as a kind of memory key to the phenomena of mythology—as if the mythology was the conventional way of speaking about the celestial sphere. We can imagine ourselves sprawled out in Snorri’s hot pool at Reykholt beside the master himself on a dark winter’s night and listening to him telling about a great tree that stands above the sky, white “as the translucent membrane inside an eggshell” (“sem himna sú er skjall heitir, er innan liggr við eggskurn”)—and then we could look up and see the Milky Way rising like a translucent white tree trunk across the vault of the heavens.
With the Milky Way as his starting point, Snorri could point out all the other phenomena “in the sky” that he lists in the Edda. As well as the gods who ride along the rainbow Bifröst up into the heavens, Snorri says that “in the sky” one may see an eagle, a hawk, swans, dogs, wolves, horses, stags, dragons and an ox; “in the sky” around the ash tree there are wells, a trumpet, a giant and numerous “places” and “halls” that he names specifically. These terms, “places” (staðir) and “halls” (salir), may refer to the conventional distinction between constellations (stjörnumerki) on the one hand and sun signs (sólmerki), signs of the zodiac, on the other, since in the best-known of the mythological poems in the edda, Völuspá, it says that “the sun did not know where it had its halls, the stars did not know where they had their places” (“sól það né vissi hvar hún sali átti, stjörnur það né vissu hvar þær staði áttu.”)
All human societies since the dawn of time have had their own understanding of the heavenly sphere and the regular and irregular movements of the stars and planets and other phenomena that appear there. This understanding is invariably expressed through myths and ordered into a system that the most learned in any culture have at their command. The mythological understanding of the sky is older than all written sources, including Snorri’s Edda, and thus part of the shared heritage of mankind from before our common ancestors moved out of Africa. No branch of learning is older in the minds of thinking men, nor better adapted to unite different cultural currents here on earth under the canopy of stars. In view of the premises on which people founded their learning, mythology was the logical way of interpreting what appeared before their eyes; people of the stone age were just as intelligent and/or stupid as people are today.[21]
Snorri grew up while there was still life in the old mythological cosmology that travelled north and developed in its own way after the end of the ice age. But Snorri would never have brought this knowledge together and organised it into a form suitable for putting down in writing without the benefit of the best that scholastic education and the written culture of the Church had to offer when he was growing up at the most important educational centre in Iceland in the late twelfth century.
After Snorri’s time people’s knowledge of this mythological worldview receded into the mists of the past, though odd points lived on on the lips of ordinary folk. Even today in Iceland, when parhelia (sun dogs) appear on either side of the sun, one before it, one after, people speak of the sun being in a “wolf clutch” (“sólin er í úlfakreppu”), the phrase referring back to the wolves Sköll and Hati that Snorri says ran in front of and behind Sól (the sun). A halo and moondogs are also often seen around the moon and Snorri’s description of Máni (the moon) can be interpreted by this present-day Icelandic usage. Snorri says that Máni has taken “the children Bil and Hjúki from the earth and they carry the pail Sægur on their shoulders with the pole Simul. These children accompany Máni, as can be seen from earth.” Without the modern Icelandic usage it would seem far-fetched to explain Snorri’s words in terms of visible celestial phenomena—phenomena that we now explain through crystal formation and refraction of light rather than through appeal to the ancient mythological understanding of the world we live in.
The illusions of narrative art under the clear sky (in Gylfi’s illusion) thus lead us into a world of gods and stirring happenings where at first sight there are only points of light on a dark vault of the heavens, with a few planets wandering unhurriedly within the firmament and a sun and a moon governing day and night alternatively. In this way the visible world becomes an all-purpose memory key to the mythology and the poems and stories associated with it, all the way down to the realms of man that the court poets composed about and the sagas tell about.[22]
To better understand the ancient written texts we need to be aware of the oral tradition that lies behind them. These texts appeal constantly to background knowledge that their original audiences must have had and applied when listening to them. The dominant themes and motifs of the longest and best-known of the family sagas, Njáls saga—reputation and honour, killing and revenge, burnings and settlement—are primed at the very outset simply by a telling reference to the figure of Sighvatur the Red, a man who, as we know from The Book of Settlements, was associated with comparable events in the generations before the main characters in the saga itself.[23] Similarly, the characterisation of the chieftain Guðmundur the Powerful in several of the sagas feeds constantly on people’s familiarity with him as a historical character outside the written texts.[24]
By dissecting the sagas still further and disregarding their literary qualities, it is possible to show how, at times, they act as a vehicle for knowledge about lands that people preserved memories of or knew stories about—Russia and the Baltic, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Ireland, the British Isles, Greenland and North America/Vínland. The sagas are therefore not only remarkable for their narrative art but they also provide us with an insight into the many and varied functions of storytelling in a world that was just beginning to embrace dedicated teaching manuals in different subjects as its main channel for education. In oral society learning had been passed on from man to man through poems and stories. We still see remnants of such methods among fishermen today. To outsiders, fishermen’s tales often seem to be solely about the big ones that got away. This is to disregard the fact that through their stories fishermen are passing on their ideas about the ethics of their sport and the proper treatment of fishing sites, explaining their experience of particular grounds, and teaching each other where the best chances of catching fish are to be found and how to go about it. This is how anglers learn their lakes and rivers. The size of the fish and whether or not it gets away is not really the point.[25]
In conclusion, it is worth having another look at Snorri Sturluson and his nephew Sturla Þórðarson, who together are counted among the pioneers when it comes to the writing of the best of the old saga texts—the former for Heimskringla, the history of the kings of Norway, the “Edda” covering the mythology, and Egils saga; the latter for a large part of the surviving accounts of the civil wars of the thirteenth century in Iceland in the so-called Sturlunga saga collection, and Landnámabók, “The Book of Settlements,” (and with, some think, some involvement in Grettis saga, Laxdæla saga, Njáls saga and possibly some of the other family sagas). We need to pay proper tribute to the innovation and wealth of ideas evidenced in the works ascribed to Snorri. His genius is the principal point of light in the fire that took hold in his lifetime and still burns bright to us nowadays out of the darkness of the past. Snorri saw a way of using the textbook form of the Middle Ages as a vehicle for a part of the mythological lore that young men training as skálds had previously assimilated from the lips of older poets under the starry sky that stood eternal guard over the ancient and subtle wisdom of men of former ages. This is how his Edda came about. The same originality of thinking lies behind the creation of Egils saga. The oldest manuscript containing fragments of Egils saga is from the middle of the thirteenth century, considerably earlier than any other saga remains, and on this basis it could be the first of the sagas to be written. If it is correct that Snorri’s innovations encompassed both his Edda and the first of the family sagas, we have to put him on a level with Dante in the history of world literature as the first author in any modern sense.[26]
The preserved versions of Landnámabók are not primary works of the same kind as the works attributed to Snorri. The material on the settlements was collected piecemeal over a long period but the oldest complete version is Sturla Þórðarson’s “Sturlubók,” with the material selected and presented in the way Sturla wanted to have it once he had risen to the top rank of society. Sturla left us with a book that contains the oldest and only account that exists of the original human settlement of a land the size of Iceland. It is the only book in the world that captures the very beginning of the interaction of man with his environment—without resorting to out-and-out myth. In most places the settlers came to an untouched country that they had to bend to their needs, not just with cultivation but, just as importantly, with placenames, stories and measurements that influenced the location of farms, the seats of chieftains, boundaries and assembly sites. The Book of Settlements alone is enough to mark out a special place for Iceland at the rich table of world culture. This remarkable book attracted and absorbed stories and memories linked to the land and its first inhabitants from all its fjords and valleys. But all the information is filtered through Sturla himself to serve his own particular purposes. He uses the learning from the past to support the aspirations of his own dynasty and to elevate himself and his family at the expense of his political opponents at the time.[27]
Book culture took over from oral tradition in people’s struggle for social status, power and honour. Men laid claim to ownership of land by appeal to family connections to the original settlers; chieftaincies and influence were strengthened through bonds of kinship and friendship that were described in the sagas; and what enhanced people’s standing came in large part from the achievements of their forefathers and -mothers. What mattered most here was being able to tell impressive enough stories. Events and people are not remarkable in themselves; it is rather the poems and stories about the events and people that determine what is deemed worthy of being remembered and cultivated by those who come later. Reality is a shifting sand, fleeting and transitory; it is the stories that live on.
It is exceptional, however one views it, to have ancient texts that draw up such a broad and comprehensive picture of a long-gone culture as we find in Old Icelandic literature—a culture whose roots reach far back before Christianity and the book learning that developed around the Mediterranean and spread from there out across Europe and beyond to the entire inhabited world. And it is rare indeed that the language these texts are written in should be close enough to a language still spoken today, the language of modern Iceland, that modern Icelanders can still read them without having to go through a course of study in a language now long dead. As a result, modern Icelanders have a special connection not only to the past and an ancient system of knowledge but also to the framework in which the events are set—the landscape itself, near and far. The riches contained in these stories are so special that they cannot do other than shape the self-image of the people who live in the country today and we call Icelanders. These riches are also of such a kind that they can be shared and enjoyed by everyone else through translations that open them up for the rest of the world.
* Translated by Nicholas Jones.
