The world owes a debt to Icelandic culture, not merely for the vast body of early mediaeval writings that have their own intrinsic literary worth, but also for the historical information they have preserved in this literature. They have also preserved much knowledge of pre-Christian Heathen beliefs. The stories on the "At Saga's Stream" C.D. cannot hope to even begin to represent a cross section of this body of literature, but hopefully will encourage listeners to read for themselves more of the myths, sagas and folktales of the Icelanders. To set the stories in context I will attempt a brief synopsis of the development of Icelandic literature.
The mythological stories, such as "The Necklace Brisingamen" and "The Mead of Inspiration", are taken from the Poetic, or Elder, Edda (and also from Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, of which more later). The Poetic Edda is divided into mythological and heroic poems. These poems were originally the product of a purely oral culture; they were composed in the poet's mind, without the use of writing and recited, transmitted and preserved by the spoken word alone. There is linguistic and literary evidence that the poems originated at a time before the settlement of Iceland. The earliest surviving Edda manuscript is the Codex Regius, probably written down about 1270, though the scholar Finnur Jonsson believed an almost complete collection to have been in existence as early as 1200 [1].
Some scholars (Mohr in 1938 and Kuhn in 1939) have claimed much of the Edda for Lower Germany and Denmark, maintaining that the Edda is influenced by ballads in forms older than those in which we now know them. Ballads were known in Iceland as early as the C12th and the later poems may have been influenced by these ballads as a few of the later Eddaic poems have something of the romance associated with popular ballads [2]. The poems might be about heroes who came from countries other than Iceland, for example the "Helgikvitha" stories come from Denmark and "Volundarkvitha" from Germany, however, the poems in their current form are Norse creations. Moreover, whilst there are heroic poems from mainland Europe, for example the Old High German "Lay of Hildebrand", the subject matter of which can be compared to the Icelandic heroic lays, there is nothing comparable with the mythological lays. Although one could assume that the ancient Germans composed poetry about their gods (and Tacitus does mention German traditional songs which celebrate the birth of an earth-born god called Tuisto [3]), there is nothing to show that poems comparable to the Eddas were known, or that the mythological poems we have today came from anywhere else other than Norway and Iceland.
One Eddaic poem, the "Voluspa" has been shown to have influenced Arnorr Jarlaskald's memorial lay in honour of the Earl of Orkney, Thorfinnr, who is known to have died in 1064. Voluspa must therefore have been composed before 1064. The imagery of the poem, with its earth sinking in the sea, its high leaping fire, its fierce steam (v.57) and its sundered crags (v.52), suggests one who knew Iceland's eruptions but the poet's description of mistletoe as a tree rising high on a plain (v.32) [4] suggests one who did not know the woods of Scandinavia . Iceland then, that had long been dependent on Norway for timber supplies, would seem to be the home of this particular poet.
The poems were composed according to prosodic rules. The Anglo-Saxons and Germans had one type of poetic metre for their narrative poems but the Eddaic poems have three, more complex metres (the complexity was mainly the introduction of rules governing the number of syllables each line could have). The metres were called "Fornyrthislag" ("Old Metre"), "Malahattr" ("Speech Metre") and "Ljothahattr" ("(Magic) Song Metre"). It is in this latter metre that I have attempted to render my poem to Saga, Othinn's daughter, the Goddess of Storytelling.
A Ljothahattr verse comprises a first line divided by a "caesura" or pause into two half-lines. Each half-line has two accented initial syllables. Either or both of the first half-line's accented syllables may alliterate with each other, but one of them must alliterate with the first accented syllable of the second half-line. (These are the standard accentual and alliterative rules for the Anglo-Saxon line [5] and for all lines of the other two Eddaic metres). The second line has no pause, three accented syllables and any two, sometimes three, of them alliterating.
All vowels and "j" alliterate with each other, so "singer" can alliterate with "Sokkvabekk". Combinations of "s" and a consonant are kept distinct so, although they do in my poem, "Saga" cannot strictly alliterate with "stories", but "spree" can alliterate with "spin"; "sv", pronounced "sw" in Old Norse, is treated as "s" followed by a vowel, so "sway" could alliterate with "sing".
The first and second half-lines both had ideally two, sometimes three, rarely four, unaccented syllables, meaning a full line could have a total of between eight and twelve syllables. (These are the syllabic rules for all Fornyrthislag lines.) The second line had no limitation as to the number of syllables. All the above rules for the first and second lines were then repeated for the third and fourth. (A Malahattr half-line had ideally three, sometimes four, rarely five unaccented syllables, so a full line could have between ten and fourteen syllables.) The Anglo-Saxon alliterative line had no syllabic limitations and so is easier to render into modern English. For the Norse poets, with their highly inflected language, these syllabic constraints were not as onerous as they are to a composer in modern English, a language which has lost many of its old inflections and relies instead on the use of subsidiary words. The lines of the Saga poem therefore fall a little short of the syllabic ideal.
Writing came to Iceland after the formal adoption of Christianity in 1000. In the first three decades of the C11th there were probably only foreign clerical teachers. However, as soon as Iceland produced its own educated men, chieftains preferred their sons to be educated by these men who had both a clerical, European education and an appreciation of their own traditions.
The southern Icelanders were the first to adopt the learned culture of Europe, founding three schools at Skalaholt, Haukdalr and Oddi. The most famous scholars of these three schools were Isleifr, Teitr, Ari and Saemundr Sigfusson. The latter was the first scholastic historian in Iceland and by C17th people believed he had written the Edda and in folklore Saemundr the Wise had become a magician! Because of their European connections they could combine foreign learning with the traditional culture of their own people. Importantly then "Foreign learning and foreign letters helped them to preserve ancient memories and to express traditional thoughts" [2]. In many of the religious works of Europe, theology had given way to story and legend. As such texts were more entertaining they became very popular in Iceland, particularly the Acts of the Apostles. From these, Icelanders learnt how biographies and wonder tales could be written in books. "It is unlikely that the sagas of kings and of Icelanders, or even the sagas of ancient heroes, would have developed as they did unless several generations of Icelanders had been trained in hagiographic narrative." [2].
In the C12th, monks of Thingeyrar, such as Gunnlaugr Leifsson (d.1218), began to write sagas of Norwegian kings and Icelandic bishops to show the moral worth of their heroes. Prior to this works such as the "Landnamabok" and Ari the Learned's "Islendingabok" had been written, telling in a very straightforward manner of the settlement of Iceland. If Ari's work was worthy but dull, the monks' works were too overly fanciful to be convincing. Gunnlaugr even translated Geoffrey of Monmouth's "The Prophecies of Merlin" into Icelandic verse. Soon, however, Icelandic literature was to develop in a modern way; Karl Jonsson, Abbot of Thingeyrar, (d.1215) wrote the saga of King Sverrir, whom Karl knew personally. Previously, sagas had been written about people long dead who were idealised, their enemies demonised. Karl admired his friend but knew him as a human personality; he could describe him accurately - he was a fine figure when sat, nobly dressed, on the high seat but standing was clearly short in the leg. Similarly, later chapters of "Orkneyinga saga" (the saga covers several generations) were based on eye witness accounts. It is important to understand that the form of these sagas was a literary one; aside from the verses the characters often speak, which like the Edda's verse, have been preserved from (or at worst, some are an imitation of) an oral tradition, these stories were written down in a very different manner to that in which they would have been told orally. They show a conscious literate style in structure, characterisation and plot.
Of great relevance here is the action taken in 1190 by Archbishop Eirikr of Trondheim in Norway to separate the church from the state in Iceland; he forbade Icelandic bishops from conferring holy orders upon Icelandic chieftains, or "gothar", unless the gothi first gave up his secular title. Educated gothar than began to turn their literary attentions away from mainland European culture and towards their own traditions.
Not least amongst these was Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) who wrote many different kinds of work. Unlike previous sagas of St. Olaf, his Olaf is not just a saint but an ambitious warlord. He understands and sympathises with the motives of Olaf's enemies. He omitted the fantastical elements of previous sagas about Olaf, for example Olaf's killing of a mermaid revered by Heathens, and rationalised others, for example when Olaf and his men are trapped aboard ship, earlier sagas tell they escape by prayers answered by an isthmus miraculously opening through which they can then sail; Snorri has his Olaf make his men dig a channel through it. His "Heimskringla", on the kings of Norway, corrects the contradictions of previous histories by means of his personal judgement.
His Prose Edda is still a work in print down to this day. Designed to preserve the techniques of skaldic verse and an understanding of the poetic circumlocutions, or "kennings", it employed, he preserved much poetry and retold many stories of the old gods (and showed himself to be a fine storyteller in the process) which add greatly to our knowledge of old myths and legends.
In looking now in more detail at the great Family Sagas of the Icelanders, the polished prose outcome of generations of literary composition, we must first look to its opposite, the oral and, to modern minds, highly artificial verse of the skalds, the Norse poets. The skalds practised a different kind of poetry to that found in the Poetic Edda. If the Eddaic poetry could be described as the anonymous oral equivalent of folk art, then skaldic poetry is the self-conscious, highly wrought fine art of the professional.
Its origins go back to the C10th, or possibly the C9th. Iceland, though not the richest of lands agriculturally, provided fertile ground for poetry; with little readily available materials for the visual arts, creativity seems to have become focused on the spoken word. Here skaldic verse would thrive when it had been forgotten elsewhere. As Eddaic verse was narrative poetry, so skaldic verse was descriptive. Metres abounded, there was endless experimentation. The prosody was even more complex. In the best known skaldic metre, "Drottkvaett" ("Court Metre"), often used for praising lords, not only were lines accentual, bound by alliteration and syllabic limitations (each line had six syllables, three stressed, three unstressed, more were permissible if the syllables were short, less if they were long) but also alternate lines could employ firstly internal rhyme, or "athalhending" (gram reki bond af londum), secondly consonance, or "skothending" (sva skyldi goth gjalda), that is to say syllables with different vowels but the syllables' terminal consonants are the same). Moreover, each line had to end with a "trochee", a word with a long stressed initial syllable and a terminal short unstressed syllable. Snorri's Edda is a handbook for skaldic verse [6].
One of the ways of ensuring that your thoughts in a purely oral culture are remembered is to think and express memorable thoughts [7]. Thoughts expressed in skaldic verse are memorable for the craftsmanship alone that they show. A verse, spoken at a dramatic moment, would fix that event in the folk memory. The first speaking of such a verse could later be inserted into a saga at the appropriate point.
In the C11th ever more conscious efforts were made to remember family sagas. In the C13th they were written down in a revised literate manner. Some of the verses in sagas will have been composed contemporaneously with the events they concern, others must have been composed at a later date, either orally or when the saga was written.
The written Family Sagas originated under the influence of the Kings' Sagas, just as the Kings' Sagas had originated under the influence of the hagiographies. Saga writers could draw upon written records; earlier sagas, whether of Icelanders, kings or saints; oral prose and verse; lists of genealogies; law books; works on foreign history; Landnamabok and Islendingabok, some of which, or versions of which, are now lost. (There is also a collection of sagas known as the "Sturlunga Sagas" that, though dealing mainly with quarrels and feuds like the Family Sagas, are concerned only with the most powerful gothar. They were all written contemporaneously with the events described and are therefore thought to contain reliable, albeit often subjectively reported information [8].)
"Brennu-Njals saga", written in the C13th, shows signs of many of the above influences, foreign and Icelandic. What we learn of Njal's nature is probably true of the writer and of the Family Sagas in general. They are traditional in values and in taste but with sometimes foreign influences discernible - in Njal's Saga forgiveness wins out over the traditional virtue of revenge. Whatever its value as history, the author's purpose was primarily literary, for what is before us today is a historical theme used to create an epic in prose.
The historicity of sagas, however, is dubious. Of one, "Hrafnkels saga Freysgotha", it was previously thought to most accurately represent historical fact. Furthermore, that it had been little altered when written down. Yet the scholar Sigurth Nordal has shown that many of its leading characters never existed [2]. It was written late in the C13th and is perhaps then the first historical novel. It must have been due to its convincing realism that many thought it factual. It was in the C13th saga that the Icelanders showed what they were capable of and, as important as their poetry was, their greatest achievement was a prose style unsurpassed in mediaeval Europe.
I cannot hope to adequately represent this large body of saga-writing on a recording. The one saga I chose to take one series of episodes from is "Egils saga Skalla-Grimssonar". It is known that it was written in Borg, the dark hero's birthplace and also where Snorri Sturluson later lived for five or six years. Turville-Petre says in his book that the saga "appears to have been written during the best years of Snorri's life and it is hard to see who but Snorri could have been its author" [2]. However, I think it is hard to see simply because we will never know how many people there were capable of writing the saga of whom we have no record.
The saga has a great deal of information packed into it and has the stark realism and crisp, telegraphic style typical of the sagas. No other saga is so rich in poetry. The poem recited in the final saga episode of the recording shows Egil's poetic craftsmanship; it is based on Fornyrthislag but with a smoother and stricter metre [2]. What is so unusual is that it has rhyming end-lines. Egil may have heard rhyming Latin hymns whilst at the court of Aethelstan of Wessex. Whatever prompted this, he was an adaptive and innovative skald. The poem came to be known as the "Hofuthlausn", "Head-ransom". Though conventional in its expression, it is a fine poem of its type and lacks nothing - save sincerity! Another long poem in the saga, is "Sonatorrek", "Loss of Sons", which gives an at times startling modern depiction, in expression if not in form, of grief; chapter 85's verses do the same for his feelings on old age [9].
Egil's C10th skaldic verse was never surpassed. Icelanders came to dominate as the court poets of Scandinavia but by the C12th they are seen to be using the simpler Eddaic verse-forms. This implies that they enjoyed and studied the Eddaic poems but perhaps also that rulers and their courtiers were beginning to find it harder to appreciate the metrical complexity and abstruse euphuisms of the Icelandic skalds. Einarr Skulason, a descendant of Skalla-Grimr, composed a poem against King Sveinn Svithandi (d.1157) of Denmark because of non-payment for a poem. In it he states that the king would rather listen to pipes and fiddles than skaldic verse [2]. Jeff Opland shows how the skalds in Scandinavia suffered the same competition from "low brow" travelling entertainers in the C12th that Anglo-Saxon scopas in England suffered in the C8th [10]. The influence of minstrelsy was waxing, that of skaldic verse waning. Skaldic verse could survive fundamental changes of ethos for it enjoyed a brief swan song when its poets turned to Christian themes.
Some Icelandic literature of the C13th is published in English today. However, the end of the C19th was a high point in Victorian interest in Vikings. William Morris in collaboration with Eirikr Magnusson, produced their "Saga Library" and did much to put Icelandic literature before the English speaking world.
It is from an earlier publication [11] that I have retold a story taken from a C14th manuscript, "Sorla thattr". Gary Aho, in his introduction to the 1996 edition of the book [12] makes it clear that though the style of the works are Morris's, there would have been no Saga Library without Magnusson. He also informs us that a biographer's bibliography of Magnusson's work runs to fourteen pages of twelve categories of articles in four languages; he was an expert on Icelandic verse forms and he translated "Pilgrim's Progress" and "The Tempest" into Icelandic. He was also an associate of the leading agitators for Icelandic independence. On their trip together to Iceland in 1871 he displayed to Morris his knowledge of the contemporary and saga-age significance of every site visited, the importance and history of every farm.
I have purposefully omitted the events depicted in the final chapter of "The Tale of Hethinn and Hogni" (which I have called "The Never-ending Battle") where a Christian warrior, Ivar Gleam-bright, brings an end to the 143 year struggle. As I see it this is a Christian gloss on an essentially Heathen tale, evidenced by no reference appearing to it in Snorri's synopsis in "Skaldskarpamal" ch.50 [6]. I prefer Skaldskarparmal's ending, given as a note to the story in the Morris and Magnusson translation: "And so it is said in songs, that in this wise shall the Host of Hedinn abide the Doom of the Gods."
The folktales of Iceland remained an oral tradition until the systematic collection of them began in the C19th after the publication by the Brothers Grimm of "Kinder und Hausmarchen" between 1812-15. Though prior to this, in the C17th, the likes of Jon Gudmundsson and Arni Magnusson had collected some folktales. In 1852, Jon Arnason and Magnus Grimsson published "Islenzk aefintyri". Arnason continued collecting until his death in 1888. His entire collection ran to six volumes [13]. The folktales were written down as they were told, in a plain straightforward manner by ordinary people without literary pretensions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
References:
1. The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia, Terry Gunnel, D.S. Brewer, Cambridge 1995.
2. The Origins of Icelandic Literature, G. Turville-Petre, Oxford Clarendon Press 1953.
3. The Agricola and the Germania, Tacitus, trans. Mattingly & Handford, Penguin Classics 1970.
4. The Poetic Edda, trans. H.A. Bellows, New York 1923.
5. Traditional Oral Epic, J.M. Foley, University of California Press 1990.
6. Edda, Snorri Sturluson, trans. Anthony Faulkes, Everyman Classics 1987.
7. Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong, Routledge, London & New York 1993.
8. Viking Age Iceland, Jesse Byock, Penguin Books 2001.
9. Egil's Saga, trans. Hermann Palsson & Paul Edwards, Penguin Classics 1976.
10. Anglo-Saxon Oral Poetry, Jeff Opland, Yale University Press, New Haven & London 1980.
11. Three Northern Love Stories, William Morris & Eirikr Magnusson, Ellis & White, London 1875.
12. Three Northern Love Stories, William Morris & Eirikr Magnusson, Thoemmes Press 1996.
13. Icelandic Folk and Fairy Tales, Trans. M. & H. Hallmundsson, Iceland Review Library, Reykjavik 1987.
Other works consulted:
Hrafnkel's Saga, trans. Hermann Palsson, Penguin Classics 1971.
Njal's Saga, trans. Hermann Palsson & Magnus Magnusson, Penguin Classics 1960.
Spellcraft - Old English Heroic Legends, Kathleen Herbert, Anglo-Saxon Books 1993.