The Icelandic Sagas
Summary
Iceland's outstanding contribution to world culture is its medieval literature, especially the "Sagas of Icelanders", a unique genre of realistic and secular prose narratives written in the 12th and 13th centuries. No similar writing was known in the other Nordic countries. Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241), the greatest Icelandic historian of the Middle Ages, wrote the history of the kings of Norway, Heimskringla (Orb of the World), which is acclaimed as one of the classics of world literature, and a textbook of poetics known as the Prose Edda. The late 13th century contributed perhaps the greatest saga of the period, Njáls saga.
An authoritative complete English-language edition of the Icelandic Sagas appeared for the first time in print in 1997, the five volume Viking Age Classics - The Complete Saga of Icelanders.
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Eddas and sagas |
The poetic heritage comprised two highly dissimilar traditions, skaldic and Eddaic. The Eddaic poems are composed in simple metres and related, in form and subject matter, to the earliest poetry in Old Englishand Old High German. Most of them either deal with mythological subjects or tell the tragic stories of larger-than-life heroes far back in the Teutonic past. The limited corpus of known Eddaic poems (the so-called Poetic Edda, all of it anonymous) is preserved in a few manuscripts, above all the mid-13th century Codex regius. While their oral preservation must have been fluid to some extent, parts of the corpus may have existed in some form for several centuries before they were committed to writing. Eddaic poetry at its best reaches, by its direct yet elevated expression, a rare poetic perfection.
The skaldic style developed in Norway out of the Germanic court tradition of delivering poetic eulogies to the king or ruler. Skaldic poetry is characterized by a complicated metrical form and a highly artificial idiom, with the sentences interlaced in a contorted manner and everyday vocabulary replaced by rare poetic words (heiti) and complicated circumlocutions (kenningar). A typical skaldic strophe must be assembled like a puzzle and solved like a riddle; yet it can be effective in its forceful expression of concentrated metaphor. After the 10th century this tradition became more and more the exclusive domain of Icelandic poets who might expect handsome rewards for their craft at the Norwegian court and even from other Scandinavian rulers. The skaldic form was adapted at an early stage to Christian religious poetry, and a number of Icelanders showed themselves capable of using this unwieldy form for occasional verses. The skalds learned their trade by studying older poetry of which a large body was known, much of it attributed to 9th- and 10th-century authors.
A leading skald of his generation was the Sturlung lord Snorri Sturluson (d. 1241). Besides his own poetic production he composed a sort of handbook for aspiring skalds, the Edda (or Prose Edda). As many of the skaldic kennings contained mythological references, Snorri included a compendium of pagan myths, making his Edda our richest source of information on Viking Age mythology.
With Snorri and his contemporaries, that peculiar art of prose narrative, the Icelandic saga, reached its mature phase. It developed earliest in the field of royal biography (mainly about the kings of Norway), either as individual or serial biographies. These so-called Kings' Sagas rose to artistic perfection in Snorri's Heimskringla (c. 1230), a serial biography of the Norwegian royal house from the mythological past to the late 12th century, centred on an in-depth portrayal of the reign of St. Ólafr Haraldsson (d. 1030), a Viking pirate-turned-missionary king and patron saint of his country.
Hagiography was well known in Iceland from translated works and some of the early Kings' Sagas treated holy or near-holy rulers. When two domestic bishops were declared saints, their lives were written (c. 1200), not only in Latin but in Icelandic as well. This was the beginning of biography treating domestic and contemporary (or recent) subjects; during the 13th century several bishops and secular leaders became the subjects of biographers whose ambition was historical and literary rather than hagiographic.
Icelandic oral tradition contained a wealth of tales, some with an historical element, some plainly fabulous or even mythological, set in Viking Age Scandinavia. This material was to some extent tapped by the writers of Kings' Sagas (and even foreign authors like the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus), and by c. 1200 Icelandic authors were beginning to compose written narrative expressly on the basis of this material, starting at the more historical end (e.g. Jómsvíkinga saga) and progressing towards the more fabulous (the genre of Fornaldarsögur – Sagas of Ancient Times). This sort of writing received inspiration from a different source when French vernacular epics became known in prose translations (from c. 1230), the so-called Riddarasögur or courtly romances. Their influence is felt in the Icelandic Romances, fictional compositions, classifiable as Fornaldarsögur or Riddarasögur according to their Scandinavian or more generally European setting.
The most original literary genre of medieval Iceland, the Family Sagas (or more properly Sagas of Icelanders), are set among Viking Age Icelanders, the anonymous authors applying lessons learnt from all of the above-mentioned types of prose narrative. These sagas developed from the more historical (drawing on genealogical and historical sources and seeking inspiration in local tradition) towards the more purely fictional. By the mid-13th century the genre had already produced some masterpieces of linguistic and narrative control, such as the long and firmly structured Egils saga (plausibly attributed to Snorri himself), the more romantic Laxdæla saga, and the short heroic tragedy of Gísla saga. The late 13th century contributed Njáls saga (or Brennu-Njáls saga, "Story of Burnt Nial"), the largest of the genre and most ambitious in scope, outstanding for the author's mastery of scene and his sophisticated character portrayals. His contemporaries perfected the more direct short-story approach in sagas like Hrafnkels saga, Bandamanna saga, and Auðunar þáttr.
The leading literary figure of the late 13th century was Snorri's nephew Sturla Þórðarson (d. 1284). He was the last master of the skaldic eulogy, the biographer of two contemporary kings of Norway, and the author of the earliest preserved compilation of Landnámabók. In the writing of contemporary Icelandic history he rose above the usual biographical approach with his Íslendinga saga which is a broad political history of the Sturlung family (including the author who is careful not to treat his own person differently from other protagonists) and its fateful rivalry with Earl Gizurr.
During the 14th century the ascendant literary genres were the prose romance, florid prose hagiography, and religious poetry which adapted ancient skaldic traditions to the tastes of High Gothic, most successfully in the Christ/Mary panegyric Lilja ("The Lily") by Eysteinn Ásgrímsson. As the last masterpiece among the Sagas of Icelanders, Grettis saga endows its outlaw hero with a flawed character that makes his superhuman prowess self-defeating.
Typical for the literary taste of the 14th century was the effort spent on large compendia and expanded versions of older works, e.g. Kings' Sagas. In this manner the Sturlunga saga, with its remarkable mass of detail on the last century of the "Commonwealth" period, was compiled on the basis of Sturla's Íslendinga saga with the total or partial inclusion of a number of individual biographies and other material. (Several older sagas only survive as interpolated fragments in these gargantuan compositions.) The 14th century also produced most of the largest and most exquisite vellum manuscripts, reflecting the great concentration of wealth in the country.
From the Viking Age, when Icelandic skalds made their art available at Norwegian courts, up to the 14th century, when Icelandic scribes frequently copied sagas for export to Norway, there existed close literary ties between the two countries. Not until the 13th century, when its vowel system underwent major changes, did Icelandic differ any more from the Norwegian dialects than they did from each other, and only in the late 14th century did drastic changes of Norwegian vocabulary and grammar seriously impede the mutual intelligibility of the two languages. Written texts and literary influences thus flowed freely between the countries; some Norwegian works are preserved in Icelandic manuscripts and vice versa; and sometimes it is hard to tell from which country a text originates. While saga writing was mainly an Icelandic occupation, Norwegian authors contributed to the early development of the Kings' Sagas and the courtly romance became known in Iceland through Norwegian translations.
The culture of medieval Iceland was, of course, not exclusively centred on literature. The visual arts, in a similar manner, combined Viking Age tradition with foreign models under lay and ecclesiastical patronage; sports and games enjoyed wide popularity; and the church managed to become the major influence on behaviour and opinion. Successful literary creation was in comparison only the irregular pursuit of a few people. Yet it is the most noteworthy aspect of medieval Iceland, both because of its uniqueness in the literary history of the West and because of its importance for the later history of the country.
Adapted from "Iceland - The Republic", Handbook published by the Central Bank of Iceland, ed. by Mr. Jóhannes Nordal and Mr. Valdimar Kristinsson, Reykjavik 1996. The Ministry is responsible for the adapted texts.
