Michael Ridpath's Blog - Posts Tagged "sagas"
Seeing a Man about a Saga
I needed someone to speak to about sagas. I found a lecturer in Icelandic Literature, Thorsteinn. His office was on the top floor of the old building of the University of Iceland. Rather unsettlingly, this reminded me a little of my trip to Berlin to research my 1930s novel: it had a touch of the Nazi Gothic about it.
Thorsteinn’s office was small and academic, with the exception of an unexplained Barbie doll on the top shelf. Nothing in Iceland is ever completely serious. There was a view over Reykjavík City Airport to Thingholt and the Hallgrímskirkja.
Just in front of the university is a rather elegant statue of an early Icelandic academic, Saemundur the Wise, and a seal. Like many future Icelanders, Saemundur studied abroad, at the Sorbonne in Paris, specializing in the devil and black magic. In the eleventh century, travel from France to Iceland was tricky, so Saemundur did a deal with the devil, who promised to take the form of a seal and give him a lift home. Saemundur hitched the lift, but as soon as he made landfall in Iceland he whacked the seal over the head with a bible. I suppose the moral of that tale is be careful about giving lifts to academics in Iceland, especially if they are carrying bibles.
I mentioned to Thorsteinn that my story was going to involve Tolkien and a lost saga. Back in England, I had read a lot of sagas, and a little about Tolkien. I was not at all surprised to discover that Tolkien was an expert on them and that The Lord of the Rings was indeed inspired by one. For my story, I needed a lost saga. I had some ideas, but I wanted to check whether they made sense to an expert.
The sagas are a series of stories written down in Iceland in the later Middle Ages in Old Norse. They fall into several categories. There are the lives of the saints, the lives of the Kings of Norway and histories of Europe – there is even a saga about Thomas Becket.
There are a couple of sagas that deal with ancient Germanic myths, including The Saga of the Volsungs, which tells the story of a cursed ancient ring, the Andvaranaut, which is passed around various gods, heroes, dwarves and dragons, leaving death and destruction in its wake. The story inspired Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and of course Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
The most famous sagas are The Sagas of the Icelanders, which are stories about the families that settled Iceland in the ninth to the eleventh centuries. Forty of these survive; some are short, some stretch to a couple of hundred pages. They are not exactly histories, they are more historical novels, even thrillers. They are expertly told, with deft, sparse characterization, plenty of action, legal disputes, wagers, stallion fights, people falling in love with other people’s husbands or wives, pride, jealousy, grief. It truly is all there, and in a modern translation they are real page-turners. I love them, although I must admit that some are written better than others, and they could all do with a good editor cutting out chunks of repetition and digression.
The big four are Njal’s Saga, Egil’s Saga, Grettir’s Saga and The Laxdaela Saga.
My favourite is Njal’s Saga, which is basically a legal thriller. Njal is an expert lawyer who advises his friends on how to solve disputes at the Althing without resorting to swords and battleaxes. They don’t always listen, people die, houses burn.
Egil was an extraordinary man and definitely deserves his own saga. He was born in Norway, and from an early age started beating people up unnecessarily. He got kicked out of the country, and went to Iceland, where he settled near Borgarnes on the west coast – his farm still stands at Borg a few kilometres to the west of town. He became a warrior, and fought for the Anglo-Saxon King Athelstan in York. As well as being a thug he was a brilliant poet, and when imprisoned by Athelstan, he wrote a beautiful poem to secure his own release. He returned to Iceland, grew old and a little dotty, and buried his treasure. It has never been found.
The sagas are emphatically not just about men. Some of the best characters are women, such as Gudrun of The Laxdaela Saga, who was beautiful, very clever and very dangerous. It was not a good idea to be either her husband or her lover. The women in the sagas are not necessarily the peacemakers: they urge their husbands to get off their fat arses and take revenge against thieving neighbours if they ever want to have sex again.
By the way, these names – Njal, Egil, Grettir, Erik – bring all kinds of difficulties to someone writing in English about both ancient Vikings and modern Icelanders. The conventions are different and inconsistent. I mentioned before that Icelandic grammar is a nightmare. Well, even the names need to be declined depending on what case they are. The likes of William Morris, being classically trained, decided to lop off the suffixes which give the names their case, and refer to just the root. So Njáll becomes Njal, and our old friend Eiríkr hinn raudi becomes Eirík the Red, which is further anglicized to Erik the Red. However, modern translations of Icelandic always use the full nominative form of the name: Njáll and Eiríkur (Eiríkr is Old Norse). So, in the same book I can refer to a modern Icelander as Egill and the old Viking poet and thug, Egil. Icelanders hate it. Copy editors hate it.
If you haven’t read the sagas, you might imagine them to be like the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf or the tales of the court of King Arthur. In fact, they are much more straightforward and down to earth. In the original Old Norse, the language is sparse, the word choice precise, more Hemingway than Proust. Unfortunately, the nineteenth-century translations into English by William Morris and Eiríkur Magnússon are quite wordy, and there are quite a few dodgy renditions out there. Magnus Magnusson’s translations are much more readable, and the current Penguin translations are excellent. This is a case where it’s definitely worth paying for quality; be wary of free, poorly translated editions on the internet.
Thorsteinn’s office was small and academic, with the exception of an unexplained Barbie doll on the top shelf. Nothing in Iceland is ever completely serious. There was a view over Reykjavík City Airport to Thingholt and the Hallgrímskirkja.
Just in front of the university is a rather elegant statue of an early Icelandic academic, Saemundur the Wise, and a seal. Like many future Icelanders, Saemundur studied abroad, at the Sorbonne in Paris, specializing in the devil and black magic. In the eleventh century, travel from France to Iceland was tricky, so Saemundur did a deal with the devil, who promised to take the form of a seal and give him a lift home. Saemundur hitched the lift, but as soon as he made landfall in Iceland he whacked the seal over the head with a bible. I suppose the moral of that tale is be careful about giving lifts to academics in Iceland, especially if they are carrying bibles.
I mentioned to Thorsteinn that my story was going to involve Tolkien and a lost saga. Back in England, I had read a lot of sagas, and a little about Tolkien. I was not at all surprised to discover that Tolkien was an expert on them and that The Lord of the Rings was indeed inspired by one. For my story, I needed a lost saga. I had some ideas, but I wanted to check whether they made sense to an expert.
The sagas are a series of stories written down in Iceland in the later Middle Ages in Old Norse. They fall into several categories. There are the lives of the saints, the lives of the Kings of Norway and histories of Europe – there is even a saga about Thomas Becket.
There are a couple of sagas that deal with ancient Germanic myths, including The Saga of the Volsungs, which tells the story of a cursed ancient ring, the Andvaranaut, which is passed around various gods, heroes, dwarves and dragons, leaving death and destruction in its wake. The story inspired Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and of course Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
The most famous sagas are The Sagas of the Icelanders, which are stories about the families that settled Iceland in the ninth to the eleventh centuries. Forty of these survive; some are short, some stretch to a couple of hundred pages. They are not exactly histories, they are more historical novels, even thrillers. They are expertly told, with deft, sparse characterization, plenty of action, legal disputes, wagers, stallion fights, people falling in love with other people’s husbands or wives, pride, jealousy, grief. It truly is all there, and in a modern translation they are real page-turners. I love them, although I must admit that some are written better than others, and they could all do with a good editor cutting out chunks of repetition and digression.
The big four are Njal’s Saga, Egil’s Saga, Grettir’s Saga and The Laxdaela Saga.
My favourite is Njal’s Saga, which is basically a legal thriller. Njal is an expert lawyer who advises his friends on how to solve disputes at the Althing without resorting to swords and battleaxes. They don’t always listen, people die, houses burn.
Egil was an extraordinary man and definitely deserves his own saga. He was born in Norway, and from an early age started beating people up unnecessarily. He got kicked out of the country, and went to Iceland, where he settled near Borgarnes on the west coast – his farm still stands at Borg a few kilometres to the west of town. He became a warrior, and fought for the Anglo-Saxon King Athelstan in York. As well as being a thug he was a brilliant poet, and when imprisoned by Athelstan, he wrote a beautiful poem to secure his own release. He returned to Iceland, grew old and a little dotty, and buried his treasure. It has never been found.
The sagas are emphatically not just about men. Some of the best characters are women, such as Gudrun of The Laxdaela Saga, who was beautiful, very clever and very dangerous. It was not a good idea to be either her husband or her lover. The women in the sagas are not necessarily the peacemakers: they urge their husbands to get off their fat arses and take revenge against thieving neighbours if they ever want to have sex again.
By the way, these names – Njal, Egil, Grettir, Erik – bring all kinds of difficulties to someone writing in English about both ancient Vikings and modern Icelanders. The conventions are different and inconsistent. I mentioned before that Icelandic grammar is a nightmare. Well, even the names need to be declined depending on what case they are. The likes of William Morris, being classically trained, decided to lop off the suffixes which give the names their case, and refer to just the root. So Njáll becomes Njal, and our old friend Eiríkr hinn raudi becomes Eirík the Red, which is further anglicized to Erik the Red. However, modern translations of Icelandic always use the full nominative form of the name: Njáll and Eiríkur (Eiríkr is Old Norse). So, in the same book I can refer to a modern Icelander as Egill and the old Viking poet and thug, Egil. Icelanders hate it. Copy editors hate it.
If you haven’t read the sagas, you might imagine them to be like the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf or the tales of the court of King Arthur. In fact, they are much more straightforward and down to earth. In the original Old Norse, the language is sparse, the word choice precise, more Hemingway than Proust. Unfortunately, the nineteenth-century translations into English by William Morris and Eiríkur Magnússon are quite wordy, and there are quite a few dodgy renditions out there. Magnus Magnusson’s translations are much more readable, and the current Penguin translations are excellent. This is a case where it’s definitely worth paying for quality; be wary of free, poorly translated editions on the internet.
The hunt for a lost saga
I was on the hunt for a plausible lost saga. How did it get lost? Whom was it about?
Originally, the sagas were written down by monks on vellum (calfskin). They used quills from the left wings of ravens or swans better for right-handed scribes and ink made from willow or bearberry. There were hundreds, possibly thousands of copies of the sagas scattered throughout Iceland.
By the eighteenth century, an Icelandic scholar who lived in Denmark named Árni Magnússon became worried that the stories might become lost, and travelled around Iceland for ten years collecting them. Iceland was poor, and he found scraps of vellum containing sagas repurposed for all kinds of everyday uses, such as shoe insoles or the back of a waistcoat.
He gathered his collection together in fifty-five boxes, and took them all back to Copenhagen in 1720. He became the librarian at the Royal Library, and stored the sagas there. In 1728, a fire swept through Copenhagen, destroying the library. Árni saved what he could, but many sagas were lost. Which was bad for Norse literature, but good for me.
One of these lost sagas concerned a Norseman named Gaukur (or maybe Gauk? I call him Gaukur, breaking my own rule about Old Norse names. Oops). We know it once existed, because there is a gap for it in the Mödruvallabók, with the note ‘Insert here the saga of Gaukur Trandilsson’. It was never inserted.
So who was this Gaukur? He is mentioned in a couple of other sagas, as Gaukur of Stöng. According to Njal’s Saga, he was killed by his own foster-brother, Ásgrímur. Why, I wondered. And where was this place Stöng?
I checked it on my map of south-west Iceland and discovered that Stöng was very close to Hekla, the voluble volcano that has erupted many times over the centuries, and which became known as ‘the mouth of hell’. Indeed, in 1104 a Hekla eruption completely smothered Gaukur’s farm at Stöng, and the valley in which it was situated.
Perfect.
Thorsteinn, my helpful saga expert, listened to my outlandish ideas patiently and kindly, and suggested various improvements and modifications. The day after my meeting with Thorsteinn, I drove to Stöng. With some trepidation: Thorsteinn mentioned that he had been scared when he had driven there with his parents when he was twelve.
Stöng is about 120 kilometres to the west of Reykjavík. After leaving the city, you drive up through desolate heath, stones, electricity pylons and steam from the earth bubbling beneath, until you suddenly arrive at the top of an escarpment with a dramatic view of a flood plain, dotted with farms and the odd town, sea and mountains in the distance. Mighty rivers such as the Hvítá and the Thjórsá bring meltwater from several glaciers churning through this plain down to the Atlantic. On the far side of the valley I could see Hekla, with its year-round white crown, a glacier.
I crossed the plain, Hekla growing ever larger, until I came to the River Thjórsá: wide, cold, the white-green colour of melted ice that had once fallen as snow thousands of years ago. As I drove upstream, ever closer to the volcano, the landscape became bleaker, the lava newer, twisted into pinnacles of frozen black trolls, heads of dogs and ravens. The higher I went, the more powerful the river seemed to become, and I wasn’t surprised to see pylons striding across the landscape from an unseen hydroelectric dam. There seemed enough force in that water to power the whole of Reykjavík.
I eventually came to a bridge over a narrow gorge through which the Thjórsá squeezed in a churning torrent and, just on the other side, the turn-off to Stöng. A rough track bucked and wove around a rocky cliff down to a partly visible valley of stone. A simple wooden fence bore a sign: ‘Lokad’. Closed.
For a moment I considered driving around it I had come all this way after all. But I resisted the temptation. May is early spring in Iceland. Snow is possible. Many minor roads remain closed until June. Even then it is unwise to drive on them in little cars like my rented Golf; you really need a four-wheel drive. Driving down that track, sustaining a puncture or a broken axle and walking back to the main road for help would be very stupid. (Sadly, it’s the kind of thing tourists in Iceland do all the time.)
Fortunately, higher up the road, I could look down on the valley of Stöng, which even nine hundred years after the eruption was a barren moonscape of stone, rock and dust. A thousand years ago, it would have been a lush green valley, with meadows, sheep and a Viking longhouse.
In 1939, archaeologists discovered the site of Gaukur’s farm at Stöng, and excavated it. A replica stands just off the main road, a long wooden building with a turf roof that reaches almost to the ground and no windows (see photo above). Hekla broods close by.
I had found my saga.
Originally, the sagas were written down by monks on vellum (calfskin). They used quills from the left wings of ravens or swans better for right-handed scribes and ink made from willow or bearberry. There were hundreds, possibly thousands of copies of the sagas scattered throughout Iceland.
By the eighteenth century, an Icelandic scholar who lived in Denmark named Árni Magnússon became worried that the stories might become lost, and travelled around Iceland for ten years collecting them. Iceland was poor, and he found scraps of vellum containing sagas repurposed for all kinds of everyday uses, such as shoe insoles or the back of a waistcoat.
He gathered his collection together in fifty-five boxes, and took them all back to Copenhagen in 1720. He became the librarian at the Royal Library, and stored the sagas there. In 1728, a fire swept through Copenhagen, destroying the library. Árni saved what he could, but many sagas were lost. Which was bad for Norse literature, but good for me.
One of these lost sagas concerned a Norseman named Gaukur (or maybe Gauk? I call him Gaukur, breaking my own rule about Old Norse names. Oops). We know it once existed, because there is a gap for it in the Mödruvallabók, with the note ‘Insert here the saga of Gaukur Trandilsson’. It was never inserted.
So who was this Gaukur? He is mentioned in a couple of other sagas, as Gaukur of Stöng. According to Njal’s Saga, he was killed by his own foster-brother, Ásgrímur. Why, I wondered. And where was this place Stöng?
I checked it on my map of south-west Iceland and discovered that Stöng was very close to Hekla, the voluble volcano that has erupted many times over the centuries, and which became known as ‘the mouth of hell’. Indeed, in 1104 a Hekla eruption completely smothered Gaukur’s farm at Stöng, and the valley in which it was situated.
Perfect.
Thorsteinn, my helpful saga expert, listened to my outlandish ideas patiently and kindly, and suggested various improvements and modifications. The day after my meeting with Thorsteinn, I drove to Stöng. With some trepidation: Thorsteinn mentioned that he had been scared when he had driven there with his parents when he was twelve.
Stöng is about 120 kilometres to the west of Reykjavík. After leaving the city, you drive up through desolate heath, stones, electricity pylons and steam from the earth bubbling beneath, until you suddenly arrive at the top of an escarpment with a dramatic view of a flood plain, dotted with farms and the odd town, sea and mountains in the distance. Mighty rivers such as the Hvítá and the Thjórsá bring meltwater from several glaciers churning through this plain down to the Atlantic. On the far side of the valley I could see Hekla, with its year-round white crown, a glacier.
I crossed the plain, Hekla growing ever larger, until I came to the River Thjórsá: wide, cold, the white-green colour of melted ice that had once fallen as snow thousands of years ago. As I drove upstream, ever closer to the volcano, the landscape became bleaker, the lava newer, twisted into pinnacles of frozen black trolls, heads of dogs and ravens. The higher I went, the more powerful the river seemed to become, and I wasn’t surprised to see pylons striding across the landscape from an unseen hydroelectric dam. There seemed enough force in that water to power the whole of Reykjavík.
I eventually came to a bridge over a narrow gorge through which the Thjórsá squeezed in a churning torrent and, just on the other side, the turn-off to Stöng. A rough track bucked and wove around a rocky cliff down to a partly visible valley of stone. A simple wooden fence bore a sign: ‘Lokad’. Closed.
For a moment I considered driving around it I had come all this way after all. But I resisted the temptation. May is early spring in Iceland. Snow is possible. Many minor roads remain closed until June. Even then it is unwise to drive on them in little cars like my rented Golf; you really need a four-wheel drive. Driving down that track, sustaining a puncture or a broken axle and walking back to the main road for help would be very stupid. (Sadly, it’s the kind of thing tourists in Iceland do all the time.)
Fortunately, higher up the road, I could look down on the valley of Stöng, which even nine hundred years after the eruption was a barren moonscape of stone, rock and dust. A thousand years ago, it would have been a lush green valley, with meadows, sheep and a Viking longhouse.
In 1939, archaeologists discovered the site of Gaukur’s farm at Stöng, and excavated it. A replica stands just off the main road, a long wooden building with a turf roof that reaches almost to the ground and no windows (see photo above). Hekla broods close by.
I had found my saga.
