Author of the Edda, but not the uncrowned king of Iceland - Nancy Marie Brown's biography of Snorri Sturluson

My Icelandic reading, the sagas and Eddas, led me to Nancy Marie Brown’s The Song of the Vikings (2012), her biography of Snorri Sturluson, author (by best guess) of Egil’s Saga, the prose Edda, and the chronicle of Norwegian kings Heimskringla, but it would also be true to say that Brown’s outstanding God of Wednesday blog led me to the Icelandic books.  What commitment to her subject – whether she is writing about her travels in Iceland, or the accuracies and inaccuracies of television Vikings, or most recently her attempts to row a small Viking ship, she is invariably interesting.  Actually, it is her good sense about exactly what is interesting that is so impressive, on the blog and in the book.

I admit that I do not find the posts on Icelandic horses, also the subject of one of her books, all that interesting, although I do enjoy the photographs.

Snorri Sturluson’s literary efforts make him the most important figure in Norse literature.  He not only wrote works of the highest significance but encouraged other writers and made copies of earlier texts.  The earliest surviving Icelandic manuscript has his writing on it, although it is a legal rather than literary document.  The books might make a reader suspect that Snorri was a monk or some kind of court historian.  In fact he was among the wealthiest men in Iceland, a chieftain and lawgiver.  For several years he schemed and fought to become what Brown calls “the uncrowned king of Iceland.”  He died hiding in his cellar, murdered by his rival’s thugs.  Snorri was like a Mafia boss.

Mobsters seem to have lost their taste for poetry.  Snorri was never much of a warrior – other people did his fighting – but he lived in a culture where writing and poetry were sources of prestige, or weapons.  Thus the prose Edda, a gift meant to win the support of an indifferent Norwegian king. 

But King Hakon didn’t acknowledge the poems Snorri composed for him – he may have declined to hear them.  The sixteen-year-old king didn’t like skaldic poetry.  He didn’t understand it.  Worse, it was old-fashioned.  (115)

Our greatest source of those wonderful Norse myths, the only source for a number of them, was the result of a political miscalculation by Snorri, the first of many.  “Hakon was the best-educated king Norway ever had,” so he wanted Latin and French.  Stories of the hot new thing in the early 13th century, King Arthur and his knights.  While Snorri was creating the conditions for the explosion of Icelandic literature, he was also inadvertently helping, in his attempt to become “uncrowned king,” to cause its downfall when Norway takes over Iceland and makes it a backwater, a source of cod and coarse wool, not poems and sagas.

Brown ends the book with a nice discussion of the long recovery of Icelandic literature beginning in the 17th century and really taking off among 19th century philologists, culminating with hit movies about cursed gold rings and Thor.  So a triumph, however tragic Snorri’s own life.

Brown’s book in progress is a history of the Vikings organized around the Lewis chessmen, an irresistible hook (click to see why).  I will clear some reading time for it in 2015 or so.

With laws shall our land be built up but with lawlessness laid waste - Icelandic sagas as cases studies in conflict resolution

Aside from all of the killing, this is the heart of Njal’s Saga, said by the wise man who gives the book its title:  “’With laws shall our land be built up but with lawlessness laid waste’” (Ch. 70).

I am thinking about where the author spends his time, especially what parts of the story he describes in detail.  The art is in the details.

I do not always understand the significance of the details.  Just before the legendary murder-on-ice scene I used yesterday is this:

It so happened that Skarp-Hedin’s shoe-thong broke as they ran down along the river, and he stopped.

“What keeps you back, Skarp-Hedin?” asked Grim.

“I am tying up my shoe,” he replied.  (Ch. 92)

After which he launches himself onto the ice into the midst of his enemies.

So one place where the author pauses is at the many killings in the saga, where every question – who, what, where, etc. – is answered in depth.  Which limb is severed by which weapon in what order.

The second place is the law, the first part of Njal’s dictum.  I called Njal’s Saga a legal thriller as a joke, but the joke is not so funny when, near the end of the saga in Chapter 142, several pages are spent on the process of jury selection, along with some other matters of Icelandic law less recognizable from television legal dramas.

Law and lawlessness.  In a comment, Alison of The Congeries asks ”how much it” – the author, the saga – “really disapproves of its Skarphedins.”  Perhaps this is just an artifact of the nature of storytelling, of drama.  The violence is so intense and enticing.  But there is something else.  The heroes of Njal’s Saga are clearly, from its rhetoric and focus, wise Njal and his friend Gunnar, men who try to avoid violence and tamp down the impulse for revenge.  Yet they obviously fail.  The story of the saga traces how small injuries lead to violence that spirals and expands until it seems to involve all of southern Iceland.  The law merely delays the violence.

I think I prefer the individual scale of two other stories, Egil’s Saga and Grettir’s Saga.  They both center on men who are superhuman, part-troll maybe, and capable of amazing, horrifying feats of violence.  Egil is quite openly a sociopath, while Grettir is more of a tragic figure, a monster-slayer who would have been a great hero in earlier times but has trouble finding a place in a society of laws.  Both men are useful to society in some ways and extremely dangerous in others.

Njal’s Saga and its cousin, Laxdaela Saga, another tale of a cycle of revenge that operates on a smaller scale, reflecting the more private cause of the conflict, a love triangle, feature characters closer to humans who nevertheless spend a good part of their energy destroying each other.  They are as much a threat to society as the homicidal Egil.  Maybe more of a threat.

I risk turning the sagas into political science case studies, but they are that, too, as well as history and fiction.  Literature, they are literature.

Thanks to Alison and Scott, who helpfully joined in on Njal’s Saga.

No one could stop people talking - bloody Njal's Saga

It is not just that there are a lot of deaths in Njal’s Saga.  It’s that they’re described like this (sensitive readers, avert thine eyes):

A huge sheet of ice had formed a low hump on the other side of the channel.  It was as smooth as glass, and Thrain and his men had stopped on the middle of this hump.  Skarp-Hedin made a leap and cleared the channel between the ice-banks, steadied himself, and at once went into a slide: the ice was glassy-smooth, and he skimmed along as fast as a bird.

Thrain was then about to put on his helmet.  Skarp-Hedin came swooping down on him and swung at him with his axe.  The axe crashed down on his head and split it down to the jaw-bone, spilling the back-teeth on to the ice.  (Ch. 92)

The teeth are a nice Tarantinoish detail, aren’t they?  If we were watching the film adaptation of Njal’s Saga, this is a point where we might hear around us in the theater “Aw, c’mon!” as well as “Cool!” and “Gross!”  It is maybe a little far-fetched, yet I will bet the passage is based on a true exploit of arms so amazing that the story was passed down for decades before being plugged into Njal’s Saga.

The book reminds me that the taste for this kind of aestheticized violence was not the invention of Hollywood.

One the same page of my edition is another of my favorite deaths:

Hrapp swung his axe at Grim, but Helgi, seeing this, hacked off Hrapp’s arm.  The axe fell to the ground.

Hrapp said, “What you have done certainly needed doing; that hand has brought harm and death to many.”

“This will put an end to all that,” said Grim, and ran him through with a spear.  Hrapp fell dead.

I have not made a transcription error.  Hrapp is commenting sardonically on the severing of his own arm.  The Icelanders are mostly perfect stoics, shrugging at predictions of their own deaths, shrugging at their actual deaths.

An example, again not for the sensitive:

Thorhall Asgrimsson was so shocked when he heard that his foster-father, Njal, had been burned to death  that his whole body swelled up; a stream of blood spouted from his ears and could not be staunched, until he fell down unconscious and the flow ceased of its own accord.  Then he got up and said that he had not behaved like a man.  “My only wish now is to take vengeance for what has just happened to me upon those who burned Njal to death.”

The others said that no one would call his behavior disgraceful; but Thorhall replied that no one could stop people talking.  (Ch. 132)

If there is any truth to the story at all, people talked for two hundred years or more, and here I am talking about it another six hundred years later.

Perhaps I will move to a less horrible subject tomorrow.

There’s nothing half-hearted about your way of doing things - on the pleasures of Njal's Saga

How about some notes about Njal’s Saga, one of the great Icelandic sagas?  I have no argument, just notes.  On the Pleasures of Icelandic Sagas.

For some reason Iceland experienced a literary boom in the 13th and 14th centuries.  Iceland was hardly unique – this is the High Middle Ages.  The form of the literature is strange, though, and even unique.  The sagas are prose tales that mix history, genealogy, legends, fiction, and anything else the typically anonymous author wants to include.  They ought to be incoherent, and I suppose some of them are.

Njal’s Saga begins:

There was a man called Mord Fiddle, who was the son of Sighvat the Red.  Mord was a powerful chieftain, and lived at Voll in the Rangriver Plains.  He was also a very experienced lawyer – so skillful, indeed, that no judgement was held to be valid unless he had taken part in it.  He had an only daughter called Unn; she was a good-looking, refined, capable girl, and was considered the best match in the Rangriver Plains.  (Ch. 1)

The sagas I know – not that many – are always written in this kind of plain style.  Lots of proper names.  Lots of real places, well identified, stops for saga tourists.  See Nancy Marie Brown, who writes about Vikings and posts at God of Wednesday, visit the site of the Althing, the annual assembly of the chieftains, where so much of the action of Njal’s Saga takes place (it is an early legal thriller).  I have borrowed her photo of the Law Rock, where one-third of the law was recited from memory every summer, and where the characters declare their lawsuits.

I read an edition of Grettir’s Saga that included numerous photographs of the Icelandic sites.  The one I cannot forget is a photo of a boulder, the very boulder that the super-strong Grettir moved.  I think it also had the ravine where he fought the ghost.  There is obviously a lot of fiction in these old identifications, but also a lot of something else.

The plain style is sometimes tedious.  I do not believe that the opening above would by itself entice too many readers.  But the style sets off the moments of tension or weirdness or wild violence peppered throughout the saga.  Or, say, when one of the men tries to avoid violence only to be insulted and goaded to revenge by his wife or mother or daughter.

An example.  Hallgerd is the foster-daughter of Thjostolf.  She has already had her foster-father kill one of her husbands for slapping her.  She has married Glum, and is happy with him, but during a fight he slaps her.  Hallgerd forbids vengeance this time, but “Thjostolf walked away with a grin on his face” (Ch. 16).

Hallgerd was outside.  She saw the blood on his axe.  Thjostolf tossed the gold bracelet to her.

“What has happened?” she asked.  “Why is your axe covered with blood?”

“I don’t know how you’ll take this,” replied Thjostolf.  “Glum has been killed.”

“Then you must have done it,” said Hallgerd.

“Yes,” he replied.

Hallgerd laughed.  “There’s nothing half-hearted about your way of doing things,” she said. (Ch. 17)

There, that is what I am looking for.  “Hallgerd laughed.”  Yikes.

I am using the Magnus Magnusson translation, the old Penguin edition, now replaced.

one verse led on to another verse,\ one poem led on to the other poem - the Poetic Edda

I have been working backwards here.  The Poetic Edda is a collection of Old Icelandic poems written – likely, at some point, spoken – by various anonymous poets in the 9th, 10th, and later centuries.  The poems are the source material for most of the mythic and legendary material in Snorri’s Prose Edda and in the more fantastic sagas like Hrolf Kraki and Volsungs.

The Poetic Edda is not the source for the “historical” sagas, so no Burnt Njal or Erik the Red discovering America here.  Just Thor and Siegfried and the like.  I guess this is obvious from the dates.

Compared to Old Icelandic prose, the Poetic Edda is difficult: fragmented, corrupt, cryptic, and the province of linguists.  Any decent edition will be footnote-heavy.  The poems take a little bit of work, although no more than their Old English contemporaries, and Beowulf aside, I think they are more rewarding.

There is the mythological stuff – see Thor go fishing for the Midgard Serpent:

Doughtily drew        undaunted Thór
onboard the boat        the baneful worm;
his hammer hit        the high hair-fell
of greedy Garms’s        grisly brother.  (“The Lay of Hymir,” 87)

That stanza only needed two footnotes.

But often the effect is completely different, a moment isolated from a familiar story for a particular emotional effect, as in “The First Lay of Guthrún,” the title character’s lament for her slain husband Sigurth:

Erst Gjúki’s daughter        unto death was nigh,
as o’er Sigurth she sate    sorrowfully;
she whimpered not,        nor her hands she wring,
nor wept, either,        as do women else.

Went to the widow        wise earls kindly,
the heavy heart        of her to ease;
nor yet Guthrún        her grief could weep,
in her bosom though        her heart would burst.  (247)

Because of the Niebelungenlied I most strongly associate this character with Guthrún’s (Kriemhild’s) revenge for her husband’s death, so it is moving to focus even for the length of a poem on the depth of her grief.  Tennyson wrote a fine short poem, “Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead,” that was inspired by this lay.

Book bloggers will be inspired by this verse, from “The Sayings of Hár”:

Know’st how to write,        know’st how to read,
know’st how to stain,        how to understand,
know’st how to ask,        know’st how to offer,
know’st how to supplicate,        know’st how to sacrifice?  (37)

Do I ever!  As an earlier stanza says, “one verse led on       to another verse,\ one poem led on     to the other poem” (36).  Story of my life.

Penguin has a version of the Poetic Edda with a new, pretty cover, tied into the Hobbit movie somehow, but I read Lee Hollander’s great 1962 translation.  I have noticed that a number of reviewers on Amazon ding it for archaicisms, which adds to the effort.  They are right.  Hollander uses the full resources of the English language to remarkable effect.

The friend of men gives the wolf a very great deal of corpse-beer. - Snorri Sturulson's Edda

Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, written early in the 13th century, should not be a book anyone reads any more, anyone who is not a linguist specializing in Norse languages.  It is a textbook, for pity’s sake.  Why would I read an eight hundred year old textbook.

The prose Edda is a textbook in Viking poetics.  The last third of the book, for example, is a praise song to the Norwegian king written in every available stanzaic form (“Here the first and third lines have two extra syllables at the beginning which characterize the form, and if they are subtracted then what remains is as dróttkvætt, and from the second and fourth lines…” 202-3).  In one sense a tour de force, in another pure tedium.

So that is not why I read the Edda.

The first two-thirds contain the bulk of Norse mythology.  Creation myths, the pantheon of gods and their adventures, early heroes.  Yggdrasil the world-tree and its adorable squirrel Ratatosk.  The creation of man by a cow:

Then spoke Gangleri: ‘What did the cow feed on?’

High said: ‘It licked the rime-stones, which were salty.  And the first day as it licked stones there came from the stones in the evening a man’s hair, the second day a man’s head, the third day a complete man was there.  (11)

Thor’s journey to the castle of Utgard-Loki is here, easily one of the greatest fantasy stories of all time, an old gnarled root of the current genre.  Thor in the giant’s glove, Thor drinking the sea, all of that good stuff.  I wonder how many young fans of the comic book hero have made their way back to this stuff.  The story of how the trickster god Loki had sex with a horse and gave birth to the eight-legged Sleipnir, greatest horse of all time, is also here.

The long middle section of the Edda turns to poetics, explicating the unique feature of Viking prosody, the kennings, the elaborate metaphorical substitutions that turn Icelandic poems into puzzles, as:

The bow-shaker generous with wealth knows how to prepare the wolves a feast.  The battle-keen lord lets the wolf’s kin rejoice in prey.  The friend of men gives the wolf a very great deal of corpse-beer.  (174)

All three lines say the same thing: “The king won the battle.”  But the Viking skalds say it better.  “Corpse-beer,” that’s great.  Snorri catalogues all of these poetic substitutions, for ships, the sea, gods, men (trees stand in for men), gold, everything.  The metaphors often require stories, so this section may need to be skimmed – it is awfully repetitive – but should not be skipped.

“What is the reason for gold being called otter-payment?” (99)  The answer to this question turns out to be the story of Siegfried and the Rhine-gold, the story of The Saga of the Volsungs, the Niebelungenlied, and Richard Wagner’s Ring operas, told by Snorri in a crisp six pages.  A couple pages later we learn “Why is gold called Kraki’s seed,” a story I also read in The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki.  The author  of the later saga got his story from the Edda.

Nancy Marie Brown has written a book about Snorri, Song of the Vikings, that I perhaps should read.  I have been enjoying her blog, God of Wednesday, quite a lot.  It perhaps nudged me towards this Scandinavian run.  This post on the murder of Snorri was a good one.

I read the Anthony Faulkes translation of Snorri’s Edda, the 1987 Everyman paperback.

Time passed and nothing noteworthy took place - The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki

The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki, written in the 14th century, author Icelandic but otherwise unknown.  Although not of the quality of the finest Icelandic sagas, it is great fun and might well make an ideal Starter Saga for anyone curious but not that curious.  It is, for example, only 78 pages long in the Penguin Classics edition (tr. Jesse L. Byock).  And part of it stars Beowulf, here known as Bodvar Bjarki, the bear-warrior.

The line I put in the title can be found on page 36, and is not typical.  This one, from two pages later, is:  “The queen is a great troll.”  In this saga that is meant more or less literally.  Or how about this:

A little while later she fell ill and gave birth to a boy, though of an extraordinary kind.  He was a man above the navel, but an elk below that.  He was named Elk-Frodi.  She bore another son, who was named Thorir.  He had dog’s feet from his insteps down.  Because of this he was called Thorir Hound’s Foot; otherwise he was the most handsome of men.  A third boy was born, and this one was the most promising.  He was named Bodvar and there was no blemish on him.  Bera loved Bodvar the most.  (40)

I do not think it is an aspersion on the Old English Beowulf to say that it would be even better is its hero had an older brother who was half elk.  The father is a werebear, and then the mother – well, see for yourself.  What I mean is, there is a logical explanation for those trollish children.

Some sagas have almost no supernatural material at all, and one of the best, Grettir’s Saga, has a lot but is fascinatingly ambivalent about its ghosts and monsters.  King Hrolf Kraki is closer to a pure fantasy adventure, even if many of the kings and heroes have some connection to historic figures.  Distant history, though, when witches and trolls were out and about more.

A scene you have to read to believe is Bodvar’s introduction to King Hrolf at his great hall, before the fight with Grendel that I know from Beowulf:

he heard a noise coming from somewhere in the corner.  Bodvar looked in that direction and saw a man’s hand emerging from a huge pile of bones lying there.  The hand was very black.  (48)

This fellow has been living in a pile of bones that the king’s warriors throw at him during banquets.  He has been busy trying to turn them into a fort to protect him from the hurled bones.  Bodvar rescues the target.  The first thing Bodvar does is throw him in the lake (see above, “very black”).

This  sounds like invention, but a footnote says: “Throwing bones was apparently one of the rowdier games played at feasts, and killing by bone-throwing is specifically listed as an offence in a number of medieval Scandinavian law codes,”  (83).   So it is merely insane.

Jean of Howling Frog Books read this saga recently and made it sound fun, which it is.  The Penguin Classics edition includes diagrams of archaeological digs of Viking great halls, giving a hint about how the book is now taught.  Me, I read it for the werebears and the bone-throwing.

Anyone with a taste for a longer saga should read Njal’s Saga along with me and Alison of The Congeries.  I am aiming for the last week of February.  A little over 300 pages in 159 chapters.  Often called the best of the bunch.

Reading Scandinavian literature - Iceland and Finland - Gapes the grisly earth-girdling serpent / when strides forth Thor to slay the worm.

While concentrating on Austrian literature last year, I concluded that I needed to know the work of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg better.  Then I started to think of other Norwegian and Swedish books I would like to read, then on to Denmark, and on like that, until I concluded that this would be the year of Scandinavian literature.

My Austrian project was a bit more thesis-driven, while this time I am more of a blank slate.  Just reading some books.

As usual, anyone who for some reason would like to read along on a particular book should speak up.  It can probably be done.  Scandinavian books are short.  I still want to stay close to my nineteenth century home, so nothing after World War I, please, although I have some arbitrary exceptions in mind and always make an exception for good poetry.

What has caught my eye?  I will tell you.  This will be in no way comprehensive, or even comprehensive-in-translation.  How could it be?  Please peruse the offerings of Norvik Press, publishers of Runar Schildt (1888-1925), “one of Finland's finest short-story writers” and “an observer of decadence in Helsinki,” or Elin Wägner, author of the “disrespectful and witty” Penwoman (1910), “the classic novel about the Swedish women's suffrage movement,” or Arne Garborg (1851-1924), “a writer who was left rootless and in conflict with himself, always searching.”  Who on earth are these people, and what is in their books?  Some interesting things, I suspect.  Maybe some of you already know.

I will proceed geographically.

Iceland

Medieval Icelandic literature is like nothing else.  The sagas are a mix of history and fiction, public and domestic life, violent yet often quite subtle, that is unique, or that was once unique, since they have had so many popular offshoots, most prominently The Lord of the Rings.  I am surprised I do not come across book bloggers reading them more often, but I am sure the Tolkien fans have good excuses and will get to them soon.

I have not read Njál’s Saga (late 13th century), so that one is most tempting, but I urge anyone curious to try Egil’s Saga, the life of a sociopathic poet, or Grettir’s Saga (c. 1320), the sad tale of the last of the monster-killers.  What strange books.  Or of course the Saga of the Völsungs, the source for Richard Wagner’s Ring operas.

The collection of ballads known as the Poetic Edda (12th century) and Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda (13th) are the primary sources for the Norse myths (Snorri may well have written Egil’s Saga too).  Fans of the recent movies featuring Thor will certainly want to read these (see post subtitle).

I have always loved mythological tales and have been reading versions of these stories since I was a child.  The Norse myths do not form as rich a literature as does Greek and Roman mythology – there is nothing as sophisticated as Homer or Ovid – but I have always found the stories to be as imaginatively rich.  Their use over the last 150 years or so tells me I am not alone.

Finland

The great Finnish mythological collection is a difficult case.  The Kalevala (1849) is the result of the efforts of  Elias Lönnrot, a country doctor who like the Grimm brothers collected folk songs and stories.  Rather than publish an anthology, though, he edited his collection into a coherent poetic epic, meaning that he wrote quite a bit of it and that the book is a hybrid of original and folk material.

Then again, so is The Prose Edda; so is The Odyssey; so is Genesis.  The difference is that The Kalevala is a recent hybrid.  I read a version of it many years ago, and would probably enjoy it a lot now.  My understanding is that the old public domain translations stink.

The one old Finnish novel I have in mind is Aleksis Kivi’s Seven Brothers (1870), about irresponsible agricultural practices, or something like that.  Again, the newer translation sounds necessary.

I have been enjoying Tove Jansson’s books a lot, but I want to save comment on her.  I guess I should save Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish literature, too, until tomorrow.  I hardly got anywhere today.  What did I miss or forget?  What obscure sagas should I read?  Runar Schildt, yes or no?

Egil: the poet as sociopath

The hero, or whatever he is, of the Icelandic Egil's Saga (1230?), is a poet, of improvised pieces, mostly. Here's how the muse strikes Egil after one of his many pointless revenge killings:

Now the bitter bearer
Of the blazing war-blade
Has taken ten
Of my trusted followers:
But my salmon-spear
Settled the score
When I cast it through
The curved ribs of Ketil.

Yes, I know, it's difficult to tear oneself away from the formal beauty and stirring sentiments found in this poem. Please, wipe away your tears so I can continue.

Egil is violent even for a Viking. He commits his first murder when he is six years old, because he lost a wrestling match. Yet he is also a poet. Egil even saves his life at one point by writing a long praise-song for a King who plans to execute him:

The ravens dinned
At this red fare,
Blood on the wind,
Death in the air;
The Scotsmen's foes
Fed wolves their meat,
Death ends their woes
As eagles eat.

That's just a little taste of a poem that runs four pages. The King - obviously - gives Egil his freedom.

Ah, poetry, beautiful poetry. I may be exaggerating certain propensities of Egil's poetry through selective quotation, but just barely.

These admirable translations are from the Penguin edition, Hermann Palsson and Paul Edwards the translators.