Sagas

“ As representative of the Norse personality, the Sagas, like all national literature, bear a twofold testimony: that of their own literary qualities, and that of the characters which they portray. In the first place, a Saga is absolute narrative: it relates deeds, incidents, and sayings, in the manner and order in which they would strike the eye and ear of the listener, did the matter pass before him. ”

“ The Sagas differ in value, according to their use and arrangement of these matters, in relation to a central or imaginative conception of the main story and the characters engaged in it. The best Sagas are not always those that give the least of their space to historical matters, to the genealogies and family memoirs. From these the original life of the Sagas is drawn, and when it is cut off from these the Saga withers into a conventional and insipid romance. ”

“ Discounting for the gigantic stature and blood-thirstiness of old days, as they have come down to us in fairy-tale and legend, the folk of the old Sagas were Forsytes, assuredly, in their possessive instincts, and as little proof against the inroads of beauty and passion as Swithin, Soames, or even Young Jolyon. ”

“ What is a Saga? A Saga is a story, or telling in prose, sometimes mixed with verse. There are many kinds of Sagas, of all degrees of truth. There are the mythical Sagas, in which the wondrous deeds of heroes of old time, half gods and half men, as Sigurd and Ragnar, are told as they were handed down from father to son in the traditions of the Northern race. Then there are Sagas recounting the history of the kings of Norway and other countries, of the great line of Orkney Jarls, and of the chiefs who ruled in Faroe. ”

“ They are among the dreariest things ever made by human fancy. But the first and freshest of the romantic Sagas have still some reason in them and some beauty; they are at least the reflection of something living, either of the romance of the old mythology, or of the romantic grace by which the epic strength of Njal and Gisli is accompanied. ”

“ The written Sagas gave a check to oral variations and rearrangements; but many of them in extant alternative versions keep the traces of the original story-teller's freedom of selection, while all the Sagas together in a body acknowledge themselves practically as a selection from traditional report. Each one, the most complete as well as the most disorderly, is taken out of a mass of traditional knowledge relating to certain recognisable persons, of whom any one may be chosen for a time as the centre of interest, and any one may become a subordinate character in some one else's adventures. ”

“ The Sagas are the Commonplace Book, the livre de raison, in which this soul of the North, free from all taint of the South, and from all antique serfdom, has left its mark. For the Englishman, who reflects and ponders, it is the real Bible of his race. ”

“ Let him go back to his favourite literature of gossiping reminiscence, or of realistic novels. We have all, probably, a drop of the Northmen’s blood in us, but in that general reader the blood is dormant.
What is a Saga? It is neither quite a piece of history nor wholly a romance. It is a very old story of things and adventures that really happened, but happened so long ago, and in times so superstitious, that marvels and miracles found their way into the legend. The best Sagas are those of Iceland, and those, in translations, are the finest reading that the natural man can desire. ”

“ That everything should present itself first of all as appearance, before it becomes appearance with a meaning, is a common rule of all good story-telling; but no historians have followed this rule with so complete and sound an instinct as the authors of the Sagas. No medieval writers, and few of the modern, have understood the point of view as well as the authors of the story of Njal or of Kjartan. The reserve of the narrator in the most exciting passages of the Sagas is not dulness or want of sensibility ”

“ The introductions of many of the older Sagas, of Gisli and Grettir for example, giving the adventures of the hero's ancestors, are made up in this way; and the best Sagas have many conventional passages—Viking exploits, discomfiture of berserkers, etc.—which the reader learns to take for granted, like the tournaments in the French books, and which have no more effect than simple adjectives to say that the hero is brave or strong. Besides these stock incidents, there are ethical passages (as has already been seen) in which the hero is in [Pg 281] some danger of turning into a figure of romance. ”

“ The characters which appear in large grey traits in the Edda, come nearer to us in the Icelandic Sagas. The Edda has something of a far, unearthly gloom; the Saga the light of day. Saga-folk are extraordinarily individual; men and women are portrayed, body and soul, with homely, telling realism. ”

“ The best of the Sagas were just in time to escape that touch of over-reflexion and self-consciousness which checks the dramatic life and turns it into matter of edification or sentiment. The best of them also give many indications to show how near they were to over-elaboration and refinement. ”

“ The element of history in them, and their close relation to the lives of those for whom they were made, have given them a substance and solidity beyond anything else in the imaginative stories of the Middle Ages. It may be that this advantage is gained rather unfairly. The art of the Sagas, which is so modern in many things, and so different from the medieval conventions in its selection of matter and its development of the plot, is largely indebted to circumstances outside of art. ”

“ The Sagas only tell how brave men—of our own blood very likely—lived, and loved, and fought, and voyaged, and died, before there was much reading or writing, when they sailed without steam, travelled without railways, and warred hand-to-hand, not with hidden dynamite and sunk torpedoes. ”

“ The sagas, epic myths, and märchen do not appear to resemble each other everywhere (as the nature-myths do) , because they are the same ideas applied to the explanation of the same set of natural facts. The sagas, epics, and märchen seem to explain nothing, but to be told, in the first instance, either to illustrate and enforce a moral, or for the mere pleasure of imaginative narration.
We are thus left, provisionally, with the notion that occasionally the resemblance of plot and arrangement may be accidental. ”

“ This is the result of the Icelandic habit of restraint. The intellectual coolness of the [Pg 215] Sagas is a pride that keeps them from pathetic effusions; it does not impede the dramatic passion, it merely gives a lesson to the sensibilities and sympathies, to keep them out of the way when they are not wanted.
This is one notable difference of temper and rhetoric between the Sagas and the old English poems. One of the great beauties of the old English poetry is its understanding of the moods of lamentation—the mood of Ossian it might be called, without much error in the name. ”

“ It has known stirring days and its heroes were the bravest of any who wielded the axe and bill in the troublesome times when blood alone could recompense a personal affront or a crossed lover. A whole sheaf of Sagas relate the deeds of the men and women of Waterdale. The valley is the same as of old. ”

“ My mood of the moment was more in harmony with the literary romanticism of the Middle Ages than with the deeds of the Sagas, with poetical than with prose composition, with the word-melody of the ballad than with the characterisation of the Saga.
Thus it happened that the fermenting, formless design for the tragedy, The Vikings at Helgeland, transformed itself temporarily into the lyric drama, The Feast at Solhoug. ”

“ It is accepted at once by modern readers without deduction or apology on the score of antique fashion, because it is in essentials the form with which modern readers are acquainted in modern story-telling; and more especially because the language is unaffected and idiomatic, not "quaint" in any way, and because the conversations are like the talk of living people. The Sagas are stories of characters who speak for themselves, and who are interesting on their own merits. There are good and bad Sagas, and the good ones are not all equally good throughout. ”

“ Episodes of this type are common in the Sagas, and it is to them in a great measure that the Sagas owe their distinction from the common run of medieval narrative. But no appreciation of this "common life" in the Sagas can be just, if it ignores the essentially "heroic" nature of the moral laws under which the Icelandic narratives are conducted. Whether with good results or bad, is another question; but there can be no doubt that the Sagas were composed under the direction of an heroic ideal, identical in most respects with that of the older heroic poetry. ”

“ Turning from fables to the wider domain of sagas, we are met by two works deserving of the most careful study. The relations between themselves of the märchen and the saga, the relation of tradition to historical fact, and the influence of a different series of beliefs, historical and religious, imposed by a higher and conquering upon a lower and vanquished culture, each and all demand the student’s attention. ”

“ To say that all the characters in the Sagas escape from the limitations of mere typical humours might be to say too much; but it is obvious that simple types are little in favour, and that the Icelandic authors had all of them some conception of the ticklish and dangerous variability of human dispositions, and knew that hardly any one was to be trusted to come up to his looks, for good or evil. Popular imagination has everywhere got at something of this sort in its views of the lubberly younger brother, the ash-raker and idler who carries off the princess. ”

“ Among the most celebrated Sagas of the remaining divisions are the "Sagas of Erik the Wanderer," who went in search of the Island of Immortality; "Frithiof's Saga," made the subject of Tegnér's great poem; the Saga of Ragnor Lodbrok, of Dietrich of Bern, and the Volsunga Saga, relating to the ancestors of Sigurd or Siegfried, the hero of the Nibelungen Lied. ”

“ After his time a long silence fell on the literature of the country, a silence not broken until the revival of Icelandic learning in the 17th century.
It is evident that a vast number of sagas must be lost; when we consider how many are preserved, we can only express amazement at the fecundity of the art of saga-telling in the classic age. The MSS., on which what we have were preserved, were all on vellum, and there were no sagas written on paper until the time of Bishop Odd, who died in 1630; there was an enormous destruction of vellums during the dark age. ”

“ The Sagas are partly indebted to a spirit of negative criticism and restraint; a tendency not purely literary, corresponding, at any rate, to a similar tendency in practical life. The energy, the passion, the lamentation of the Northern poetry, the love of all the wonders of mythology, went along with practical and intellectual clearness of vision in matters that required cool judgment. The ironical correction of sentiment, the tone of the advocatus diaboli, is habitual with many of the Icelandic writers, and many of their heroes. ”

“ The customs of the heroes and people of the Erin of Cuchulain's time were as archaic as the chariots in which they rode to battle. The sagas contain a wealth of material for the historian. They show us a land where the men were herdsmen, tillers of the soil, hunters, bards, seers, but, above all, warriors. ”

“ Wholly new fictions were also written in this style so widely different from that of the earlier literature.
We will first briefly consider the mythic-heroic sagas, since they deal with life in the north and relate stories which are, excepting the embellishments, very old and founded on the traditions out of which the whole literary development grew. These sagas are chiefly transprosings of old poems, of which fragments of more or less length are at the same time introduced. ”

“ Thus there are genuine pieces in Nial’s Saga (chaps. 34, 78, 103, 126, 146) , in Eyrbyggia, Laxdæla, Egil’s Saga (part only) , Grettla (two and a half stanzas, cf. Landnamabók) , Biorn’s Saga, Gunnlaug’s Saga, Havard’s Saga, Kormak’s Saga, Viga-Glum’s Saga, Erik the Red’s Saga and Fostbrædra Saga. In Nial’s, Gisli’s and Droplaug’s Sons’ Sagas there is good verse of a later poet, and in many sagas worthless rubbish foisted in as ornamental.
To these may be added two or three works of a semi-literary kind, composed by learned men, not by heroes and warriors. ”

“ Sagas—stories told of heroes, of historical events, of physical phenomena, of the names or location of places, and intended to be believed. They are to be differentiated from myth by the fact that they have never assumed any religious or symbolic signification. They are, as a matter of fact, hero-tales in the making—of the same stuff in many cases as the great hero-tales, but having remained in the hands of the folk, have never received the enrichment and beauty of those hero-tales which the poets took up. ”

“ They are called Sagas. The other class of tales consists of such as are told simply for amusement, like Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, and Puss in Boots. They may embody incidents believed in other countries, or in other stages of civilization, to be true in fact; but in the form in which we have them this belief has long since been dropped. In general, the reins are thrown upon the neck of the imagination ”