Saga

“ 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. ”

“ The vivid effect of the Saga, if it be studied at all closely, will be found to be due to this steadiness of imagination which gives first the blurred and inaccurate impression, the possibility of danger, the matter for surmises and suspicions, and then the clearing up. ”

“ The literature begins with annals or chronicles similar to the contemporary historical records of other countries, but it does not take long before it has developed sufficient skill to produce genuine works of art. Certain peculiarities were, however, preserved through all the periods of the development of the saga, excepting, of course, the mythic-heroic stories and the mediæval romances, where the saga spirit is almost wholly wanting. ”

“ It was illegitimate for the saga-man, in the preparation of his epic, to allow himself to stray for any length of time from one of those three themes; since even love must be considered in the light of an episode. ”

“ In a word, it must be borne in mind by the student of tradition that every tradition which has assumed the form of saga, myth, or story contains two perfectly independent elements—the fact upon which it is founded, and the interpretation of the fact which its founders have attempted. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the deeds are magnified or wholly fanciful, the characters are semi-historical; when the events or places are historical, the chief actors are generally imaginary.
Saga
In the myth-legend, or saga, the deeds transcend the ordinarily credible and the heroes are often directed by superhuman agencies. Perhaps the oldest examples of this kind are those recorded in the Sanscrit "Mahabharata" and "Ramayana", and the Persian "Shah Nameh." ”

“ The saga prose is straightforward and business-like, the dialogue short and pithy, with considerable interspersion of proverbial phrase, but with, except in case of bad texts, very little obscurity. It is, however, much interspersed also with verses which, like Icelandic verse in general, are alliterative in prosody, and often of the extremest euphuism and extravagance in phrase. All who have even a slight acquaintance with sagas know the extraordinary periphrases for common objects, for men and maidens, for ships and swords, that bestrew them. ”

“ Tradition has, or at least seems to have, to do with facts, usually designating some particular spot or region where the incident is said to have taken place, often even giving the names of actors, while the Saga is entirely free in its scope, equally as regards incident, and the time and place of its happening. ”

“ Howard or Havard the Halt, The Banded Men, and Hen Thorir (Morris and Magnusson) [172] ; Kormak, said to be the oldest, and certainly one of the most interesting. [173]
So much of the interest of a saga depends on small points constantly varied and renewed, that only pretty full abstracts of the contents of one can give much idea of them. On the other hand, the attentive reader of a single saga can usually give a very good guess at the general nature of any other from a brief description of it, though he must of course miss the individual touches of poetry and of character. ”

“ But truth seemingly was not readily appreciable by primal men until it was dramatized in saga, in legend, and in myth, in formulas, rites, ceremonies, customs, and material symbols based on those narratives ”

“ In the first place, historical events that live in folk-memory assimilate materials of ancient märchen and sagas, and thus lead to a connected hero saga. Secondly, an impressive historical personality stimulates the transference of older myths as well as the creation of others, though these, when woven into a whole, resemble a märchen-cycle rather than a hero saga proper. ”

“ With Romanticism there also emerged poets of so great merit that only a few such had come forward since the end of the saga period. But henceforward—let's take as our point of departure the second quarter of the nineteenth century—each generation in the country has indeed produced some outstanding literary works, comparable in quality with the accomplishments of the ancient classical Edda and saga periods. ”

“ The Sagas give the look of things and persons at the critical moments, getting as close as they can, by all devices, to the vividness of things as they appear, as they happen; brief and reserved in their phrasing, but the reverse of abstract or limited in their regard for the different modes and aspects of life, impartial in their acknowledgment of the claims of individual character, and unhesitating in their rejection of conventional ideals, of the conventional romantic hero as well as the conventional righteous man. The Sagas are more solid and more philosophical than any romance or legend. ”

“ Think of the imaginative exercise required to turn the language of these Saga-men into a diction so picturesque and so concrete as to make each Saga an English poem, for poem each one is, if Aristotle is right in thinking that imaginative substance and not metre is the first requisite of a poem. ”

“ Foreigners who come to this country in search of the old saga-island are sometimes a little disappointed at finding here, in place of saga-tellers and bards, a modern community, with its own university, a national theatre, and a symphony orchestra. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here the story may dwindle to a fireside tale; there it may become an epic in the mouth of Homer or a novel in the hands of Madame D'Aulnoy or Miss Thackeray. The savage makes the characters beasts or birds; the epic \ poet or saga-man made them heroic kings, or lovely, baleful sorceresses, daughters of the Sun; the French Countess makes them princesses and countesses. Like its own heroes, the popular story can assume every shape ”

“ We have seen that the classical form of a tale distributed throughout a large part of the Old World owed its peculiar features to the fact of its entrance into the higher literature of the race at a period of relatively advanced civilisation: a traditional selection had been established against the ruder forms of the saga. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But viewed as a whole the transprosing is faithfully done, and the impression we get from those parts of which we possess only the prosaic paraphrase is uniformly the same as that which we get from those passages of which the original poems are preserved. The saga is in fact throughout, by virtue of its natural simplicity, an exceedingly fascinating reproduction substantially of the songs with which we are familiar, and frequently it approaches the form of the verse so closely that we catch glimpses of the latter with its alliterations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The relation of the Sagas to the older poetry may be expressed in this way, perhaps, that they are the last stage in a progress from the earliest mythical imagination, and the earliest dirges and encomiums of the great men of a tribe, to a consistent and orderly form of narrative literature, attained by the direction of a critical faculty which kept out absurdities, without impairing the dramatic energy of the story. The Sagas are the great victory of the Humanities in the North, at the end of a long process of education. ”

“ No mention is here made of the essays, romances, Sagas, translations and poetry published in the city. In the bookbinding establishments the work is done by hand and it is efficient. Honest work goes with every stitch. ”

“ Of late years there have been placed alongside of the traditional myth, folk-tale, and legend many other products of tradition—customs, ceremonies, practices, and beliefs, and it has been argued, and argued strongly and convincingly, that the tradition which has brought down the saga and song as far-off echoes of an otherwise unrecorded past has also brought down these other elements which must also belong to the same distant past. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Now, in all these three classes of romance, savage fables, rural märchen, Greek or German epics, the ideas and incidents are analogous, and the very conduct of the plot is sometimes recognisably the same. The moral ideas on which many of the märchen, sagas, or epic myths turn are often identical. Everywhere we find doors or vessels which are not to be opened, regulations for the conduct of husband and wife which are not to be broken; everywhere we find helpful beasts, birds, and fishes; everywhere we find legends proving that one cannot outwit his fate or evade the destiny prophesied for him. ”

“ They rely, like the Teutonic epic and the Sagas, on situations that test the force of character, and they find those situations in the common conditions of an heroic age, subject of course to the modifications of the comparatively late period and late form of society to which they belong. ”

“ An immense imaginative literature is growing up around the Sagas. To mention only a few prominent writers who have received their inspiration from these sources, we have, Baring-Gould in 'Grettir the Outlaw' (1889) , the works of Henty and Ballantyne, R. Leighton's 'Olaf the Glorious' (1894) , Du Chaillu's 'Olaf the Viking' (1893) , Kingsley's 'Hereward', etc., Longfellow, W. Morris in 'Sigurd' and 'Earthly Paradise', and Arnold's 'Balder Dead', etc., etc.
[127]
BANDED MEN, THE. Tr. by Wm. Morris and Eirikr Magnússon. Saga Library. 1890. ”

“ There is one general quality or characteristic of the Sagas which has not yet been noticed, one which admits of explanation and illustration, while it represents very well the prevailing mode of imagination in the Sagas. The imaginative life of the Sagas (in the best of them) is intensely strong at each critical point of the story, with the result that all abstract, makeshift explanations are driven out; the light is too strong for them, and the events are made to appear in the order of their appearance, with their meaning gradually coming out as the tale rolls on. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”