Icelandic Sagas

A Window on a Medieval World

One summer in the thirteenth century, an Icelandic chieftain named Gissur, the son of Thorvaid, received a letter from Haakon, the king of Norway. It commanded Gissur to return a man named Snorri Sturluson to Norway, or to kill him. Knowing that Snorri would never willingly return to Norway after having offended the king, Gissur took seventy of his followers and a larger force in reserve. They traveled to Snorri's establishment, found him in a cellar, and stabbed him to death.

Thus died one of Iceland's greatest authors, a shrewd political maneuvered, astute and cunning arranger of marriages and alliances, keeper of Iceland's laws, and masterful accumulator of wealth and power. He wrote a handbook of poetry, a history of the kings of Norway, and possibly a saga of his ancestor, Egil Skallagrimsson. When he was killed, Snorri was probably the richest and most powerful man n Iceland.

Such a death could not go unavenged. About five hundred of Snorri's followers rode toward Gissur's house. Gissur and his men left their Christmas feast to take refuge at the bishopric at Skalholt, where the bishop armed his clerics and helped with the defense. When Snorri's followers attacked, the bishop leapt up on the rafters and began to excommunicate Snorri's followers. When both sides agreed to reconciliation, the bishop freed the men from excommunication and offered them food.

Gissur subsequently made several trips to Norway, where the king gave him the title of earl and the right to rule Iceland in his own name. Gissur isolated and killed those who opposed his plans to unite Iceland under his rule on behalf of the king of Norway. The year was 1264. Thus ended the Sturlunga period, a time of chaos that took its name from Snorri's relatives, the descendants of Sturla, who were the most powerful family in Iceland for most of the thirteenth century.

Iceland Quickly Settled

In the ninth century A.D., Norse chieftains moved to Iceland with their followers and slaves from Norway and the British Isles to claim land on the uninhabited island. Within sixty years the land was fully claimed, and in another seventy years families with insufficient land began to send some members to work for larger holdings during part of the year. This source of part-time labor made less demand on the large household's funds than did year-round support of slaves. Large landowners and chieftains could pay for feasts and presents to cement alliances with the difference in cost between the part-time laborers and the full-time slaves, who ate as much as they produced. Thus, after A.D. 1000, landowners freed slaves and replaced them with seasonal labor. The Little Ice Age started around A.D. 1200, and more small farmers failed and were forced to join the seasonal workers and renters as the climate cooled. This allowed large landholders to expand even more.

Iceland's entire social system depended on property relationships, but there was no state entity to give institutional reality to the concept of property through the enforcement of laws. Each chieftain had to muster sufficient forces to back up claims to land and to expand; otherwise, he would lose influence, followers, and power. Since any expansion was at the cost of other chieftains, conflict escalated. As the use of force increased, it became even more necessary to maintain overwhelming force and build followings through feasts and gifts. Chieftains' increasing demands for demonstrations of support conflicted with farmers' needs. Sometimes farmers resisted, but the chieftains simply responded with coercion. Even if they did not like it, farmers had to rely on some chieftain to protect their claims to land.

Though Iceland's powerful chieftains craved more luxury goods to use in social maneuvering, Norwegian traders were finding trips to Iceland less profitable. They came to Iceland less frequently with cargoes of grain needed to supplement the diet, timber for building, or luxury goods for chieftains to display and distribute.

Sagas Record Families' Intrigue

We know about the internecine warfare, strife, cruelty, shortsighted selfishness, and violence of the Sturlunga age because Icelanders wrote about the events, as they happened or shortly afterward, in a group of sagas called the Sturlunga Saga. Icelanders also turned their attention to their past and wrote sagas about their ancestors. The most famous of these are Njal's Saga, Egil's Saga, Gisli's Saga, the Eyrbyggja Saga, and the Laxdaela Saga.

The saga documenting one particularly interesting Icelandic lineage is Njal's Saga. In it is the material for a dozen adventure epics.

Gunnar. One of the central characters of Njal's Saga is Gunnar. The archetype of the saga hero, he is handsome, accomplished, well traveled, very athletic, somewhat modest, and not very clever. Gunnar returns from very successful travels abroad and goes before the general assembly, where he is highly honored. There he meets a tall, blond, and beautiful woman. Hallgerd, the daughter of Hoskuld, has had a series of marriages, all of which ended when her overly sensitive foster father killed her husbands for what he took to be insults to her.

Gunnar's adviser is the wise and prescient Njal, who counsels against the marriage. Gunnar doesn't listen, and Hallgerd gets him involved in disputes that end in his being outlawed. At one point he slaps Hallgerd. Though outlawed, he refuses to leave his farm, and anyone has the authority to kill him. He declines the help his many friends offer. His enemies attack him in his house. He holds them off with his bow and arrows until an attacker leaps up and cuts his bowstring. Then Gunnar asks his wife to cut a length of her long hair and braid it into a bowstring for him. She reminds him of the time he slapped her and refuses to help. He defends himself valiantly, but his enemies finally kill him.

Then the saga shifts to Njal and his sons, whose foster brother is a popular chieftain. A scheming and jealous chieftain who is losing followers convinces the brothers that their foster brother is plotting against them, and they kill their foster brother. This leads to the burning of Njal and his family in their house. One son-in-law escapes, and the remainder of the saga details how he hunts down and kills those who murdered his family. Finally he is reconciled with the leader of the killers and marries his niece, the widow of the murdered foster brother.

Egil. Ungenerous, covetous, moody, irritable, temperamental, proud, often despondent, clever, and a great poet, Egil, son of Skallagrim (Grim the Bald), is the antithesis of the model fair-haired hero. He is the grandson of Kveldulf ("evening wolf"--because he was something of a werewolf). After the king kills his favorite son, Kveldulf takes vengeance on the king's followers. Kveldulf dies on the way to Iceland, and Skallagrim establishes a farm there.

Though Egil is gloomy a somber, like his father and grandfather, his brother, Thorolf, is blond, outgoing, and handsome. The brothers go to Norway and get involved in many adventures that alienate them from the king. Unwelcome in Norway, the brothers pillage and raid and then go to England to fight on the side of King Athelstan against the Scots. Egil is gloomy when his brother is killed in battle. He goes to Norway to take care of his brother's estate and marry his widow. When he goes back to Norway to claim his wife's estate, Egil ends up killing King Erik's son and several of his followers. He then returns to Iceland.

When one of his sons drowns, Egil is inconsolable until his daughter, Thorgerd, cajoles him out of his depression. He makes a poem for his son, in which he laments that he cannot take revenge on the sea. Another son, Thorstein, is the father of Helga the Fair, who is the central woman in Gunnlaug's Saga. Old, blind, and helpless, Egil dies at home.

Gisli. The major figure in the saga that bears his name, Gisli is not as brooding as Egil, but he is far from the model hero Gisli's Saga also starts in Norway, where a disappointed suitor of his sister tries to burn Gisli's family in their house. They escape, incinerate their attackers, and go to Iceland. The parents die, and the three siblings get married. The brothers work the same farm, just next to that of their sister's husband, Thorgrim. Gisli travels abroad with his wife's brother, Vestein, while Gisli's brother, Thorkel, travels with their sister's husband, Thorgrim.

After they return, Thorkel overhears his wife, Asgerd, telling Gisli's wife, Aud, that She loves Aud's brother, Vestein. Thorkel divides the family wealth, and he and Asgerd love in with Thorgrim next door. Vestein comes to Gisli' place for a feast. Thorkel gets Thorgrim to sneak into the house and stab his rival to death in his bed. When there is another feast at his brother's farm, Gisli sneaks into his house at night and kills Thorgrim with the same spear that killed Vestein.

Gisli's sister marries Thorgrim's brother, Bork. A sorcerer casts a spell on the killer of Thorgrim. Gisli's sister figures out that Gisli killed her first husband when he makes a careless verse about it and tells Bork. He gets Gisli outlawed and begins to hunt him down. Gisli evades his hunters for eighteen years by clever tricks. Finally Bork's followers find Gisli and attack him. He makes a valiant defense, aided by his loyal wife, but his attackers kill him.

Snorri. When the man who killed Gisli reports his success to Bork, Gisli's sister, Thordis, tries to kill him and divorces Bork. She is the mother of Snorri the Chieftain, who is a central figure in the Eyrbygja Saga. Snorri is quite unlike Gunnar, Egil, and Gisli. He is neither moody nor brooding, but bright, alert and always scheming. He has Njal's understanding of social relations and, like Njal, advises others to their advantage, but he is no fighter like Egil, Gisli, and Gunnar.

The saga explains how the Snaefellsness peninsula was settled by Norse chieftains fleeing the Norwegian King Harald and their feuds in Iceland. Among the settlers in Thorlof, whose grandsons, Thorgrim and Bork, married Gisli's sister, Thordis. Snorri the Chieftain was the son of Thorgrim and Thordis. After a trip to Norway, Snorri manages to trick his dead father's brother, Bork--now his mother's husband--out of his farm. There are witches, sorcerers, the ferocious and unmanageable berserker warriors from Norway, feuds, seductions, piratical raids on farmers, assassination attempts, fights with very concrete ghosts (not ethereal things), and hauntings--even the outlawing of Erik the Red, who sails from the West Fjords to Greenland. Through all of this, Snorri the Chieftain advises, helps, makes alliances, and takes cases to the assembly.

Gudrun and olaf. Snorri the chieftain has a similar role in the Laxdaela Saga, whose central character is Gudrun, the daughter of Osvif. The saga opens with Norse chieftains leaving because of Harald. The sons of Ketil the Chieftain go to Iceland, but Ketil himself goes to Scotland. After Ketil dies, his daughter, Unn, goes to Iceland with her followers. Her granddaughter, Thorgerd, daughter of Thorstein the Red, marries Dalla-kol and has a son named Hoskuld, familiar from Njal's Saga. Hallgerd, Gunnar's wife in Njal's Saga, is Hoskuld's daughter.

Thorgerd toes to Norway after her husband dies, marries Herjolf, and has another son, Hrut, also familiar from Njal's Saga. In this saga, the two brothers quarrel over their inheritance after Hrut goes to Iceland. On a trading expedition, Hoskuld buys a slave woman named Melkorka and brings her back to Iceland, where his wife, Jorunn, received her coldly. The slave Melkorka has a son named Olaf. Melkorka turns out to be the daughter of the king of Ireland, which elevates Olaf's status.

Olaf goes to visit his grandfather, the Irish king, who acknowledges him, before returning to Iceland to marry Thorgerd, Egil Skallagrimsson's daughter from Egil's Saga. Olaf becomes one of the most famous of the Icelandic chieftains, mentioned in many sagas. They have a son named Kjartan. Meanwhile, Hoskuld's other son, Thorleik, by Jorunn, his wife, has a son named Bolli. Thorleik is angry when Hoskuld includes his illegitimate son Olaf in his will, so Olaf offers to foster Thorleik's son, Bolli, to make their relationship closer. Bolli and Kjartan grow up as brothers.

They both fall in love with Gudrun, daughter of Osvif, who is a descendant of Unn's brother Bjorn. When they go to Norway, Kjartan tries to get Gudrun to promise to wait for him for three years, but she will not, though she loves him. In Norway, Kjartan takes up with the sister of the king. Bolli returns before Kjartan and tells Gudrun that he believes Kjartan will stay with the kings' sister. Gudrun then marries Bolli because she thinks Kjartan no longer cares for her. When Kjartan returns, she goads her husband, Bolli, and her brothers into killing him. Kjartan doesn't fight his beloved foster brother, but dies at his hand.

Thorgerd, Egil's daughter, the dead Kjartan's mother, goads her four other sons--Holldor, Steinthor, Helgi, and Hoskuld--into killing Bolli in revenge, saying their grandfather Egil would never have left such a death unavenged. She even goes along with them to gloat at Bolli's death. Gudrun carefully notes her husband's killers. One of the killer's wipes Bolli's blood from his sword on Gudrun's sash and predicts that the avenger is even now under the sash.

Gudrun names her son Bolli after his father. Snorri the Chieftain concocts a plan to get a suitor to help her young son avenge his father. After they get vengeance, the suitor is killed, Gudrun marries again, and her husband drowns. Her son marries Snorri's daughter and goes on a pilgrimage. Gudrun becomes a nun, but before she dies her son asks her which of her men she loved the most. She replies that she loved most the one she treated worst.

Sagas Valuable To Study

Some sagas recount the adventures of other chieftains or the ill-fated love lives of certain poets; others satirize chieftains or castigate merchants. Still others relate the discovery and colonization of Greenland and expeditions to Vinland.

While the sagas are presented in objective style, describing only actions and discourse, never thoughts or feelings, and never taking the omniscient view of a novelist, they leave no doubt as to whom they favor. Both women may seem to behave similarly, but Hallgerd is a wicked woman and Gudrun is a heroine. The saga writers let their audience know their opinions by putting words in the mouths of "the people of the countryside," by having a character comment "you are a wicked woman," as Gunnar's mother tells Hallgerd, and by their descriptions of the characters.

In his own life, Egil repeats his father's ambivalent relations with the Norwegian kings, just as Skallagrim repeated his father's. The pattern perpetuates itself. Njal could see into the future and tried to save his friend Gunnar, but he could not. He tried to save his own family, but could not. The same thing that happened to Gisli's family in Norway repeated itself in Iceland. The same sword his father's brother broke in a dispute with its owner, reforged into a short spear by a sorcerer, kills Vestein and Thorgrim. Sagas don't so much tell stories by suspense as describe patterns by repetition

Were Hoskuld and Hrut really friends, as in Njal's Saga, or enemies, as in the Laxdaela Saga? How can we believe both? We do not need to. We need only understand what it meant to be a friend and what it meant to be an enemy. The sagas may not be "true" by modern standards of historical reportage. The only way to judge veracity is to compare their contents with the equally contestable documents such as law books and chronicles, which often, but not always, confirm events and individuals. The Sturlunga Saga gives us near-contemporary accounts of events, but they are not therefore more or less reliable. They are the accounts a people told to themselves for their own reasons. Furthermore, they were a people whose assumptions and outlook on life were radically different from our own.

If we read the family sagas and Sturlunga Saga for their patterns, to understand the political and economic systems that produced them and the assumptions upon which they are based, then in terms of what we already know from anthropological research about other such societies, we can begin to build a picture of the society of that time. We can see how it evolved from the first Norse chieftains who settled on the island to the violent chaos of the Sturlunga era, a period ending with Iceland's incorporation into Norway in 1262. If we accept this literature for what it is, it opens a window on a world vastly different from our modern one. The sagas show us real men and women in action, patterns in life-and-death situations, and many examples of grace under pressure. While they are remote from our world, they are not irrelevant.