Short Fiction: The Saga and Tháttr

Introduction

The term “saga” (plural “sögur”) is Old Norse in origin and means “a saw” or “saying.” After written language supplemented oral language in the North, the word “saga” was extended to include any kind of legend, story, tale, or history written in prose. As a literary term, “saga” refers more specifically to prose narratives written in medieval Iceland. The sagas are traditionally classified according to their subject matter. The main types of sagas are Konungasögur (kings’ sagas), Íslendingasögur (sagas of the Icelanders or family sagas), Sturlunga saga (saga of the Sturlungs), Byskupasögur (bishops’ sagas), Fornaldarsögur (sagas of past times), Riddarosögur (sagas of chivalry), and Lygisögur (lying sagas). In general, family sagas and kings’ sagas are of highest literary merit. Their excellence ranks them among the finest work of the European Middle Ages.

Closely associated with the saga in medieval Icelandic literature was the tháttr (plural thættir), a shorter prose form which is related to the saga in roughly the same fashion as a short story is to a novel: The most evident difference between the two is length. Tháttr literally means “a single strand,” as of rope. The Icelanders early extended this meaning metaphorically to refer to parts of written works. Episodes of narratives, chapters of histories, or sections of law were thus known as thættir. Icelandic short stories came to be called thættir because many of them are preserved as anecdotes or strands in sagas, particularly in the kings’ sagas.

While the term “saga” has made its way into popular modern nomenclature as a label for an epiclike narrative, the word “tháttr” has no cognate descendant in English and has but recently been accorded attention as a genre with its own governing rules. The common habit of embedding short stories in the sagas suggests why the Icelandic thættir have either been overlooked or absorbed into a general discussion of saga literature. Enough versions of single stories exist both as separate manuscripts and as episodes in the sagas to indicate that the stories had a recognizable identity of their own, more or less independent of the host texts. Genre distinctions in medieval Icelandic writing were not particularly definitive. Terms such as “frásaga” (story, narrative), “æfentyri” (adventurous exploits), and “hlut” (part) mingle with “saga” and “tháttr” as reference terms in the literature. On occasion a narrative referred to in one place as a tháttr is called a saga in another. Although more sophisticated and telling differences between saga and tháttr were established through practice of the arts, the boundary between stories and sagas remained fluid.

Origins of the saga and tháttr forms

Evidence of the strong ties and shifting boundaries between the saga and tháttr forms has provoked ongoing speculation about the original relationship between the two. The once-held belief that thættir were oral tales recorded by scribes and then linked into sagas has been discarded. Sagas and thættir represent a sophisticated confluence of numerous sources both written and oral and are dependent as well on the genius of their individual authors. While the origin of saga and tháttr writing is a matter of speculation, it can be said that the two are related emanations of the deeply rooted storytelling traditions of Northern Europe.

Storytelling, poetry recitation, and their descendant written forms have historically been the most favored of all arts in Scandinavia and particularly in Iceland. This affection for and mastery of the literary arts in Iceland has been attributed to strong urges of an emigrant culture to preserve knowledge of its European ancestral history. Medieval Icelandic manuscripts are the single preserve of certain heroic Germanic myths and tales which were part of a shared tradition of the Northern peoples. The old literature was lost in Germany and England, where Christianity arrived early. In Scandinavia, where Teutonic mythology and religion held sway for centuries longer (Sweden did not have a Christian bishop until the twelfth century), some of the old myths and stories were preserved, mainly in two Icelandic texts known as the Eddas. The Poetic Edda (ninth to twelfth century; English translation, 1923) contains heroic, didactic, and mythological poems which allude to events, legends, and beliefs of the Teutonic tribes. Prose Edda (c. 1220; full English translation, 1987) relates mythological and heroic stories of the pre-Christian North and provides an elaborate poetics for the poetry associated with the legends.

Medieval Icelanders had material as well as patriotic motives for their literary efforts. Those who note the preponderance of writing and the relative absence of other artistic endeavors in Iceland point out the lack of native materials necessary for practicing other arts. Those who engaged themselves in such vigorous literary activity on a remote and rural island several hundred miles from the European mainland were by majority Norwegian emigrants, who came to Iceland during the reign of Harald I. Harald’s ambitious rise to power during the later decades of the ninth century and clashed with the Norwegian landed gentry, whose livelihoods and properties were threatened by the young monarch’s expansion. Rather than suffer servitude or death, many chose emigration westward. Various other causes, including the hope for a better life and the need to escape the law, brought more settlers.

From all accounts, the Icelanders were industrious and enterprising farmers, exceptionally literate and particularly skilled in self-government and law. Those who could argue the law and bring cases to just settlement were highly regarded. The Icelandic pioneers organized assemblies called “Things” which ruled the country by democratic process. They elected to their head not a monarch, but a lawspeaker, part of whose job it was to recite the entire body of law every three years. The first law of the land was a customary one, added to and refined at the annual assembly and passed by memory between generations. An old law formula recited in Grettis saga (c. 1300; The Saga of Grettir, the Strong, 1869) gives evidence that alliterative techniques aided in memorization and so rendered law into a poetry of sorts. This law system, suggested by district assemblies in Scandinavia, was unlike any other the world had known. Democratic assemblies ruled the entire country of Iceland for more than eight hundred years before such an idea began to infect Western history on a larger scale. Although the system was far from utopian in practice, it commanded the respect and loyalty of the people. Words were the recognized bond of the body democratic; they were to replace force as the modus operandi of government. Against this vision of rational and peaceable government struggled an old revenge codes from the heroic tradition. Conflicts between law and violence and the law’s frequent incapacity to stop violence became major themes in the Family Saga literature.

Christianity was adopted by assembly vote in the year 1000. One of the most important legacies of the new faith was the access its missionaries provided to written language. Icelanders quickly learned the Latin that the churchmen brought and became familiar with its texts. They also put the new alphabet to most vigorous use in the practice of vernacular and sometimes secular literatures. Young Icelanders furthered their educations in Europe or at home. By the early twelfth century there were two bishoprics in Iceland, at Skalaholt and Holar. Both sees supported schools where chieftains sent their sons. At Holar, Icelandic farm boys learned Gregorian chant and Latin versification from a French clergyman. Class distinctions were few, thus allowing the new learning to spread rapidly.

Christianity, with its attendant teachings and written language, initiated Iceland into European traditions. Biblical lore and Christian ethics were added to the Icelanders’ stock of old Germanic stories and myths without replacing the older literature. Confident of the value of their own history, Icelanders gave over their enlarged knowledge to the service of the stories of their own peoples. Possibilities for preservation became virtually unlimited. Stories, law, and history had found their harbor on vellum. Before the era closed, Iceland produced a prodigious amount of hagiography, historiography, homiletics, astronomy, grammars, laws, romances, and stories, much of it in Icelandic.

The oldest manuscripts, which are preserved in Iceland, are from the twelfth century; the earliest text is thought to have been a legal code. Ari Thorgilsson is regarded as the father of Icelandic vernacular history. Libellus Islandorum, commonly called Íslendingabók (c. 1120; Book of the Icelanders, 1930), comments on the settlement of Iceland, on exploration voyages to Greenland and Vinland (America), and on other important political data associated with the founding of the island republic. Book of the Icelanders well reflects the respect for historical data and interest in biography which continued to be evident in the later Kings’ Sagas and Family Sagas; it is written in a style free from embellishment; it is sober and thorough but not without touches of human interest.

Of more central importance to the evolution of the distinctly literary sagas and thættir is Landnámabók (c. 1140; Book of Settlements, 1973), which was also first written in Thorgilsson’s time and is sometimes attributed to him. Book of Settlements is a rich repository of historical and legendary anecdotes about four hundred of Iceland’s first settlers. The work documents land claims, describes farmsteads, and gives accounts of feuds, law cases, and marriages. It lavishes special care on genealogy, naming the pioneers’ descendants and ancestors as fully as the author’s knowledge allows. The author weaves dramatic incident and brief character sketches in with the more sober demographic and historical data. About Ingolf, who was Iceland’s first settler, Book of Settlements reports that as soon as he saw Iceland he threw his high-seat pillars into the sea and made settlement where they landed. Details of ordinary life, both comic and domestic, interlace the carefully prepared documentary. One section describes a dale named for a cow, and another tells about a man who lost his life in battle when his belt broke and his britches fell. In the Thórdarbók version of Book of Settlements, the author justifies his compilation, noting that civilized peoples are always eager “to know about the origins of their own society and the beginnings of their own race.” Historians continued to expand and revise Book of Settlements, issuing it in various editions during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Kings’ Sagas

The first document to which the name “saga” is attached is the fragmentary Oldest Olafs saga helga from about 1180. Although primarily a hagiographic account of King Olaf Haraldsson (Saint Olaf), the saga does contain several thættir made lively by verbal exchanges. Oldest Olafs saga helga was likely composed at the Benedictine monastery in northern Iceland. Such monasteries carried on a wide range of literary activities, not all of them religious in nature. Translations of European histories were undertaken and biographies of kings were written with an eye to more than the kings’ saintly virtues. Most of these early works are lost.

The popularity of sagas about kings is evidenced by the compilation of the Morkinskinna (c. 1220; rotten skin). Morkinskinna is a collection of biographies of eleventh and twelfth century Norwegian kings which incorporates thirty thættir, among them “Halldor Snorrason,” “Ivar’s Story,” and the most famous tháttr, “Audun and the Bear,” one of the most beautiful pilgrimage stories in world literature. When the Icelandic biographers of kings set to documenting the lives of long-dead Norwegian monarchs, they turned to the skaldic verse which celebrated their subjects. The fixity of the verse patterns and the conventionality of the kennings (elaborate metaphors) made the poetry a more reliable medium for accurate preservation of the kings’ lives than oral tales.

Skaldic verse had its origins in Norway, but Icelanders became its greatest practitioners. Several of Iceland’s pioneers were skalds, including the most famous of all skaldic poets, Egill Skallagrimsson, whose two beautiful poems, Hofulausn (c. 948; The Ransome of Egill, the Scald, 1763) and Sonátorrek (c. 961; lament for my sons), are centerpieces in Egils saga (c. 1220; Egil’s Saga, 1763). Many kings’ sagas are liberally interspersed with skaldic poems, but it would be a mistake in most cases to think of kings’ sagas as merely prose expansion of the tighter verse forms. The numerous histories which grew out of the skaldic tradition seem to have directed attention to the art of biography for its own sake. These kings’ sagas, especially those found in the Morkinskinna and Flateyjarbók manuscripts, are also host to dozens of thættir which feature as their subject a meeting between an Icelander and a Norwegian or Danish king. These short stories probably gave rise to techniques, characters, and themes more purely fictional than the histories which embody them. The subject matter of the thættir is not often traceable to skaldic verse.

Practitioners of skaldic poetry became favorite subjects for both saga and tháttr writers. A number of heroes of the great family sagas—Egill, Gisli, Grettir, and Gunnlaug among them—are also famous poets. The kings’ sagas contain many stories which feature a Norwegian king and his skald. Even heroes who are not poets can grace a scene with a skaldic verse when the occasion warrants.

Side by side with the newer written forms, stories continued to be recited; such performances also provided subject matter for the writer of sagas and thættir. In Morkinskinna is recorded the story of a young Icelander visiting a European court. It is Yuletide, and the boy makes the court company merry each night with his stories. As Christmas draws near the boy’s spirits fall, for his stock of stories is nearly spent. He tells King Harald he has but one final story, the story of Harald’s own adventures abroad. The king is delighted by this unexpected attention and arranges it so the story lasts for the twelve nights of the festival.

Medieval Icelanders told stories about stories and stories about poems. They recorded poems about past events which were made into stories with poems embedded in them; they celebrated those who recited and wrote verse and tale. Clearly the literary arts and its practitioners were accorded a position of honor, and what the bards praised in their ancestors they put into practice themselves.

The medieval Icelander who has most clearly come to embody the Icelandic desire to preserve antiquarian literature is Snorri Sturluson, a historian and poet who simultaneously practiced the more pragmatic arts of law and diplomacy. Snorri’s work is impressively diverse. He is the author of the so-called Prose Edda, which is a compendium of Germanic mythology, a catalog of kennings, and a poem of more than one hundred stanzas. The poem is accompanied by a commentary on the stanzaic and metric forms of each verse. Other works attributed to Sturluson include the masterful collection of kings’ sagas known as Heimskringla (c. 1230-1235; English translation, 1844), one part of which is the distinguished St. Olaf’s Saga. Sturluson has been called the author of Egil’s Saga, although that is a matter of conjecture.

During the thirteenth century, the powerful Sturluson family dominated Icelandic political affairs. Sturluson undertook diplomatic missions to Norway and was powerful in Icelandic politics, serving twelve years as lawspeaker. His talents as historian, literary critic, antiquarian, sagaman, and poet rank him as the most prominent literary figure of his age. He was also an influential and wily chieftain who was deeply involved in the internecine struggles of the day and who was neglectful of family obligations. It was his own estranged son-in-law who, leading sixty men, murdered Sturluson in an ambush in response to an order from the Norwegian king.

This incident serves to point out the state of general lawlessness which plagued the Icelandic Republic in the thirteenth century. (The Saga of the Sturlungs gives lurid account of these days.) While the old democratic system of assembly rule had never matched in practice what it held in theory, legend at least had it that for several generations the country was, for the most part, at peace. The prestigious assemblies had continued to function, and respect for the law had kept violent family feuds from turning into general lawlessness. By the first decades of the thirteenth century, however, Iceland’s political and social life had become a welter of competing factions. The Norwegian crown, the assemblies, and the church bishops vied to impose a gaggle of rules and counter-rules. The lines of authority were so indistinct that no group hesitated to use force to advance its position.

Family Sagas

It was during these last chaotic days of the Icelandic Republic (Norway assumed jurisdiction over the country in 1262) that the most sophisticated of all the sagas, the family sagas, were written. These sagas of Icelanders owe important debts to the centuries of interest in law, history, and kings’ lives which preceded them. Yet the blend of national history, genealogy, local legend, and character anecdote gathered into stories with structures and aesthetic values of their own is quite unlike earlier sagas or Continental literature of the same period.

Nowhere else in Europe (excluding the British Isles) had prose been adopted for such clearly literary purposes: The medium of the Continent’s literature was still verse, and the subject matter was heroic and traditional when it did not take up prevailing Christian motifs. In Europe, the thirteenth century was the age of Scholasticism, and its literature was written mainly under the inspiration of the Christian faith. Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802) stands as the age’s crowning achievement.

The Icelanders knew the heroic tradition well. This hoard of common experience, which found voice in works as diverse as Beowulf (c. 1000), the Poetic Edda, and Nibelungenlied (c. 1200; The Nibelungenlied, 1848), was kept alive mainly by Icelanders. Nor were the Icelanders unaffected by the Christian literature of courtly romance. Thomas of Brittany’s Tristan (c. 1160) was translated into Old Norse as Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar in 1226, and numerous other translations followed.

Such material engaged the imaginations of the family saga writers and supplied them with a storehouse of conventional stories, cosmological schemes, and codes of heroic behavior, but the subject matter and the ethos of the family sagas spring from a native source. Sagamen took their ancestors’ history and their own knowledge of the Icelandic landscape and transformed the Icelandic experience into narratives and stories which, in retrospect, read remarkably like novels and short stories. The high literary merit of the family sagas has made them widely known outside of Iceland and linked the name “saga” with their particular subject matter. The more than 120 sagas and thættir thought to have been written during the thirteenth century provide a remarkable fictional portrait of the tenth and the first third of the eleventh centuries. The sagamen rendered their histories in human terms. They were interested in individual men and women and the drama their lives provoked. By aesthetically arranging these incidents, which often range over a century and involve scores of characters, the sagamen aroused interest in the moral dimensions of their ancestors’ acts and the larger questions which they raised about human destiny in general.

The saga writer’s techniques are those which are often associated with modern realistic fiction. Verisimilitude is of primary importance. Characters are not drawn as types but are faithful portraits of individuals. Characters speak as people do to one another and are revealed through action. Description is minimal and lyrical effusion is absent. The imagery is spare, homely, and solid, free of affectation and exaggeration.

Presumably the authors of the family sagas did not have in mind a literary experiment when they wrote their stories. More likely they sought to reduplicate the actual features of life as they thought it had existed for their ancestors and as they had come to know it. For a long time it was thought that the sagas provided reasonably accurate histories of the Icelandic pioneers and their descendants. Research conducted in the past thirty years, however, has shown that the sagas are not reliable as histories nor as indices to local geography, although they take historical events and lives of historical persons as their subject. It is far more accurate to describe the sagas as well-composed fiction. The manner of presentation is the historian’s, but the effect is literary. Pertinent genealogies are recorded, local customs explained, and place names accounted for as the stories unfold. Use of the authorial “I” is almost totally absent, and point of view is established by selection of detail and juxtaposition of scenes rather than by interpretive commentary.

Saga language also suggests the historian’s objective tone. Concrete nouns are its hallmark. Verbs tend to be generalized and clauses strung loosely by means of parataxis. Interpretive adverbs and adjectives are avoided, and, when employed, they are determining rather than descriptive. Descriptions of landscapes or of persons are consequential. If a river is filled with floating chunks of ice, someone will surely jump from one to another or swim between them. When fantastic elements or dreams break into a realistic account, verisimilitude is not lost. For example, the same language is employed in The Saga of Grettir, the Strong when the monster Glam attacks Grettir as when the opponent is human or the scene less dramatic.

Language spoken in the family saga is terse and laconic. It is never rhetorical or stylized. Dialogue typically occurs at dramatic moments and so increases tension and reveals character. Forceful and felicitous language is accorded the highest respect: Lawspeaker, poet, and wit have the day. To die with a quip on one’s lips is a measure of heroic stature. Vesteinn dies complimenting his assailant on his effective blow, and Attli falls noting that “broad spears are becoming fashionable nowadays.”

Family sagas tend to be episodic. Individual scenes begin and end in rest. They are related to one another by movement through time, as well as by cause and effect patterns generated by the action. Characteristically a saga closes decades or even centuries after it begins, and this remorseless passage of time is often associated with fate. The saga’s episodic structure attains its unity through juxtaposition and symmetry among its lesser parts. Reliance on techniques of short fiction is apparent: The scene is the basic unit of the family saga, and the larger effects of the narrative rely on the successful realization of each scene and the arrangement of those scenes.

Although bound into a close family by the commonality of the Icelandic historical milieu and shared method of construction, the family sagas support a range of character types and thematic interests broader than other medieval literatures. Laxdœla saga (c. 1200; English translation, 1899) has as a main theme the decline of the generous habits which prevailed during the pioneer generations. Unn the Deep Minded, who gave wise counsel until the day of her death, is mother of the Laxdaela clan and emblem of pioneer largesse. Laxdœla saga’s central story is of the imperious Gudrun who forces her third husband to kill Kjartan, her former lover and her husband’s cousin. Kjartan is a hero in the old tradition and also one of the first to practice Christianity in Iceland. His death ushers in a more violent era; Gudrun takes control and sets off revenge killings which disrupt the entire district. Peace is finally won but in an atmosphere less luminous and expectant than that of the pioneer age. Eyrbggja saga (c. 1200) also has a district’s history as its subject and shares some characters with Gísla saga súrssonar (c. 1200; The Saga of Gisli, 1866). The powerful Sturluson figure, known for his strength and wiliness in a number of sagas, figures in many scenes, and his attempts to advance his career by means of shrewd planning and outright trickery provide focus in the otherwise diffuse history of the Snaefelsness region. Eyrbggja saga’s author had a strong antiquarian interest. Hauntings and old religious rites figure prominently in the saga. Strict adherence to the heathen viewpoint does not admit the romantic and heraldic details which decorate the latter half of Laxdœla saga.

Several of the finest sagas are biographies. Egil’s Saga preludes the story of the famous warrior-poet with a long and well-wrought section about Egil’s father, grandfather, and uncle and their conflicts and alliances with Harald Fairhair. Egil himself is portrayed as a Viking with a lusty appetite for brawling and ransacking. He has a series of confrontations with European royalty, managing in the most extreme situation to save himself from Eirik Bloodaxe’s wrath by composing and reciting a poem in praise of the king. In his mature years, Egil settles in Iceland and is one of the few saga heroes to die of old age. In his last years Egil becomes old and blind and is mocked by servants, but his contrariness exerts itself to the last. He takes his treasure and buries it without a trace.

The Saga of Gisli and The Saga of Grettir, the Strong are biographies of two of Iceland’s great outlaws. Both heroes are poets. Gisli is a man obsessed by the desire to protect family honor; he kills his sister’s husband to avenge the killing of his wife’s brother. He is found out and outlawed, and his enemies pursue him and drive him to take up undignified poses and disguises to save his life. He is also terrorized by bloody, prophetic dreams, which appear in the saga as verses given him by dream women, one bright and one dark. Gisli makes brave defense and is portrayed as a far greater man than those with whom he does battle. The Saga of Gisli distinguishes itself by its intensely concentrated telling. A foreboding and tragic tone sounds throughout.

Grettir’s outlawry is longer and less ominous than Gisli’s. Like Egil, Grettir is a precocious and taciturn child. After a brilliant youthful career as a land-cleanser, Grettir’s great strength is arrested by a curse placed on him by the monster Glam. The battle scene between Grettir and Glam is one of the finest in saga literature. The reckless young hero hears how Glam has ravaged the Vatnsdale district and is anxious to test his strength against such an opponent. He is warned from such opportunism, but he pays no heed. Grettir defeats Glam but is cursed by the dying monster to a life of fear and solitude. Grettir’s outlawry, which follows this battle, is the result of a false charge. He is eventually forced into the interior of the island where he lives as a solitary, fending off those who come to kill him for bounty. Despite his perilous situation, Grettir becomes a gentler and more dignified man during his nineteen years of outlawry. He dies a tragic death, but the saga ends with the lucky adventures of Grettir’s half brother, which are presented in the “Spés tháttr.”

Njálssaga (c. thirteenth century; The Story of Burnt Njal, 1861) is called the greatest of all family sagas. It encompasses the two biographies of Gunnar of Hlidarendi and Njal, which are followed by the story of Kari’s vengeance. This intricately designed triptych is woven into a whole by the author’s imaginative grasp of every feature of his narrative. Gunnar lives his life within the framework of the old heroic code, but he is not a lucky man. He arouses the envy of lesser men and has a wife who steals. He is unable to stop a chain of events which leads him to kill three members of the same family, a situation which Njal has predicted will lead to his death. Gunnar is hunted down and murdered in his own house, a victim of lesser men. His wife, Hallgerd, a sinister force in the saga, betrays him. Gunnar’s friend and mentor, Njal, is a lawyer and a prophet of sorts who devotes his life to an attempt to replace the old revenge codes with justice and law. His attempts are insightful and trusting but finally fruitless. His own sons kill Njal’s foster son, and after other violent developments, Njal and his family are burned in their house by Flosi. Njal’s son-in-law Kari takes revenge. Reconciliation is finally achieved after Kari and Flosi are both absolved in Rome. The reconciliation is confirmed when Kari marries Flosi’s niece, the young woman who instigated the burning of Njal. On a larger plane this saga takes as its subject the upheaval and redefinition of values associated with the coming of Christianity to Iceland. Njal himself has certain characteristics of the Christian martyr. Laxdœla saga and The Saga of Grettir, the Strong contemplate this same theme from different points of view.

The great age of family saga writing seems to have ended about 1300, a time just postdating the passing of the Icelandic Republic into Norwegian control. Of the major family sagas only The Saga of Grettir, the Strong is thought to have been written later. Authors of the later era turned their attention to mythic and heroic themes drawn from the Germanic heritage. They wrote what are known as sagas of past times, which have as their subjects fantastic, heroic, and supernatural events of the remote past.

Sagas of Past Times

The most notable of the sagas of past times is the Völsunga saga (c. 1270; The Saga of the Volsungs, 1930), which opens by recounting the earliest days of the tribe of the V”lsungs. The flower of the clan is Sigurd, the most popular of all Northern heroes. Sigurd kills the dragon Fafnir and comes into possession of the Nibelungen wealth. Later he is betrothed to the Valkyrie Brynhild, but the affair comes to tragedy when Sigurd, under a witch’s spell, forgets Brynhild and marries another woman. Brynhild is married into the same family and eventually urges her husband to kill Sigurd. When the deed has been accomplished, Brynhild throws herself on Sigurd’s funeral pyre. The remainder of the saga follows the life of Sigurd’s widow, Gudrun, and the revenge killings her children carry out. Stories and characters of The Saga of the Volsungs are common to all Germanic peoples; TheNibelungenlied is based on the same tales, which also form the basis for Richard Wagner’s opera Der Ring des Nibelungen (1874; The Ring of the Nibelungs).

The author of The Saga of the Volsungs relied heavily on the eddic poems which include all the elements of his story. The prose in The Saga of the Volsungs is notably passionless and lacks the verisimilitude that the solid presence of the Icelandic landscape and historical personages gave to the family sagas. The sagas of past times in general do not retain the high literary standards of their predecessors, although sagas such as Ragnars saga Lodbrókar (c. eleventh century; The Saga of Ragnor Lodbrok, 1930), Örvar-odds saga (eleventh century; Arrow-Odd, 1970), and Hrólf saga kraka (c. 1280-1350; The Saga of Hrolf Kraki, 1933) are popular as swashbuckling adventure stories. Icelandic romances of chivalry (Riddarasögur) and the fairy tale or lying sagas (Lygisögur), which were based on foreign models, captured the interest of fourteenth and fifteenth century writers. These outlandish adventures are written in an ornate and verbose style. The day of the family saga had passed; although family sagas were collected and copied during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and were doubtlessly read, they were no longer written.

Away from the European mainstream, Icelandic writers created a literature of psychological realism worthy of comparison with nineteenth and twentieth century fiction. At the same time, the family sagas found a unique place within the humanistic tradition of the Middle Ages. Sagamen were Christian. The importance of an individual life, the emphasis on selflessness, forbearance, and conciliation, as well as other Christian values, exert quiet force when they appear as qualities of fine men and women, whether they are pagan or Christian. The pagan heroic code, with its stringent and violent demands, comes to clash with these gentler ideas. Such conflicts may be within an individual, between family members, or argued in the courts. Whatever the dramatic forum, the importance of the immediate conflict is never sacrificed to point up an abstract principle. Family sagas are primarily good stories well told. The best of them retain allegiance to district history and genealogy without allowing antiquarian interests or Christian creed to obscure their aesthetic designs.

The family sagas number around thirty-five and are anonymous. They vary in length from a few pages to more than four hundred. The Story of Burnt Njal is the longest, and both Egil’s Saga and The Saga of Grettir, the Strong are more than three hundred pages long. Most of the longer sagas deal with heroes and families in the northern and western regions of Iceland; The Story of Burnt Njal is set in the south. The sagas which are set in eastern Iceland are fewer in number, and they are shorter. Among them are two fine sagas, The Vapnfjord Men and Hrafnkels saga freysgoa (c. 1200; Hrafnkel’s Saga, 1935). The Vapnfjord Men is the story of a friendship between two brothers-in-law which disintegrates when they are alienated by a Norwegian merchant and quarrel over a box of silver. After one friend casts off his sick wife, who is the other friend’s sister, a feud begins and continues into a second generation. Reconciliation is achieved only after a young man kills his best-loved uncle in answer to an earlier killing. Half-hearted battles between the inheritors of the quarrel convince them that it is more honorable to end the fighting.

Hrafnkel’s Saga is a masterpiece of short fiction. It relates the story of the precocious son of an Icelandic pioneer who rises quickly to district prominence. Hrafnkel kills his shepherd for riding his horse and is brought to trial by the shepherd’s family. Judgment is passed against Hrafnkel, and he loses his wealth and is tortured at the confiscation trial. Later, after abandoning his heathen practices, Hrafnkel rises again to district renown. He takes revenge on his opponents by killing an innocent man, and this time there is no retort. Hrafnkel remains in control and enjoys great prestige. The saga makes exceptionally fine use of landscape features to forward its plot, and the dialogues spoken at the National Assembly are among the best in family saga literature. Characters in this tightly woven saga are finely and individually drawn.

Short sagas stand midway between the saga and the tháttr genres. Hrafnkel’s Saga, for example, is a saga, although in the main it tells a single strand story. In English collections it is often placed among Icelandic stories. At thirty-five pages, it is longer than a tháttr and much shorter than the generational sagas. Such commonality of subject matter and similarity of technique do bind saga and tháttr and might well indicate that they are shorter or longer redactions of the same prose form. As noted earlier, boundaries between saga and tháttr are not explicit. Despite the wide common ground, however, certain provinces belonging only to the tháttr reveal its closer affinities to the modern short story.

Thættir

One hundred short stories are usually named as thættir. Approximately forty-five of these fall into a group which features an Icelander as protagonist, and among this group are the most distinguished of the stories. Tháttr length runs from a single page to about twenty-five pages, the average being between ten and twelve standard printed pages.

While the family sagas typically take as heroes famous men or families, the thættir usually choose a common man. Thættir about Icelandic farmers cluster around the lives of saints, historic heroes, folklore heroes, or kings. By far the most popular subject matter is the Icelander who travels to the court of a European king; these thættir outnumber all others by approximately five to one. Such a predominance of one sort of short story may be an accident of preservation, but it is more likely that the kings’ sagas, which host them, provided a kind of yeast for the development of such short stories. One suspects they are fictional and imaginative, even fanciful outgrowths associated with the serious business of relating kings’ biographies.

A tháttr tends to focus on a single character. At first the hero may appear to be a fool, who later proves himself to be inventive and insightful. Many tháttr heroes are poets, and some are simple, anonymous travelers. These protagonists are usually young men who have strayed away from home, equipped with a native wit or goodness which is hidden under an offhanded ingenuousness. In a typical tháttr of the king and Icelander type, the Icelander speaks with one or more monarchs, often alienates himself in the initial meeting, and leaves court intent on proving his true worth to the king. The moments of recognition and reconciliation tend to be complimentary to both king and Icelander; a spirit of equality unites the common man from the North with the powerful monarch. The effect is clearly patriotic, revealing the pride the Icelanders took in the most ordinary among their ancestors.

Hreidar the Fool is one such story. Hreidar is the younger of two brothers and said to be barely able to care for himself, but it is apparent almost immediately that he is a very canny fool. Hreidar traps his brother into taking him abroad with him, where he manages to meet King Magnus. Magnus is charmed by his eccentricity and invites Hreidar and his brother to stay at court. The king predicts that Hreidar will lose his even temper and learn to be clever with his hands.

When he is rudely teased by some of King Harald’s men, Hreidar does lose his temper and kills a man. He seeks asylum with an upland farmer, and while in hiding, he tries his hand at metal-smithing. When Harald and his men arrive to capture Hreidar, he is well enough hidden to escape detection. He is willing to risk his life for a joke, however, and bursts into Harald’s presence handing him a gilded silver pig he has made. Before Harald realizes the pig is an insult, Hreidar races away and returns to King Magnus, for whom he recites a poem and is rewarded with an island. Hreidar gives the island back at Magnus’s suggestion and returns to Iceland where, as the text says, he put aside his foolishness and became a successful farmer.

In brief, the lowly Icelander has his way with everyone. His foolish cleverness reveals Harald to be a harsh and tempestuous man and Magnus to be a good ruler and counselor. For his own part, Hreidar has an entertaining series of adventures and returns home a wise and more mature man.

The tone in such a story is noticeably lighter than in the family sagas. Thættir are infused with the optimistic outlook of the Christian Middle Ages, in contrast to the family sagas, whose scope tends to be epic and serious. While there are many comic moments in the family sagas, the burden of bringing alive the ethos of an age imposes epic obligations on an author. The tháttr writer is free from such weighty obligations. While a character like Hreidar shares nobility of spirit with a saga hero like Hrafnkel, the tháttr author is not burdened by the long-term consequences of his hero’s deeds except in the most general way. The tháttr writer, for example, need not confront his hero’s death. The tháttr form may well have encouraged writing stories which were more fictional than historical. The interchange between Icelander and king typically has far more moral and psychological consequence than historical importance. Ivar in Ivar’s Story is an Icelandic poet residing at the court of King Eystein. Ivar asks his brother to tell Oddney back in Iceland that he wishes to marry her. Ivar’s brother does not deliver the message; instead he marries Oddney himself. Ivar hears the news and becomes downcast. The king cannot understand his sorrow and calls Ivar to him and offers him land, gifts, and other women, but Ivar is not solaced. The king can think of nothing else to offer except his companionship. Ivar accepts Eystein’s offer of friendship. Each day before the tables are cleared, Ivar joins the king and speaks of Oddney to his heart’s content. Soon the poet’s happiness returns, and he remains with King Eystein.

The tháttr writer seems to have enjoyed a greater imaginative freedom because he was not bound to make aesthetic sense of a vast amount of time. Since he wrote about a moment often unmarked in history and about an Icelander whose life was not particularly noteworthy, he could turn his attention to the creation of a fictional environment. The thættir are not analyses of historical deeds whose consequences are national in scope; they are tributes to the characters of kings. The stories also celebrate the characters of common Icelanders who call forth the true natures of the kings they visit. Likely the Icelandic writers knew little about life in Norway or about its landscape, so focus tended to remain on character and dialogue, which were explored and exploited to the exclusion of other features. The thættir characters found themselves in realistic dilemmas and extricated themselves through dint of their imaginations, or, as in the famous case of Audun, told in Audun and the Bear, by innocence and goodness.

Audun and the Bear

Audun is a Westfjord man of very modest means who gives all of his money for a Greenland bear that he wishes to present to King Svein of Denmark. When Audun lands in Norway, King Harald, having heard about the precious bear, invites Audun to court, hoping to buy it or have it given to him. In a graceful show of honesty and naïveté, Audun tells Harald he wishes to deliver the bear to Svein. Harald is so startled by the man’s innocence that he sends him on his way even though Norway and Denmark are at war. Audun finally makes his way to Svein, but not without begging for food and selling half of the bear to do so. Svein is pleased and supplies Audun with silver for a pilgrimage to Rome. When Audun returns to Svein’s court after his journey south, he is reduced to a beggar, and the kings’ men mock him. Svein recognizes Audun and richly rewards him, praising him as a man who knows how to care for his soul. Audun refuses a position in Svein’s court in order to return to Iceland to care for his mother. On his way home, he visits once more with Harald and at the Norwegian monarch’s request tells him about the gifts Svein has given him. Among those gifts is an arm ring which Svein has instructed Audun to keep unless he can give it to a great man to whom he was obligated. Audun gives the ring to Harald, because, as he says, Harald could have had his bear and his life but took neither. Audun sails back to Iceland and is considered a man of great luck. In the few scenes of this story, the tháttr author gathers peace, goodwill, generosity, and integrity around this modest Icelander, who, without consciousness, becomes a model of the medieval pilgrim.

The thættir as a group, although they are restricted in subject matter, tend to take the shape of modern short stories; they develop character swiftly and pointedly through action. They are dramatic rather than narrative. Genealogy is curtailed if it is used at all. They usually dispense with the ominousness of fate and the burden of history. Language is terse and witty, often with a lightness appropriate to its subject.

During the fourteenth century, the themes of the sagas of past times were also taken up by tháttr writers. These stories tend to lack the tension, the energy, and the comic juxtaposition of earlier thættir. The old patterns are visible but without the solidity that the stories of Icelanders in the kings’ courts have. The setting shifts to prehistoric Europe, and the plots often read as bawdy folktales. In the story Gridr’s Fosterling, Illugi (c. 1300), for example, the young prince’s playmate, Illugi, wins royal favor by killing a revenant and is allowed to accompany the prince on an ocean voyage. When Illugi swims to shore for fire to save the ship’s crew from freezing, he wanders into the cave of an ogress who tests his courage before allowing him her daughter’s favors. The monster is a queen under an evil spell. Illugi destroys the spell and marries the daughter. The queen marries the prince and all live happily ever after.

When this sort of subject matter replaced the realistic action and individual characters of the earlier thættir, the stories became less distinguishable as a genre and certainly less akin to modern fiction. This shift in subject matter indicates a stronger bonding with the European literatures. The popularity of the adventure and the fantastic tale were prompted by the Continental interest in romance. Certain of the later thættir are strong and resemble the best fabliaux. The strongest stories of this group are usually reliant on historical matter and the learned tradition, as their predecessors were, rather than on folktale. “Spes Tháttr,” which concludes The Saga of Grettir, the Strong, is an example. Because of their optimistic character, thættir do have natural affinities to fabliaux, but the tháttr’s strengths are particularly its own. The use of realistic characters, few and vividly dramatized scenes, vigorous dialogue, and definitive imagery give the medieval Icelandic short story a distinct place in the history of European short fiction.

Bibliography

Andersson, Theodore M., and William Ian Miller. Law and Literature in Medieval Iceland: “Ljósvetninga saga” and “Valla-Ljóts saga.” Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989. Written by a literary critic and a legal historian, this study combines methodologies to the study, translation, and annotation of two relatively unknown family sagas. Includes a bibliography and an index.

Clover, Carol J. Óláfs Saga Helga, Runsivals Tháttr, and Njáls Saga: A Structural Comparison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Clover compares three sagas in this historical study. Includes a bibliography.

Durrenberger, E. Paul. The Dynamics of Medieval Iceland: Political Economy and Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. Durrenberger touches upon a number of important and complex issues in his study of Icelandic society and its sources. Includes a bibliography.

Hollander, Lee Milton. Víga-Glúms saga and “The Story of Ógmund Dytt.” New York: Twayne, 1972. Includes a discussion of The Story of Ógmund Dytt, which is a translation of Ógmundar Þáttr Dytts, part of the Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar. Includes a bibliography.

Molan, Chris. The Viking Saga. Austin, Tex.: Raintree Steck-Vaughn, 1985. Based on modern translations by Magnus Magnusson and Herman Pálsson of Groenlendinga saga and Eirik’s saga, this work describes how the Vikings came to discover Vinland and their settlements in the New World.

Stitt, J. Michael. Beowulf and the Bear’s Son: Epic, Saga, and Fairytale in Northern Germanic Tradition. New York: Garland, 1992. An informative study comparing texts within the tradition, including a chapter entitled “Epic, Saga, and Fairytale.” Includes an index.

Tucker, John, ed. Sagas of the Icelanders: A Book of Essays. New York: Garland, 1989. A collection of essays by noted authors in the field, including a general introduction by Tucker entitled “Sagas of the Icelanders.” Includes a bibliography and an index.

Víga-Glúms Saga, with the Tales of Ógmund Bash and Thorvald Chatterbox. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1987. Text includes a translations of and Ógmundar Þáttr Dytts and þorvalds þþáttur tasalda. Includes bibliographical references.