The Odd Charm of the First Icelanders
The land called Iceland has
around 200 volcanoes. Many of them
still active. Much of the country
is covered by ice, thus the name. It
is a barren country: only around one-fourth of it is inhabitable.
Iceland has not been settled for very long
compared to China or the rest of Europe.
The first to settle in Iceland were Norwegian Vikings, mostly men, who
came with their Celtic wives, slaves and followers. These first settlements happened around 900. The land they came to was hard to live
on, the winter weather was terrible.
The difficult living conditions made them a very tough culture: they
were clannish and competitive.
There were many bloody conflicts over land.
Iceland developed a very strong literature
over these first centuries. One
odd thing about its literature is that many of the stories were quite like our
modern novels. In other countries
in Europe the literature was mostly poetry, but the Icelandic stories were in
prose writing. They called their
stories sagas. By the 1300s the greatest
sagas had been written. I will
simplify some sentences from an article by Brad Leithauser to give some idea of
how these stories came to be written:
We don't know the names of the writers
of the sagas. They were anonymous
scribes who worked in the enclosing dark of terrible winters, recording onto
calfskins their tales of heroes and heroines, brave feats and bitter blood-feuds.
When winter descended and travel was too dangerous, their island nation would
be cut off from the rest of the world for months on end. They put their heads
down and kept working.
Leithauser
tells that the sagas are often about blood-feuds: battles between competing
families. They are often about the
period just after Iceland was founded by the Norwegian Vikings. In those difficult times the Icelanders
started to develop a complicated legal system to control the violence of their
conflicts. One of the strange
things about their stories is that they give a lot of legal language about how
things should be
settled, but then things will suddenly turn violent. One historian of law wrote of the Icelanders that they had
"a legal system so complex that it is hard to believe that it was created
by men whose main occupation was to kill one another."
Leithauser
writes about how the Icelandic sagas are different from ancient Greek and Roman
literature. In Homer's war story,
the Iliad, one can
tell when an important character is going to be killed: the story leads up to
it slowly and presents information about his past, to remind readers of the
hero's greatness. In the Icelandic
stories it is very different. The eruption of violence is sudden and startling.
Leithauser writes:
One moment, somebody is rounding up a few horses, or fixing a
wall on his farm, or gathering hay, and the next moment he is lying face down
on the ground, his blood steaming in the frosty air.
Like the
Greeks, the Icelanders spoke of fate, but their idea of it was different. The world for the Icelanders is
unpredictable and risky. Reading
their literature one has a feeling that anything can happen to anyone at any
time. What's more, characters that
seem to have a potential importance will enter the story only to suddenly
disappear. There is the mention of
Skeggi in "The Saga of Grettir the Strong":
Skeggi was distinguished from all his
brothers and sisters by his strength and build. By the age of fifteen he was
the strongest person in north Iceland, and at that time people said his father
was Grettir. Everyone thought he would grow into an outstanding man, but he
died at the age of sixteen and there are no stories about him.
And that is
the story of Skeggi!
Also the reader
notices the sagas are on a different scale from the Greek or Roman
literature. In the Greek and Roman
epics we always read of thousands of men fighting each other in huge battle
scenes. In the sagas we might read
of a major battle where "dozens of men" were slain.
The
Icelanders valued quit wit, and there is often a dark humor in the dialogue of
the sagas. In "The Saga of
Droplaug's Sons," after Helgi's lower lip is taken off by his enemy's
sword, his reply is: "I was never beautiful, but you've made no
improvement in my looks."
Sometimes the violence is told plainly and directly in the most gruesome
way: "They broke the neck of the old woman Skjaldvor and it was a
difficult job for them because she had a very thick neck."
Living on
their barren land, suffering the terrible winters, the Icelanders often dreamed
of the impossible wealth beyond their reach: the wealth of faraway lands. Leithauser points out an odd fact of
their stories: the word gold appears very often:
Gold must have had a special imaginative gleam to a people for
whom it must have symbolized the riches of faraway southern lands. . . . In
addition, the attraction of gold for the Icelanders may be related to their
location, just below the Arctic Circle. Anyone who has ever spent a December or
January in Iceland knows that the most striking thing about an arctic winter
isn't the shortness of the day but the seeming weakness of the sun--a pale,
dreamy disc that, even at the height of noon, stays low on the horizon and
hardly looks capable of warming an old cat sleeping on a windowsill. To the
medieval Icelandic farmer, who usually went hungry at winter's end as his
autumn food supplies ran out, that low gold coin on the southern horizon was
the only reserve he had to keep off starvation.
Leithauser
says that gold was often used to symbolize feminine beauty, as in the following
lines about Helga the Fair:
Helga was so beautiful that learned men say that she was the
most beautiful woman there has ever been in Iceland. She had so much hair that
it could completely cover her body, and it was as radiant as beaten gold.
Many of the
Icelandic sagas become very confusing to read because of the large number of
characters mentioned and the confusing names. One odd thing about the medieval Icelandic people was how
they liked to use the name Thor or names that came from Thor. Leithauser writes:
In "Gisli Sursson's Saga," we meet a man named Thorkel
who is going to the Thorsnes Assembly with Thorbjorn's sons. He meets up with Thorstein, the son of
Thorolf, who was living at Thorsnes with Thora and their children, Thordis,
Thorgrim, and Bork the Stout. Also there is the man in Njal's Saga who "had two sons, both named
Thorhall."
These Thors
and sons of Thors were tough people.
Many Americans might still believe that Christopher Columbus was the
first European to reach America.
But it is now known that this is wrong. Viking sailors from Iceland got to North America before
Columbus ever did. They tried to
establish settlements on the northeast coast of Canada, but the settlements
were not successful.
I write here
of the medieval Icelanders, but one should remember that Iceland is still
there. It is a thriving country
with a very educated population.
It has been found that Icelanders read more books than any other people
in the world. Is this maybe
because they still suffer from their difficult winters?
Eric Mader
[Note: Much
of the information and all of the quotations I use above come from an excellent
review by Brad Leithauser that appeared in the December 20, 2001 New York
Review of Books (Vol.
48, No. 20). Because I've written
these paragraphs to teach teenage students in Taiwan about medieval Iceland,
I've simplified Leithauser's sentences.]
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