A packed Court Hall heard
Richard Thomas's fascinating talk on Sagas. As mentioned below, (see post below,
dated 15 January), Richard spent some years in a diplomatic service posting to
Reykjavik. Here is a summary of his talk:
"
In modern English the word
“saga” means a long, often tedious account of a series of events or
misfortunes. It is in fact Old Norse or Icelandic
for “story”, and has for centuries denoted a corpus of some hundreds of mediaeval
prose works, written in Iceland in the thirteenth century. The greatest of them, the so-called “family
sagas”, are mainly about real people who lived at or soon after the time of the
settlement of Iceland, two or three hundred years earlier. They were written from
folk memory, and combine actual history with imaginative fiction. They are characteristically
composed in spare, often humorous, prose, and range in length from about thirty
to three hundred pages. Half a dozen or
so of them are among the greatest works of medieval, or indeed any, literature,
including Njal’s Saga, Laxdaela Saga, Egil’s Saga and Hrafnkel’s Saga.
Leif
had set out from Brattahlid, the farm a thousand miles away in Greenland which
his father, Eric the Red, had built ten or twenty years earlier, when he
established the Icelandic colony there at the end of the tenth century – a colony
that was to survive for five hundred years.
Eric was a pagan, but his wife Thjodhild was a newly converted
Christian, and her wish to build a church was granted by her husband provided
it was out of sight from the main buildings at Brattahlid. Archaeologists in the Nineteen Thirties found
further proof of the historical accuracy of what the sagas describe when they
discovered the remains of a tiny church, hidden by a small hill, only yards
from Eric’s house. That little church, by
a fjord in Greenland, has since been reconstructed, to stand as a lonely and
poignant monument to the toughness and humanity of those Viking explorers and
colonizers whose deeds are known to us through a wonderful corpus of mediaeval
literature known as the Icelandic Sagas."
The sagas survive mainly in
the form of vellum manuscripts, repeatedly copied out in the isolated manor
farms in which most mediaeval Icelanders lived.
In a country with few archaeological remains these precious objects
serve as its principal historical artefacts.
But the sagas survive also as a spirit or feeling that informs almost
everything that is thought about in Iceland, a country unlike anywhere else. From
the settlement, in the late tenth century, until the end of the thirteenth, it
was a kind of republic, free of the malign rule of kings, largely free even of
the priestly grip on education exercised by the mediaeval church in the rest of
Western Europe. This state of affairs, combined with the scattered and
isolated nature of the farms and churches, served mainly by amateur priests,
meant that ordinary Icelanders became literate, hundreds of years before their
counterparts in the rest of Europe. The
amazing oral transmission of Iceland’s laws was mirrored by the way folk
memories and the country’s history, in particular of its settlement, were
eventually written up and preserved as sagas, which were read and recounted
time and time again, right up to modern times, in evening “saga
entertainments”.
There is plenty of fiction in
the sagas, including accounts of monsters and other supernatural beings. But this is mixed with apparently
straightforward history, including in the two Greenland Sagas the story of Leif
Eiriksson’s “discovery” of North America, five hundred years before Columbus,
dismissed as a fairytale by many sceptical scholars until confirmed by the
discovery of clear archaeological evidence in Newfoundland in the Nineteen
Sixties.
For more information on Sagas,
including full texts of English translations of some of the Sagas mentioned by
Richard, click here to access the Sagas Database website. If anyone would like
a copy of the text of Richard's talk, e-mail me at lyoulten@aol.com
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