The Northern Saga E-Book

Ernest Edward Kellett

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

There was a king in Denmark who was called Rolf Kraki: he was the noblest of the kings of old, alike in valour and in mildness, and also in lowliness of mind. And of this lowliness this story is a sign, which is ofttimes told. There was a boy named Vogg, small and poor: he came to King Rolf’s court. At that time the king was young and slight of body. Vogg came in and looked up at him. ‘Why lookest thou so at me?’ said the king. ‘I had heard’, said Vogg, ‘that King Rolf of Leidra was the greatest man in all the Northern lands: and now, there sits in the high-seat a Kraki or little thin pole, and men call that their king, though round him are twelve Berserks, all mightier than he, and Bodvar Bjarki mightier by far.’ The king, no whit offended, took the lad’s words kindly, and said, ‘Now thou hast lengthened my name, and henceforth I shall be known as Rolf Kraki. But ’tis the custom at a naming-feast to give gifts: take then this ring’; and he took his ring from his hand and gave it to Vogg. Then Vogg said, ‘This oath I take, that whosoever killeth thee, of him will I be the bane’. All men laughed at the boy’s boast; but the king said, ‘A little toy makes Vogg glad’.

Leseprobe

The Northern Saga

Ernest Edward Kellett

© 2023 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782385745103

PREFACE

Few story-tellers are to be compared, for directness and simplicity, with the old Icelandic sagamen. In their unforced art and freedom from sophistication they remind us of Herodotus and of the Hebrew historians; while in the width and sweep of their themes they are not unworthy to be set beside Homer himself. There is a peculiar sense of relief when one turns to them after a course of modern realistic and psychological novels. In them we have no probing after motives, no complicated spiritual conflicts. The passions of the heroes are violent, but they are natural. The social life they describe is free, vital, and almost Homeric, and allows full play for those passions to express themselves in act. Disguise and hypocrisy are rare: the men appear as what they are. We read these stories, and see humanity as it is when stripped of the trammelling garments of convention.

No translation can give an adequate idea of the brief, staccato, but vigorous style of these tales. Those who desire to enjoy them to the full should undertake the pleasant task of learning the language. But in the present little work I have tried to suggest something of the effect this literature has had upon myself, and I trust that my failure has not been too conspicuous. I have chosen a few specimens from widely different ages and styles; and to aid in their comprehension I have prefixed a short account of the conditions which gave birth to this astonishing literature.

E. E. K.

CONTENTS

Introduction

I.

The Story of Rolf Kraki

II.

The Story of Kormak

III.

The Tale of Geirmund Hell-skin

IV.

The Saga of Hord, or the Story of the Holm-men

V.

The Tale of Gretti and Glam

VI.

The Tale of Thidrandi

VII.

The Tale of Hallbjorn Hali

VIII.

The Tale of Bjarni

IX.

The Tale of Lodin

X.

Brand the Generous

XI.

The Burning at Flugumyri

XII.

The Story of Viglund

XIII.

Master Piers

XIV.

The Three Companions

Appendix

INTRODUCTION

Like other great forms of literature, the Northern saga arose from a peculiar and short-lived social condition. The Elizabethan drama sprang from circumstances which are not likely to be repeated, and the attempt to reproduce it to-day simply results in an arid and artificial mimicry of what was, with all its faults, a living and spontaneous growth. The Homeric epic (like the Teutonic epic, of which Beowulf is almost the only surviving specimen) was the natural product of a certain stage of society which has utterly passed away; and Virgil’s imitation of Homer only brought forth something totally un-Homeric. The case is similar with the Northern saga—except, perhaps, that the conditions which gave it birth were even more remarkable than those which bred a Homer or a Shakspere.

Towards the end of the ninth century there arose in Norway a state of affairs not unlike that which prevailed in Palestine about the end of the period of the Judges. Hitherto the heads of families had been able to live, not exactly every man under his vine and under his fig-tree, but under his own fells and on his own land. Everyone did that which was right in his own eyes, restrained only by the sword of his neighbour or by his own caution. It was a patriarchal system, adapted to an early age, but unfitted to meet the needs of an advancing civilisation. The Saul who put an end to it was the great King Harald Fairhair, who, during a reign of seventy years, devoted himself to the task of destroying the power of the nobles and consolidating that of the king. It was a necessary task, but a stern one, and it demanded as much ruthless unscrupulousness as was needed by the early Stuarts against the Douglases or by Richelieu against the Montmorencys. Harald is said to have sworn an oath never to cut his hair till the task was accomplished; and accomplished it at last was. Sturdy was the opposition: at the great sea-fight of Hafrsfirth[1] there were the most astonishing feats of valour on both sides. Harald planted his ‘Berserks’ in the thick of the fight, and these enchanted heroes acted up to their repute; but on the other side Onund Treefoot, having lost a leg, plunged the stump into a cauldron of boiling tar, staunched the flow of blood, and fought on. At length the ‘bonders’ fled. Even so, all opposition was not entirely crushed; but finally the chiefs resigned the hopeless struggle. Those that stayed in Norway were fain to acknowledge the supremacy of Harald; those that still clung to the ancient ‘liberty’ took refuge in Orkney or Shetland, the Faroes or the Hebrides, and often sought by piratical raids to avenge themselves on their conqueror. But thence also the indomitable determination of Harald routed them out: he gathered together, we are told, a mighty armament, and—not once only, but twice—swept the Northern seas so thoroughly that ere long scarcely a single Viking was left to trouble them.

No wonder, at such a time as this, that the harassed ‘bonders’ looked eagerly towards a country which, though partially within the Arctic Circle, promised to be less inhospitable than a Norway ruled over by a Harald. Some years before this a Swedish sailor named Gardar, crossing from Pentland Firth, was driven by a storm far to the north-west. After many days he lighted on a certain country, in which he stayed through the whole winter, and which he discovered to be an island. Returning east, he ‘praised the land much’. He was followed soon by a Viking named Naddad, who, being outlawed in nearly every country of the North, was glad enough to hear of one where a man could act as he pleased. Naddad and his men called the place Snow-land. Shortly afterwards a third famous Viking, named Floki, wishing to discover the land of which Gardar had spoken, hallowed three ravens after the old heathen fashion, and let them loose in succession from his ship. The first flew back at once; the second fluttered for a short while and then returned; the third flew straight for the land to which men would go. Floki, following the raven, reached the island. There he climbed a mountain to get a view of the country, and saw that the firths were full of sea-ice; wherefore he called the land Iceland.

From that time the land began rapidly to fill. Great chiefs came over with their families, and settled there, following the rude sailing directions which were all that the most skilled navigators could give before the mariner’s compass was known. ‘First, you steer for the Faroes, and then you leave them to the south at such a distance that the sea shows half-way up the cliffs; and then you sail on until the whales and sea-fowl are met with.’ When the would-be settlers drew near the shore, they adopted equally primitive methods in choosing their place of landing. Thus Ingolf, one of the earliest of the immigrants, having made a great sacrifice before leaving Norway, consulted the oracle as to his destination. The oracle bade him go to Iceland. Accordingly, he took with him his household goods, and the two sacred pillars that were at the head of his high-seat. As he sighted the Iceland coast, he threw these pillars overboard, resolving to settle where they touched the shore. A year later they were found at Reykjavik, and there he built his home. Later came Onund Treefoot, Geirmund Hell-skin, Thrand the Sailor, and others of Harald’s enemies.

Not, of course, that adventurers of this kind were the only settlers. Men came—nay, as Vigfusson has clearly shown, they had come already, even before Harald Fairhair began his reign—from all the scattered parts of the Norse world: from Ireland, from Man, from England, from Scotland, from Wales. Highest of all, in rank and splendour, was Aud ‘Djupaudga’, the Deeply Wealthy, widow of Olaf the White, King of Dublin. After the death of her husband, and the slaughter of her son Thorstein in some Irish rising, she came with a great company of her retainers to Iceland, and settled in Broadfirth, perhaps the most fertile part of the new country, and the seat of the most famous sagas. Her brother-in-law, Helgi the Lean, occupied large tracts in the north, and other relatives settled in south and east. From these great ancestors sprang the vast majority of the chiefs around whom the stories cluster. Indeed, many scholars have seen in the infusion of Irish blood brought into the Norse stock by Queen Aud and others one of the main factors which help to explain the sagas. In any case, from her came the indomitable pride which would yield to nothing, not even to death itself. As the old queen felt her end coming, on the day of the marriage of her youngest grandchild, she ‘greeted her kinsfolk with great courtesy, and saw to it that the feast was lordly and magnificent. Then she walked with a quick step out of the hall, and men said how stately she still was. And next day Olaf went into her sleeping-chamber, and she was sitting up against her pillow, and she was dead. Everyone thought it a wonderful thing, how Aud had kept up her state and her pride to the very day of her death.’

Within about a couple of generations since the first settlement the whole island—that is, the strip of coast-line which alone has been found habitable—was occupied and parcelled out among a number of great families of the various kinds we have described. There were no towns in our sense of the word, but scattered hamlets, surrounding the great houses of the chiefs; the dwellings of the small farmers who were in more or less of dependence upon the nobles; the cots of the thralls, and the ‘sheilings’ or huts in the hills among the sheep-runs, which of course were abandoned in the winters. The names of the chiefs are all known to us from the Landnáma Bók of the historian Ari—an indefatigable investigator, born in the eleventh century, who collected and set down all the information he could get as to the settlement from the ‘skalds’ or bards of the great houses. His work is as interesting as that of Herodotus, and as accurate as a gazetteer.

The Norsemen were not the first inhabitants of Iceland. When they arrived there they found in several places books, bells, crocks, and the like, which showed that the ‘Papey’ or Christian hermits from Ireland or Scotland had been there before them. But these old saints had all died, as perhaps they hoped to die, in these distant retreats. The Norsemen were heathen, nor did they learn Christianity for more than a hundred years from the first settlement. Their ideas, their customs, and their superstitions were all ‘of the old fashion’; and their poems and stories exhibit corresponding features. During the summer they busied themselves in Viking raids, in visits to Norway, in fishing, in farming, or in frightful feuds with their neighbours. An Icelander fought with Athelstan against Anlaf and Constantine at the battle of Brunanburh; another assisted Ethelred the Unready against the Danes. But—and this is characteristic of Iceland—both these dauntless and unscrupulous heroes were poets, and recorded their loves and hates in song. For in Iceland there are four months in every year in which the sun is scarcely visible, and in these months there is little to do but to tell the deeds done during the summer. ‘The holy Bede’, says Ari, ‘speaks of a land called Thile, where there is no day in winter, and no night in summer; and this Thile is our Iceland.’ All the great chiefs had at their little courts some man, often a relative of the chief, who was an authority on all the marriages and genealogies, knew the origins of the feuds, the truces and the breakers of them, the love stories and the hairbreadth escapes, the ballads and the tales. During the winter nights such a man was in his glory, for it was then that he would bring out his harp and chant his lays, or mount the dais and recite his histories, receiving at the close a drink of mead and the proud thanks of his chief. Nor was it only the professional who could do this. At Yuletide, as we hear in the saga of Eric the Red, the whole household played at ‘tables’ and told stories. Many are the stories, in the sagas themselves, of men who knew the sagas. Thus, for example, in the Life of Harald Hardrada, we hear of a blind man named Stuf, a grandson of the renowned Gudrun, the heroine of Laxdaela Saga. Meeting by accident with Stuf, the king was struck with his ready wit and conversational quickness. ‘The king talked much with Stuf; and when men would sleep, he bade him into the sleeping-room, to skemta to him.’ Skemta, properly ‘to shorten or abridge’, was used by the Icelanders to denote the telling of tales, the chanting of ballads, or anything else that was good for making time pass quickly. ‘And when the king was in bed, Stuf sang him a flokk or lay; and when he had finished the king asked for another. And as the king was long awake, Stuf sang him thirty flokks. Dost thou know drapas also? said the king (a longer and more stately lay is a drapa). No fewer are my drapas than my flokks, said Stuf: whereupon the king told him he was a good froediman’—that is, a man learned in stories. When Harald fell at Stamford Bridge, Stuf made the funeral drapa in his honour.

Similarly, in the same saga, we are told of a young and clever Icelander, but poor and ragged, who came to King Harald and begged him for help.

‘The king’, says the story, ‘asked him whether he knew any froedi or traditions: whereupon the Icelander answered that he knew certain sagas. Then said the king, I will take thee into my court, and thou shalt abide with me this winter and skemta as men ask thee. And so he did, and gained great friendship from the men, insomuch that they gave him clothes, and the king himself gave him good weapons. Thus the time ran on towards Yule: but as Yule drew near, the Icelander grew sad at heart. The king saw this, and asked what it was that made him sad. It is that I am born so, said he: I am of a changeful mind, now cheerful now gloomy. Not so, said the king; and I will now guess what ails thee. This is my guess, that all thy store of sagas is finished, for thou hast told to everyone that asked, whether by day or by night; and now thou thinkest it ill to be short of sagas at Yuletide, nor does it please thee to tell a tale a second time. Thou hast guessed right, O king, said the Icelander; for I have but one saga left, and that is the tale of thy travels, which I dare not tell here in thy presence. Nay, said the king, that is the very saga which there is upon me the greatest longing to hear. Now shalt thou cease to tell tales till Yule, and on the first day of Yuletide shalt thou begin thy saga, and tell of it some portion; and I will so fashion things that thy tale and Yule shall end together: nor will I let thee know, until the end, whether it please me well or ill. And so it came to pass; on the first day of Yule the Icelander began the tale, and had said but little when the king bade him cease; so there was much talk among the men about that tale. Some said it was great daring in an Icelander to tell it there, but others thought not so. The king took pains that it was well hearkened to, and, as he had said, he fashioned things so that the tale and Yule ended together. Then on Twelfth Night the king said, Hast thou no desire to hear how the tale has pleased me? Very fearful am I about that, herra (“lord”), said he. Methinks it was very well told, said the king, nor did it depart at all from the truth: who taught thee? He answered, Every summer in Iceland I went to the Thing, and learned some part of the saga as Halldor, the son of Snorri, told it. No wonder, said Harald, that thou knowest well if Halldor taught thee: therefore shalt thou be welcome every time thou comest. So he stayed with the king that winter, and at spring the king gave him store of goods, and he was a thriving man thenceforward.’

Everywhere, in fact, we hear of men renowned for their skill in story-telling and for their accuracy in memory. ‘Sir Ingimund the sailor-priest’, the hero of Helen Barmby’s fine ballad, was one of these famous tellers. Of Halldor Snorri’s son we have just heard. Sturla Thord’s son, the last and perhaps the greatest of Icelandic historians, himself tells us how he gained the favour of a hostile king by his gift of story-telling—indeed, the king told him ‘he spoke better than the Pope’.[2] Nor were mortals the only beings that might be thus propitiated. A merchant was once telling his crew at sea the saga of King Vatnar, and called him a noble man. When he lay asleep by Vatnar’s Howe, he dreamed that the king came to him, and said, ‘Thou hast told my saga; I will give thee this reward therefor. When thou wakest, look in my howe and thou shalt find.’ So when he awoke he looked and found there a great treasure.

Such then was the origin of the saga. It was at first literally what its name implies, a Saw or thing said. Not till the twelfth century at earliest were the tales written down; and even when they began to be actually written in the first instance, they still retained for many years the character stamped upon them by a long period of telling. Thus, for example, the Hakonar Saga of Sturla was written from the first. It was based upon information given by Hakon’s son Magnus and by his ‘wisest men’: it is in fact a history in the proper sense of the word; but it is a history told in saga style. What that saga style is it will be the business of the following pages to explain and illustrate.

Saga Characteristics