In which I complete a 2021 New Year's Resolution

[bloodygranuaile]

 The first I remember hearing about the Icelandic “family sagas” was in Kory Stamper’s Word By Word, where she describes them so hilariously that I made a mental note to track some down and read them one of these days. I was therefore very pleased to find that I already owned them because I had bought a copy of The Sagas of Icelanders at Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg a few years prior, apparently under the belief that it was a volume of the “heroic sagas,” which is a completely different genre of ancient Icelandic literature. 

 

Anyway. I, with the help of Twitter, decided that The Sagas of Icelanders was to be my 2021 yearlong read, and then, because I am in a perverse mood lately, I read the whole thing this month, before 2021 has even started. I am pleased with this course of action because it means I can make Varney the Vampire my 2021 read instead. Also, the sagas made very good December reading.

 

It is a bit hard to describe quite what the family sagas are about but “neighbors killing each other over dumb bullshit” comes close. More specifically, they are the stories of the families and notable individuals who settled Iceland (and, occasionally, Greenland) in the years during and shortly after the unification of Norway under King Harald Fair-Hair. Most of these stories involve somebody killing somebody else over something fairly impenetrable to modern readers--or, in at least once case, *explicitly* at complete random--and setting off an escalating series of blood feuds where the kin of the murdered person must avenge them, but then when they do, the kin of the person they got revenge upon think it was a little much and decide that they need to then avenge that person’s death, and so on and so forth until either a) everyone is dead b) everyone has been sentenced to outlawry or c) on rare occasion, the whole situation gets de-escalated in court and everyone is sentence to giving each other lots of expensive gifts as compensation and people actually abide by this and are willing to let the matter be considered settled.

 

The lawsuits are, to me, one of the more interesting parts of the sagas; in a very violent, warlike society where half the economy seems to be based on raiding (the other half is based on farming) and these important but frequently contradictory codes of honor dictate constant fighting, this elaborate system of lawsuits and gift-based settlements seems to take up a lot of time and energy and have a very complex and sophisticated set of procedures around it for something that 80% of the time seems to keep things quiet for a few years at most, or that the characters just straight up blow off in favor of more fighting. However, the times where it does work, it’s interesting that de-escalating a situation without further bloodshed can be seen to enhance the reputation of both parties in a lawsuit--a number of these resolve not with one person “winning” and the other “losing,” but with both parties exchanging gifts in compensation for the injuries inflicted in the course of the feud by their side, and with then everyone feeling like compensation had been made. I think I found this particularly interesting because in a strictly currency-based economy like ours, you’d have debts cancel each other out--if I owe you $10 and you owe me $10, we’d probably call it even and not exchange any money; me giving you $10 and you giving me $10 right back would seem to be a little silly--but in an economy where wealth can take the form not just of silver marks, but of land, livestock, weapons, armor, jewelry, or clothing, the act of exchanging goods seems to do a lot to provide a sense that something is actually being done to resolve the conflict, rather than it being an unsatisfying draw. 

 

In addition to lots of violence and lawsuits, the sagas feature a good number of jokes; many of these are only middlingly funny to a modern reader, and require some amount of laborious marginalia to explain, which, of course, always makes a joke somewhat less funny. This volume also features a handful of “tales” in addition to the sagas; these are generally much shorter--only a few pages--less genealogically rigorous (and therefore possibly entirely fictional), and more explicitly comic. My favorite of the “tales” was undoubtedly “The Tale of Sarcastic Halli,” about a guy named Halli who is highly gifted in the fine art of roasting people. The Tale of Sarcastic Halli features the only callback joke in the book, involving Halli’s death by porridge, and also my favorite of the ridiculous, riddle-esque ways of naming things that features so heavily in Viking alliterative poetry: a floor being referred to as the “moor of socks.” 

 

I regret to report that Viking society was wildly sexist and as such, like 80% of the female characters in this book fail the sexy lamp test. Of the ones that pass it, most often their role is to harangue the men into engaging in acts of honorable vengeance that, despite being required for honor reasons, end badly for everybody. There is approximately one story in which a woman actually hits anybody herself; Aud, the wife of the titular Gisli in “Gisli Sursson’s Saga,” socks a dude in the nose with a heavy purse of silver and instantly became my favorite character (later in the saga she also defends herself with a club, so, go Aud). 

 

The biggest challenge in reading this book, IMO, is the fact that all the male characters are named like Thorstein and Thorbjorn and Thorkel and Thorolf and Thorgrim, and all the female characters are named Thora and Thorgerd, and it’s really nearly as bad as reading British history where everyone is named William or Charles or Charles William. There is a reason that in novel writing they tell you not to do this (unless you are George R. R. Martin and are allowed to name everyone Robert). 

 

Anyway all my nitpicks here are affectionate; the sagas are completely batty and I enjoyed them quite a lot.