Free The Sagas of the Icelanders by Jane Smilely

of law, the moral natures of the old saga heroes were a mirror in which people of the Sturlung Age could aspire, at least in imagination, to see themselves.

VIII. THE WORLD OF THE SAGAS
     
    In selecting the sagas and tales of Icelanders to be included in this volume, the editors wanted to illustrate different characteristics of their art, and to suggest the varieties of experience that made up ‘the world of the sagas’. Iceland was the newest and most remote nation in Europe when the stories recorded in these sagas took place. It was first inhabited in the expansion of the Norse hegemony westward, and like other frontier societies it was a good place for people unhappy or in trouble at home to get a new start. The sagas describe, in the first few generations of what we think of as the Icelandic nation, a restless class of able and ambitious young men, on the move back and forth, largely concerned with making fortunes and earning reputations on a larger stage than Iceland offered. A hundred years later, the coming and going, within Iceland but more especially abroad, was associated with Christianity and the missionary activities of pious Icelanders and clergy from abroad. Iceland was by no means imagined as the centre of the world. An element of movement – travel, discovery and exploration – was an aspect of the earliest narrative literature in Icelandic, even before the
Sagas of Icelanders
were put into writing. It has seemed appropriate, therefore, to conceive of the selection in this volume as itself a journey into a saga world that can be characterized (not altogether metaphorically) in terms of the various spaces and locales these stories tell us about.
    The first stage describes the emigration of important families from Norway to Iceland, often with a temporary stop in Britain. It is the single most enduring element of the foundation story of Iceland, and is mentioned in most of the sagas in this collection, nowhere more fully than in
Egil’s Saga
, where we see that even the patterns of movement as they become established in Icelandic society are an inheritance from a former life in Norway. The more or less constant movement over long distances by the younger men of an aristocratic family is contrasted to a deep and defining relationship with the particular place that is the inherited family seat.
Egil’s Saga
offers in greater detail the conventional story of a family’s inability or unwillingness to adapt to a form of government headed by a single national king.
    A second convention of the emigration story is the symbolic token that determines the particular site where the new home or family estate is to be built in Iceland. In
Egil s Saga
it is the place where Kveldulf’s coffin comes ashore after his burial at sea. As famous as this place, Borg, becomes, it is matched in historical importance by Hvamm in
The Saga of the People of Laxardal,
which was built where Unn’s high-seat pillars had come ashore. Typically, leaving the old home in Norway is described in constitutional and political terms, whereas finding a home in Iceland is guided by a more magical agency that sanctions the foundation of new houses and the communities that surround them.
The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal
is unique in telling an emigration story that is determined entirely by this magic. Ingimund, the founder, is a loyal and valued friend of King Harald Fair-hair, but as the result of a Lapp woman’s magic he considers himself destined to abandon his property in Norway and head for Iceland, where she has hidden an amulet sacred to Frey, in a place from which only he can retrieve it. It is several years after his arrival before Ingimund finally finds his predestined homeland, the beautiful valley of Vatnsdal, where he builds a large temple and in the process discovers his amulet. He calls his farm Hof (Temple) in acknowledgement of the auspiciousness of this place.
    The first generations of settlers had the task of adjusting the