Free The Sagas of the Icelanders by Jane Smilely Page A

laws and traditions they brought with them to their new situation where, to an extent far greater than in Norway, they were lords of their own domain. They found suitable areas in which to live and divided them into workable farms among the people who had followed the founding chieftain to Iceland. This meant giving names to the mountains, valleys, fjords and headlands – as we see Ingimund do on his way to Vatnsdal, Aud on her way to Laxardal and Skallagrim when he explores Borgarfjord. In these sagas little stories explain the origin of place-names, and a close connection develops between features of the land and historical memory; in an oral culture these names serve as a ‘memory theatre’, reminding those who walk over it of the great stories associated with the places.
    In the realistic novels and stories of the nineteenth century, there was a convention of beginning the way Nikolai Gogol does in
Dead Souls
: ‘Through the gates of the inn in the provincial town of N. drove a rather handsome, smallish spring britzka, of the sort driven around in by…’ An Icelandic saga could never begin this way. Particular, identifying places are too important to its art and thought, so in this respect the realism of saga style is closer to that of the twentieth century than the nineteenth. ‘The town of N.’ is both a coy way of suggesting that the author wants to protect the identity of his characters, who are real people, and, at the same time, of implying that it is really the typical rather than the actual in which universal human truths are to be found. The saga authors assume, however, that life manifests itself through the particular and that universality derives, paradoxically, if at all, from reconstructing particular men and places: ‘Herjolf was the son of Bard Herjolfsson and a kinsman of Ingolf, the settler of Iceland. Ingolf gave to Herjolf the land between Vog and Reykjanes’ (
The Saga of the Greenlanders
).
    Another reason that ‘the town of N.’ would not be found in a saga about Iceland is that until the eighteenth century Iceland had no towns. The cosmopolitan blending of nationalities, the accumulation of wealth, together with the openness to commercial and artistic innovation and subtleties of class and manners – all of the things we associate with medieval towns elsewhere in Europe – had no place in Iceland. It is to the tales of the Icelanders, which characteristically take place abroad, or to separate episodes in longer sagas, that we must turn for anything like an urban experience – in Norway, Denmark or England, and often the scene is the court rather than the strictly urban neighbourhood. There is a wonderful market in
The Saga of the People of Laxardal,
where Hoskuld buys his concubine Melkorka, and a good street scene where Kjartan irritates the followers of King Olaf Tryggvason. Audun in
The Tale of Audun from the West Fjords
travels from Greenland to an unnamed town in Norway where he rents a room before going to see the king, and in another unnamed town in Denmark, he wanders the streets begging for food for himself and his bear. These urban scenes are a kind of moral holiday from the more problematic life within the constraints of Icelandic society.
The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue
largely takes place abroad, in kings’ courts and in more urban settings than would be possible in Iceland. It has, as a result, a sense of distance and romance. Gunnlaug, like Gisli and Egil, is a poet, but his verses are less directly related than theirs are to particular social situations, and suggest a freer, more purely emotional expression.
    Because Iceland was exclusively rural, it was a conservative society, closed to the newly rich or the landless, one in which the ‘best farmers’ managed every aspect of labour, production and property, as well, of course, as defining and propagating appropriate social custom. The social, political and geographical centre of Iceland in the Saga Age and