Free The Sagas of the Icelanders by Jane Smilely Page B

later was at Thingvellir during the Althing, which like so much of life in the sagas went on out of doors. An oral culture had no use for government archives and the files they contain. There were no contracts or records, deeds or proceedings that had any existence other than in the memory of witnesses. To see Icelandic society at work on the national level the scene moves from individual farms to the outdoor assemblies in the local districts and then, later in the summer, to Thingvellir.
    In the settlement stage, effective leaders were cultivated who could attempt to settle disputes over territory and local authority and to tame a sort of ‘wild western’ high-handedness that was a feature of life in the new land. The finest saga of settlement is
The Saga of the People of Laxardal
, although it is much more than that, defining over several generations ideals of chieftaincy and heroic character. It is worth noticing, too, how large a role women play in it, and more complex and problematic ones in some respects than those of the men. We are not allowed to forget in this saga, or in
The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal
, that it was families who moved, not merely aspiring or desperate Vikings. Where the saga does its hardest intellectual work is in telling the stories of how the succeeding generations in these founding families tested each other and the laws of Iceland in their competition for power. The saga never tells us what it ‘means’, but its thought resides instead in the narration of events and in the particularities of character and event. We are not told that such-and-such a thing will always happen, or even that it will ever happen again, but rather that this is a case in which serious and responsible people of goodwill landed in a conflict that tested their characters and abilities, as well as the social structure of the nation. And it usually sounds true enough to what we know about people that we believe it and remember it.
    Two of the sagas in this collection,
The Saga of the Confederates
and
The Saga of Hrafnkel Frey’s Godi
, are tightly focused on a single theme: the limits of individual wealth and authority of a chieftain. They are very different in tone, but both are less broadly conceived than are the regional sagas, and it is interesting to note that women play essentially no role in them. Although it is so limited in scope and setting, Hrafnkel’s saga is one of the masterpieces of saga art. Since both Hrafnkel and Odd, the protagonist of the comic
Saga of the Confederates
, are ‘taught a lesson’, some commentators have been tempted to assign a didactic purpose to these two sagas, as though we readers should somehow learn the same lesson: don’t let your conduct be guided by allegiance to a pagan god; or just because you are three times wealthier than the next wealthiest man in the land, don’t consider yourself the equal of the ‘best farmers’. The sagas are about the intrinsic superiority of chieftains, despite their excesses and follies. Each, through the special lens of its art, sounds true, without recourse to allegory.
    *
    There are places in Iceland that are neither fertile valleys and upland pastures nor the sanctified sites of assemblies. They are the uninhabited places, often in the interior, where outlaws take refuge, sometimes in the company of spirits only partly human. It did not take long for this demarcation of social space to develop, as Iceland evolved into a reasonably stable and conservative rural society. People who found the constraints of normal social life impossible to accept, whether for reasons of honour or of excessive animal spirits, were often condemned to exile. They sometimes chose, as did the hero of
Gisli Sursson’s Saga
, to attempt survival in the uninhabited places in Iceland. Like
The Saga of Hrafnkel Frey’s Godi
, this saga is another little masterpiece of characterization. Gisli is a great hero, a good and patient man, but one of too little good