Narrative in the Icelandic Family Saga

Meanings of Time in Old Norse Literature

Heather O'Donoghue

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786726254
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Representative of a unique literary genre and composed in the 13th and 14th centuries, the Icelandic Family Sagas rank among some of the world's greatest literature. Here, Heather O'Donoghue skilfully examines the notions of time and the singular textual voice of the Sagas, offering a fresh perspective on the foundational texts of Old Norse and medieval Icelandic heritage. With a conspicuous absence of giants, dragons, and fairy tale magic, these sagas reflect a real-world society in transition, grappling with major new challenges of identity and development. As this book reveals, the stance of the narrator and the role of time – from the representation of external time passing to the audience's experience of moving through a narrative – are crucial to these stories. As such, Narrative in the Icelandic Family Saga draws on modern narratological theory to explore the ways in which saga authors maintain the urgency and complexity of their material, handle the narrative and chronological line, and offer perceptive insights into saga society. In doing so, O'Donoghue presents a new poetics of family sagas and redefines the literary rhetoric of saga narratives.

1

The representation of external time

The Íslendingasögur, or family sagas, are set primarily in Iceland, in the so-called söguöld (saga age), that is, roughly the period from the settlement of Iceland in 870 CE to the beginnings of its Christianization in the decades following the conversion in the year 1000 CE. This location in space and time is universally regarded as the defining feature of their genre. They probably reached their final form – that is, the form in which they have come down to us – in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, although some of their narrative elements may very well have originated in an earlier, oral period, perhaps even close in time to events narrated in the sagas. The Íslendingasögur are thus not merely narrated in the conventional preterite tense of storytellers but are actually about the past, and this past is both in a continuum with the present time of the narrator and original audience, and conterminous with their own actual geographical location, Iceland.

Partly as a result of the largely accurate topographical detail in the sagas, and partly because in many places the topography of Iceland has changed relatively little since the Middle Ages, the settings of these medieval narratives are readily accessible to a modern audience. The attention paid to accurate topographical detail is one of the features of saga narrative which bolsters the impression it gives of historicity, or authenticity, and this inclined early saga scholars to regard the Íslendingasögur as historical documents. I shall argue in what follows that attention to actual historical chronologies, and to realistic temporal detail – from the passing of individual seconds to the broader sweeps of Icelandic and Norwegian history, or the naturalistic interplay of night and day, or summer and winter, and the impact their different conditions necessarily have on the lives of saga characters – contributes no less to the apparent historicity of the narrative. However at the same time, I hope to show that the representation of external, or objective, time in saga narrative is no mere inflexible scaffolding for the events of the saga but is exploited for literary ends, to promote the themes and issues which occupy each individual saga.

I shall consider in the course of this chapter the distinctive contributions of the genealogies so characteristic of the Íslendingasögur, and how through them the time span of the main action of certain sagas reaches both further back and further forwards in time. I shall explore how the saga author ties the events of individual sagas to established dates in Icelandic and Norwegian history. I shall look at the use of familiar naturalistic alternations in time, such as day and night or winter and summer, and also at annual calendrical markers – Christmas or Easter – and the use of Christian time labels as opposed to secular ones. I shall look too at the careful timings associated with the legal system. I shall discuss the intersection of the passage of time with geographical distance in some saga narratives, and conclude with a summary of how the distinctive concerns of individual sagas are both reflected in and augmented by their authors’ representation of external time.

It is worth making clear at the outset that I shall not be concerned with the accuracy or otherwise of a saga author’s chronology as set against actual historical dates, or against the timings attested in law codes. I am not even especially concerned with how far any saga’s internal chronology is either consistent in itself, or consistently aligned with other saga narratives. My aim is simply to demonstrate how fundamental the explicit representation of the passage of external time is to saga narrative. More than half a century ago now, M. C. van den Toorn published an article on time and grammatical tense in the sagas which incidentally anticipated much of what has been so far written on time and saga narrative. He was emphatic about the fundamental importance of specific references to time in family sagas, asserting that ‘die Verfasser nicht ohne Zeitangaben erzählten, ja, höchstwahrscheinlich nicht erzählen konnten ohne zu berichten, ob ein bestimmtes Gespräch an einem Morgen oder an einem Abend stattgefunden habe, ein Umzug im Herbst oder im Frühjahr vorgenommen wurde, eine Reise drei oder vier Jahre nach einer vorigen Reise angetreten wurde’ (authors did not narrate without time references, indeed were most probably incapable of narrating without reporting that a certain conversation took place in the morning or the evening, that a move happened in autumn or spring, that a journey was undertaken three or four years after a previous one).¹ The detailed representation of the passage of external time is fundamental to family saga narrative.

Genealogies

As every reader or listener soon discovers, the Íslendingasögur are full of genealogical material. Much of it is ‘front-loaded’, that is, whole sagas, or distinct sections of whole sagas, open with an account of the forebears of what are usually the characters in the main body of the story. This technique has not always been regarded positively: Vésteinn Ólason, for example, speaks of family sagas as ‘notorious for the[ir] abundance of genealogical information’.² Kathryn Hume, in her article about beginnings and endings in the Íslendingasögur, summarizes some of the most negative reactions to the amount of genealogical detail: that authors reveal their ‘weakness’ for genealogy, as Stefan Einarsson put it; that they ‘apparently give information for information’s sake’, according to Theodore M. Anderson; or that, in W. P. Ker’s damning and sweeping conclusion, genealogies are ‘felt as a hindrance … by all readers of the Sagas; as a preliminary obstacle to clear comprehension’.³

Genealogies are not in themselves a narrative form but still very clearly indicate the passage of time, an irreversible and inevitable succession of generations which is nevertheless presented in reverse order, that is, running from the forward-moving present backwards through time. The primary effect of an opening genealogy is definitively to situate the narrative which follows in the framework of actual time, the narrative emerging, as it were, from a connected list of names which was very likely to be familiar to a contemporary audience.⁴ Hume marks off the genealogical material from what typically follows in the saga as a ‘pre-beginning’, and also discusses, as I shall in due course, the material constituting what she terms ‘post-ending’.⁵ Thus, the genealogies which open saga narratives stretch the time span of the saga back to earliest times, sometimes even beyond the time of the first settlers and deep into the era of their Norwegian forebears. The closing genealogical information – what Hume calls the ‘post-ending’ – is usually shorter, but still stretches the saga’s time span forwards, sometimes far enough forward in time to reach the present time of the narrator and the saga’s first audience. Both kinds of material anchor the main body of the narrative in a framework of known time. The narrative seems to constitute a distention of part of the history of Icelanders between two usually unequal genealogical summaries, like a hammock slung asymmetrically between two trees, suspended from narrow ropes.

Vésteinn Ólason concludes his discussion of saga genealogy as follows: ‘Undoubtedly the most important function of the [introductory genealogical material] is to establish the impression that a reader or listener will be engaging with a truthful narrative.’⁶ It seems therefore counter-intuitive to claim that the genealogies do not in fact merely function as an objective temporal scaffolding for the saga narrative, but rather make a purposeful contribution to its themes and concerns. However, opinion has more recently turned to a more favourable – though perhaps still somewhat grudging – assessment of the contribution of genealogies. Hume herself noted that even if (or perhaps because) genealogical material is not integral to whatever one distinguishes as the body of the narrative – Hume defines this as ‘contributing to the conflict story’ – it must ‘apparently [be] considered necessary to saga aesthetic’.⁷ In line with W. P. Ker’s focus on the experience of a reader, Vésteinn Ólason states that the genealogies are essential for those who want to ‘immerse themselves fully in the saga world’, and Hume concludes that sagas themselves ‘satisfied psychological cravings extrinsic to aesthetic appreciation of a well-shaped plot’ and that the opening and closing material contributes to that satisfaction.⁸ Vésteinn goes on to argue that the genealogies can ‘help to explain the origin of confederacies and alliances’ – evidently what Hume had in mind as ‘the conflict story’ – and that from the point of view of a contemporary Icelandic audience, genealogies very often ‘reveal ancestral excellence’. Finally, he quotes Einar Ólafur Sveinsson’s slightly double-edged appraisal that genealogies ‘endow the saga with an air of pomp and ceremony’.⁹

These affirmative judgements still assume – even if implicitly – the essential historicity of the genealogical material. Given that the twelfth-century Icelandic Fyrsta málfræðiritgerðin (First Grammatical Treatise) claims that genealogies were currently being read and written in Iceland, it seems likely that there were some secure written as well as oral genealogies available to saga authors – and probably, the population more widely.¹⁰ No one has seriously questioned the essential authenticity of the genealogies in the sagas, and Gísli Sigurðsson rightly insists that it is ‘highly improbable’ that the genealogies are wholly invented.¹¹ But Margaret Clunies Ross adds ‘carry[ing] a number of [a] saga’s key themes’ to the genealogies’ primary function of stretching the narrative backwards and forwards in time, although she does not go into detail.¹² However, in a very detailed comparison of the genealogies in several sagas, Gísli makes a strong claim for artistic rather than factual priority: ‘The differences in information offered by the various sources on families and genealogies are generally motivated by purposes specific to each occasion, with modifications and selection dictated by the needs of the narrative rather than any aim to provide a strictly historical record of the actual family connections among Icelanders in the 10th century.’¹³ In what follows I shall examine some saga genealogies which in my view strongly support, and even extend, Gísli’s claim.

The very nature of a genealogy – the basic structure of a family tree – means that with every generation back, there is an increasing degree of selectivity open to the saga author. One can, for example, make a decision to follow the paternal or the maternal line in each generation. Moreover, the inclusion of names at the margins of the chosen central genealogical thread – an otherwise unrecorded spouse, say, or an extra sibling, or the addition of a significant nickname – offers ample room for introducing figures who may underline or reflect the themes of the saga as a whole. It is very striking how far some family saga genealogies do appear to have been tailored to match what is narrated in the body of the saga.

Laxdœla saga, for example, opens with a genealogy of two characters whose stories figure prominently in the first part of the saga: the half-brothers Hrútr Herjólfsson and Höskuldr Dala-Kollsson. As in a number of family saga genealogies, the family is traced back to the celebrated settler Ketill flatnefr (flat-nose). Ketill is himself described as the son of a prominent Norwegian, the hersir (leader) Björn buna (stream), and Ketill’s wife Yngvildr is also said to have come from a distinguished Norwegian family.¹⁴ A similar genealogy is also found in Njáls saga, in which Hrútr and Höskuldr again feature prominently, but there is no mention there of Ketill’s highborn wife or her family.¹⁵ Five children of Ketill and Yngvildr are named in Laxdœla saga. One daughter married the settler Helgi inn magri (the lean), who is featured in a number of saga genealogies, but in Laxdœla saga his mother is also cited: she is named as Rafarta, the daughter of the Irish King Cearbhall.¹⁶ It has been suggested that Helgi’s nickname is Irish¹⁷; one of Ketill’s sons, also Helgi, certainly had an Irish nickname: he is Helgi bjólan (probably from the Irish word beóllan, diminutive of the Irish word for ‘mouth’). One of Ketill’s daughters is the celebrated matriarch Unnr in djúpuðga (the deep-minded) – she is said to have been married to Óláfr inn hvíti (the white) who as Amhlaibh conung features in Irish annals as a prominent ruler in Ireland, though he is not mentioned in Unnr’s genealogy in Eyrbyggja saga. Finally, Unnr’s sister Jórunn is nicknamed ‘manvitsbrekka’ (wisdom-slope).¹⁸

Domination by Irish elements on the one hand, and impressive women on the other, matches perfectly the main themes of Laxdœla saga itself, with its celebrated heroine Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir, and her lover Kjartan, whose grandmother was an Irish princess bought as a slave by his grandfather Höskuldr. However, the Irish princess Melkorka, Kjartan’s grandmother, is not presented, even by implication, as a descendant of the Irish figures named in the genealogy, and Guðrún is only very distantly related to her powerful predecessor Unnr. In other words, the genealogy is primarily connected thematically, rather than by descent, to what follows in the main body of the saga.

In fact, the opening genealogy is not completely separated from the main body of the saga, as what Hume calls a ‘pre-beginning’. Instead, the saga author soon begins to expand his list of names, moving into narrative mode with a detailed and lively re-enactment of Ketill’s decision to emigrate to Scotland, where he is feted as a famous Norwegian aristocrat, and an account of the death of his grandson Þorsteinn, who had become king of half of Scotland before being betrayed and murdered in Caithness. The narrative then moves on to tell of Unnr who, having married two granddaughters into renowned Orcadian and Faroese dynasties, finally settles in Iceland.

In Iceland, this celebrated matriarch – an impressive woman even by the standards of saga heroines – organizes a lavish wedding feast for her great-grandson Óláfr feilan (whose nickname derives from the Irish for ‘wolf’). In spite of her advanced years, she impresses all the guests with her upright and dignified bearing, but retires early to bed and is found dead – though still sitting up – the next morning.¹⁹ She is thus the first of the powerful women for which the saga is famous. However, as we have seen, Unnr’s power is expressed not only – however impressively – in her personal, domestic sphere, but also in the extraordinary management of her family dynasty. One of the enduring themes of Laxdœla saga is the increasing wealth and ambition of the Laxárdalr families down through the generations – sometimes, to an overweening degree. This theme meets the Irish element in the storyline when Höskuldr Dala-Kollsson buys the slave Melkorka, who turns out to be an Irish princess. The scene in which he negotiates the purchase can be read as revealing rash bravado on Höskuldr’s part: it seems that his primary aim is to catch out the trader by asking to buy something which the trader does not have to sell – a slave woman – ...