Saga vs Novel

Juxtaposition is one of my favorite words. So I was understandably thrilled when a 2014 essay by Ben Yagoda in Slate, complaining "Does Novel Now Mean Any Book?" crossed my (virtual) desk at the same time as a 2002 academic paper by Torfi Tulinius of the University of Iceland called "Egils Saga and the Novel."

What is a novel? Seems no one knows. Yagoda, who writes nonfiction and only nonfiction, got his nose out of joint when someone called him a novelist. "I got on Twitter and sent out a tweet asking people if they were familiar with the 'novel = book' custom." He received numerous replies, including one from a very exasperated literary agent: "In queries: ALL THE TIME. People telling me of their 'nonfiction novel' or their 'fictional novel.'"

I admit that "fictional novel" is one phrase that makes me cringe.

That said, I'm the last person you should ask to define "novel." The more closely I look at the question, the harder it is for me to explain the difference between fiction and nonfiction, even though I've published both.

If you get your facts wrong when writing a novel--for example, if your Vikings eat potatoes or you kick your horse in the withers--your story fails.

But to write nonfiction you have to leave out a lot of what "really happened." You have to shape the truth. And you have to speculate (i.e., write fiction) to fill in the gaps between your facts.

And often what you thought was a historical fact you find, if you dig back far enough through your sources, was some prior writer's speculation.

That's especially true when you're writing, like I do, about the Middle Ages. There are an awful lot of gaps in what we know about the world a thousand years ago. And a lot of what we "know" comes from texts that, today, we might be inclined to call novels.

Like Egil's Saga.

Derived from the Icelandic verb "to say," the word "saga" implies neither fact nor fiction. Of the 140 known medieval Icelandic sagas, some are fantasies, some are biographies, some are chronicles--as fact-filled as any medieval text--some approach memoirs, and others may best be described as novels.

For hundreds of years, scholars have argued over whether the sagas are "history" or "fiction."

An Icelander writing in 1957 considered the sagas too good to be true: “A modern historian will for several reasons tend to brush these sagas aside as historical records," he said. "The narrative will rather give him the impression of the art of a novelist than of the scrupulous dullness of a chronicler.”

Archaeologists, too, dismiss the sagas as fiction, though there are notable exceptions. Jesse Byock of UCLA has led excavations in Iceland for twenty years; he and his colleague Davide Zori wrote in 2013, “We employ Iceland’s medieval writings as one of many datasets in our excavations, and the archaeological remains that we are excavating … appear to verify our method.” Of his team’s discovery of a Viking Age church and graveyard, he said, Egil’s Saga “led us to the site.”

Perhaps the greatest of the Icelandic Family Sagas, Egil's Saga may have been written by Snorri Sturluson, as I argued in Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myth. Much of my argument was based on Torfi Tulinius's analysis--though this particular paper, "Egils Saga and the Novel," somehow escaped me.

Egil's Saga, Torfi begins, is "a book born of other books." Among its themes are "the status of poetry in human life" and "the individual's need to define himself."

The world of the saga is "both same and different." It is not the 13th-century world of the author, but a fictional 10th-century world against which Snorri and his peers could "project their hopes and worries as well as their ideas about themselves."

The story is realistic--it is "set within a landscape everybody knows"--but it is not true. "It is probable that somebody called Egill actually lived at Borg in the 10th century," Torfi says. "Egils Saga, though, is a work of language." The characterization of this Egill and the events he takes part in may be "purely fictional."

"The originality of Egils Saga--and this is what makes it a novel--is that here it is the audience's own history and reality which are offered to interpretation," Torfi concludes. "However, no keys are given, except those which lie hidden in the text."

As Ben Yagoda documents, readers today have a hard time telling the difference between fictional-by-definition novels and nonfiction books. "An (unnamed) major metropolitan newspaper, in its obituary of Louis Zamperini, referred to Laura Hillenbrand's book about him, Unbroken, as a 'novel,'" he scoffs. An "actual class assignment from an actual (unnamed) school" referred to Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel as novels.

Yagoda blames, in part, "the blurring of generic boundaries, and the fuzziness of 'truth' in the postmodern era," but, as any medievalist can tell you, that blurring and fuzziness has a long history.

In 800 years, who will know what parts of Unbroken are true and what parts were the writer's speculation? What moments of Louis Zamperini's life did she (of necessity) leave out? And what keys to interpretation lay hidden in the text? If someone else wrote a nonfiction book about Zamperini, would it be the same? Of course not.

A nonfiction book, like a novel, is "a work of language." Perhaps we should call them all sagas.

"Egils Saga and the Novel" by Torfi Tulinius was published in Snorri Sturluson and the Roots of Nordic Literature (Sofia, Bulgaria: University of Sofia, 2002). Download it at Academia.edu.

Read Yagoda's essay at http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/08/04/novel_increasingly_used_to_mean_any_book_fiction_or_nonfiction.html

Touring with the Sagas

When some people go to Iceland for the first time, they want to see it all. In seven days they drive the entire Ring Road, bagging all the sights.

I'm a little different. I've been to Iceland 19 times, twice staying over three months, and I have yet to see huge swaths of the country. I've never been to the East Fjords. I've only glimpsed much of the north.

Instead, I've gone deep. I've gotten to know one corner of Iceland very well: the area between Borgarnes and the island of Flatey in Breiðafjorður, out to the tip of Snæfellsnes with its evocative glacier, and in to Surtshellir cave at the edge of the highlands. It's an area with a wonderful variety of landscapes--farms, fishing villages, lava fields, glaciers, beaches, waterfalls.

I like to stay on one farm for a week, traveling only as far as I can reach on foot or horseback or the occasional half day's drive. On various trips I've found a path through the lava that had long been lost, crouched behind a rock while a sea eagle strafed me, rode a horse across a swift salmon river (careful not to let the eddies dizzy me), collected crowberries, watched fox pups play, rescued trapped sheep, frightened myself in a pitch-dark cave, drank sweet water from the well in another, soaked in a wilderness hot pool, sunned on the flank of a volcano.

I'm not a naturalist: What drew me to this part of Iceland were the sagas, with their tales of sheep-farmers and sorcerors, horse fights and feuds, love and grief and hard times and strife. Tales of a satisfying life scratched from an unforgiving land. Tales tempered with poetry and grace.

I've sat where the wily chieftain of Helgafell, Snorri goði, sat, ten centuries before, pondering his next move. On horseback, I've ridden the route he followed to collect his father-in-law's corpse--and the one his namesake, Snorri Sturluson took to confer with his nephew a few nights before he died.

The first time I visited Iceland, in 1986, I went in search of Snorri goði, a character in two of my favorite sagas, Eyrbyggja Saga and Laxdæla Saga. I was then a graduate student studying medieval literature and simultaneously working for a science magazine; I wanted to write a historical novel about Snorri. That book was never published, but ten years later much of my research--done on horseback, as well as in libraries--found its way into my first published book, A Good Horse Has No Color: Searching Iceland for the Perfect Horse (Stackpole Books, 2001).

My second book about Iceland brought me back to Snæfellsnes. The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman (Harcourt, 2007) uses medieval literature and modern archaeology to tell the story of Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir and the Norse expeditions to North America. Guðriður grew up on the tip of Snæfellsnes, in the shadow of the glacier some people call the third most holy spot on earth. (Seeing it rise out of the sea is certainly one of my favorite views of Iceland). I've since retold Guðríður's story as a young adult novel, The Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveler, which will be published by Namelos in the spring of 2015.

My most recent book, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) required me to get to know Borgarfjörður even better. This book is a biography of another Snorri--Snorri Sturluson, who lived at Borg and then at Reykholt, and by the end of his life in 1241 ruled most of the West Quarter of Iceland. At Borg he probably wrote Egils Saga, while at Reykholt he wrote the Edda, which contains almost everything we know about Norse mythology, as well as Heimskringla, his long collection of sagas about the kings of Norway from the ancient days of Oðin the Wizard-King through King Magnus Erlingsson in 1177.

The best way to research my books, I've found, is to walk through the landscape where history happened, to live where my subjects lived and face some of the same challenges. To cross rivers on horseback, for example, or climb a volcanic crater. To experience the midnight sun in summer, when the birdsong never stills, as well as the dark days of winter (though I must admit, I've let a very few of them stand in for the rest). 

In 2012 I was approached by the trekking company America2Iceland, which had just moved its base of operations to the farm of Staðarhús in Borgarfjörður. They wondered if I'd be willing to join their tours and share my love of Iceland's history and sagas. Together, we began developing a tour called "Song of the Vikings," after my book. The first year it was a riding trek circling through Snorri's domain. The next year we combined riding lessons for beginners with more sightseeing by bus, visiting saga sites and museums, and allowing more time to learn about Iceland's history and culture.

Next summer, by request, the tour will have no mandatory horseback riding (though, since we will be based at a horse farm with a resident riding teacher, optional lessons and trail riding can be added). From July 27 to August 2, we'll follow in Snorri Sturluson's footsteps, taking the chieftain's trail from Thingvellir, where he took part in the yearly assembly, to Reykholt, his main estate--now a research institute with an exhibition about his life.

We'll see the highest-volume hot spring in the world, discussing the value of hot springs in medieval Iceland--and how a fight over this one may have caused the sagas to be written. We'll meet the Icelandic horse and learn why the horse, not the dog, is "man's best friend" in Iceland. We'll visit the Settlement Center in Borgarnes and compare new theories about Iceland's settlement. We'll see the Egil's Saga exhibition there as well, and discuss how that saga reflects Snorri Sturluson's own life. We'll drive into the highlands to see the cave Surtshellir, named for the Fire Giant who will destroy the world at Ragnarök, and discuss the connections between Icelandic nature and Norse mythology. And we'll see how those myths are still vital in modern popular culture, by sharing some of the literature and art Snorri Sturluson inspired, from Wagner to Tolkien to Neil Gaiman.

This tour is limited to 12 people, so each will get my personal attention. For more information, or to sign up, see America2Iceland.com or contact Rebecca at America2Iceland by email at info@america2iceland.com or phone at 1-828-348-4257. I think this is the perfect tour for first-time visitors to Iceland. Even if you've been to Iceland before, you'll see it in a completely new light.

(A version of this essay was published in the December 15 edition of the Icelandic-Canadian newspaper, Lögberg-Heimskringla.)

The History Channel's Viking Earl

To get ready for Season Two of the History Channel's TV series, "The Vikings" (premiering February 27), I've been watching Season One on DVD, as I mentioned in last week's post [here]. And I've been reminded of some of the things that bothered me.

I'm glad that Earl Haraldsson died--much as I like the actor Gabriel Byrne--because that name drove me nuts. Haraldsson? If you know anything about Old Norse, the Viking language, you know that "Haraldsson" literally means "Harald's son," and no self-respecting Viking chieftain is going to live his life in his father's shadow. For a while, I thought his first name was "Earl." Odd, but not impossible. (I know a horse named "Earl.") But no, "Earl" is a title, as we learned when Ragnar Lothbrok became earl.

Some people in the Icelandic sagas are referred to by their patronymics (or matronymics). There are the Hildaridarsons, for example, in Egil's Saga, named for their mother Hildirid. 

In the far north of Norway, we read in Chapter 7 of the Herman Pálsson and Paul Edwards translation, "there was a man called Bjorgolf, farming on Torg Island. He was a land-holder, rich and powerful, though he was a hill-giant on one side of his family, as you could tell from his size and strength. He had a son called Brynjolf, very much like his father."

One autumn, when Bjorgolf was getting on in years, he was invited to a feast. "As was the custom, lots were cast every evening to decide which pairs were to sit at the same drinking horn." A beautiful young girl named Hildirid was paired with the old half-troll. "They had plenty to talk about all evening and he thought her a fine-looking girl."

A few weeks later, Bjorgolf sets off in his Viking ship with a crew of 30. He walks up to Hildirid's house and announces to her father that "I'm taking your daughter back home with me and mean to tie a loose marriage-knot here and now." He pays the father an ounce of gold (a good bride-price: an ounce of gold is worth eight ounces of silver, and you could buy a slave girl for one ounce of silver) "and off they went to bed."

Hildirid soon has two sons--and then old Bjorgolf dies. "No sooner had he been carried to the grave, than Brynjolf"--Bjorgolf's older son--"told Hildirid to take her sons and clear out, so she wet back to her father on Leka Island, where her sons grew up." The boys got none of their father's inheritance (though their mother's father left them pretty well-off), and turned into spiteful, sly, manipulative sneakers generally referred to as that "pair of bastards" or "the Hildaridarsons." They didn't deserve names.

Soon the Hildaridarsons had wheedled their way into King Harald's confidence. They began slandering the great warrior Thorolf, son of Kveld-Ulf ("Evening-Wolf"--not only do we have hill-trolls in this saga, we have werewolves). The king had asked Thorolf to collect the tribute of furs that the Finns owed each year. It was a lucrative position, even if the tax-collector didn't skim off the best for himself, as the Hildaridarsons claimed Thorolf did.

"The King would never believe such a pack of lies," said Thorolf, when his friends told him of the slander. "There's not a scrap of evidence here that I'd betray him."

Yet King Harald did believe it. In Chapter 22, he sails north with 300 men in six ships. They catch Thorolf unaware in the middle of a feast, surround his great hall and set fire to it. The women and children, old people, slaves, and servants are allowed out. Thorolf and his warriors break down a wall and burst from the burning hall.

"Fighting broke out at once and for a time Thorolf and his men used the house to shield their backs, but as it blazed up the fire started threatening them and soon many had been killed. Thorolf ran forward towards the King's banner striking out to left and right.… Thorolf came right up to the thick wall of shields and ran the standard-bearer through with his sword.
"'I'm just three paces short,' Thorolf said.
"He had been pierced with spears and swords, but it was the King who gave him his death-wound and Thorolf dropped down at his feet."

When Kveld-Ulf heard the news he had only one question: Did his son die on his face or on his back? "Old men used to say that anyone who fell face down would be avenged, and that the retribution would come as close to the killer as the victim's fall was close to him."

And so the saga begins.

Back to the History Channel's TV series, "The Vikings." Are we, as viewers, supposed to know all this? Are we supposed to know that someone referred to only by his mother's or father's name is a coward and a conniver? Does Earl Haraldsson--or his wife--ever refer to him by his real name? Or are we supposed to accept the idea that he thinks of himself as too poor an example of manhood to deserve a name? What were the writers thinking?

The Icelandic poem called Hávamál, or "Words of the High One," presents the closest thing we have to a Viking code. The most famous verse runs like this:

Cattle die, kinsmen die,
Every man must die.
But one thing only never dies:
A name with honor earned.

From what I saw of Gabriel Byrne's Earl Haraldsson, in Season One of the History Channel's TV series, "The Vikings," I think he earned a name. Shall we give him one?

Join me again next week at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world. And if you want to learn what happened next in Egil's Saga, join me on the Song of the Vikings tour from America2Iceland.com, where we'll ride through the landscape of Part Two of the saga.