Iceland's Independence Day

Today, June 17, Icelanders celebrate their independence day, on the birthday of Jon Sigurdsson, the leader of the nineteenth-century Icelandic independence movement. Jon was a saga scholar, before he became a politician. He worked briefly at the library in Copenhagen established by the great collector of medieval Icelandic manuscripts, Arni Magnusson.

So it's fitting that, on this day of Icelandic independence, we remember the role of the sagas in setting Icelanders free.

Reading the Icelandic sagas, you learn of Iceland's early days as a free state, from its founding in 874.

Reading the sagas, you learn how Iceland lost its independence in 1262 and became subject to Norway, which itself was later taken over by Denmark.

And reading the sagas--simply the act of reading and rereading them--is what united the nineteenth-century Icelanders, as I learned while researching Song of the Vikings, my biography of the saga master Snorri Sturluson.

Here's how I explained the connection between Icelandic sagas and Icelandic independence in Song of the Vikings:

In 1835 four Icelandic students founded a political magazine in Copenhagen. They printed their manifesto in the form of a poem, which "was exactly what was needed in order to unite the Icelandic people," says Karlsson in The History of Iceland (published in 2000 by the University of Minnesota Press).

The only one of their ancestors it evokes is Snorri:

"... Ah! but up on the lava where the Axe River plummets forever
into the Almanna Gorge, Althing is vanished and gone.
Snorri's old site is a sheep-pen; the Law Rock is hidden in heather,
blue with the berries that make boys--and the ravens--a feast.
Oh you children of Iceland, old and young men together!
See how your forefathers' fame faltered--and died from the earth!"

Four lines of this poem by Jonas Hallgrimsson (translated here by Dick Ringler) are engraved on a plaque now standing on the site of Snorri's booth in Thingvellir, the great rift valley in the south of Iceland where the Althing, the yearly parliament of chieftains, met during the Saga Age.

The Althing reconvened as a national parliament, with Danish permission, in 1845. In 1874 Iceland received a new constitution and, in 1904, home rule. One of its first demands was that Denmark return the manuscripts of the sagas that had been collected--mostly by the scholar Arni Magnusson--and brought to the royal library and that of the University of Copenhagen in the early 1700s. The Danes declined.

In 1918 Iceland became a sovereign state in a "personal union" with the Danish king--much like the situation in 1262, when the chieftains swore oaths of loyalty to King Hakon the Old. For its coat-of-arms the new nation turned once again to Snorri.

King Harald, Snorri wrote in Heimskringla, was angry at the Icelanders, who had composed lampoons about him. He ordered a "troll-wise man" to spy out the country's defenses. Disguised as a whale, the wizard swam close to Iceland’s eastern shore: "Then came a great dragon down from the dale" and "blew poison at him." He swam along the north coast, "but there came against him a bird so big that its wings neared the fells on both sides of it." The wizard-whale fled to the west: "Toward him came a great ox that waded out in the sea and began to bellow horribly." Swinging wide, he swam south, "but against him there came a great hill giant who had an iron staff in his hand and bore his head higher than the fells." King Harald was dissuaded from attacking. Iceland's coat-of-arms bears a dragon, an eagle, an ox, and a giant.

The Icelanders repeated their demands to "bring the manuscripts home." The Althing passed resolutions in 1930 and 1938, then their literary quest was interupted by World War II. In April 1940 Denmark was invaded by Germany; a month later Iceland was occupied by the British, one result being Iceland’s final break with Denmark. The independent Republic of Iceland was established at Thingvellir in 1944; in 1947 the Althing resolved, once again, to "bring the manuscripts home."

This time, Denmark formed a committee. In 1961 a list of manuscripts was drawn up, and Iceland agreed to give Denmark twenty-five years to deliver them. Ten years later—after being photographed and conserved—the first set steamed into Reykjavik harbor aboard a Danish coastguard cutter. Thousands of Icelanders stood by the docks. Thousands more watched via the first live outdoor broadcast of the state television station. Eventually 1,666 manuscripts and over 7,000 charters (1,350 of them originals, the rest copies) were returned from Arni Magnusson’s collection—slightly over half of it. Another 141 manuscripts were sent home from the Royal Library. The last arrived in Iceland in 1997.

"People still say: 'We want to see the manuscripts,'" wrote Gisli Sigurdsson and Vesteinn Olason in The Manuscripts of Iceland in 2004. The manuscripts "are at one and the same time the repository of medieval Icelandic culture and its visible symbol." They are Iceland's "main source of pride."

If you are in Iceland, a fitting way to celebrate June 17 would be to visit the Settlement Sagas exhibition of the Reykjavik City Museum.

A Viking Fairy Tale

A reader of Song of the Vikings, my biography of the 13th-century Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson, wrote:

"I am doing a research project for school about Norse mythology and am wondering, are their any classic fairytales ("Beauty and the Beast," "Sleeping Beauty," etc.) or fairytale characters (werewolves, etc.) that correspond to any particular Norse myths, or have a similar storyline or characteristics?"

My response:

There are, indeed, a lot of fairytale motifs in the Icelandic sagas. If you look in Snorri's Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway, especially the first saga (Ynglinga saga), you'll find dwarfs, trolls, talking birds, and Odin's shapeshifting and other wizardly skills. There are werewolves in Volsunga Saga and in Snorri's Edda, as well as a hint of one in Egil's Saga.

A wonderful fairytale that Snorri tells himself is this "sleeping beauty"-like one from "The Saga of King Harald Fair-Hair" in Heimskringla. Here it is in the 1932 translation by Erling Monsen:

King Harald went one winter a-feasting in the Uplands and had a Yule feast made ready for himself in Toftar. On the eve of Yule, Svasi came without the door whilst the king was at the table and he sent a messenger to the king to go out to him. But the king was wroth at that behest and the same man who brought in the behest bore out the king’s anger, but notwithstanding, Svasi bade him carry the same message a second time; he said he was the Finn whom the king had allowed to set his hut on the other side of the stream there. 

The king then went out and agreed to go home with him and crossed the stream, egged on my some of his men but discouraged by others. There Snaefrid, Svasi’s daughter, stood up, the most beautiful of women, and she offered the king a cup full of mead; he drank it all and also took her hand, and straightway it was as though fire passed through his body, and at once he would lie with her that same night. 

But Svasi said that it should not be so except by force, unless the king betrothed Snaefrid and wed her according to the law. The king took Snaefrid and wed her, and he loved her so witlessly that he neglected his kingdom and all that was seemly for his kingly honour. They got four sons, Sigurd the Giant, Halvdan Highleg, Gudrod Gleam, and Ragnvald Rettlebone. 

Afterwards Snaefrid died, but the colour of her skin never faded and she was as rosy as before when she lived. The king always sat over her and thought that she would come to life again, and thus it went on for three winters that he sorrowed over her death and all the people of his land sorrowed over his delusion. 

And to stop this delusion, Torleiv the Wise came to his help; he did it with prudence, in that he spoke to him first with soft words, saying, “Is it not strange, O king, that thou shouldst remember so bright and noble a woman and honour her with down and goodly web [cloth] as she bade thee. But thy honour and hers is still less than it seems, in that she has lain for a long while in the same clothes, and it is fitter that she should be raised and the clothes changed under her.” 

But as soon as she was raised from the bed, so there rose from the body a rotten and loathesome smell and all kinds of evil stink; speedily a funeral bale was then made and she was burned. But before that all the body waxed blue and out crawled worms and adders, frogs ,and paddocks and all manner of foul reptiles. So she sank into ashes, and the king came to his wits and cast his folly from his heart and afterwards ruled the kingdom and was strengthened and gladdened by his men, and they by him, and the kingdom by both.

I recently came across a paper that uses this fairytale to explore how Snorri Sturluson worked as a writer--a topic that I discuss at some length in Song of the Vikings. By examining his Edda, looking at the sources he used and the reasons he had for writing, I conclude there that Snorri invented much of what we think of as "Norse mythology."

Now scholar Takahiro Narikawa has convinced me that Snorri also invented--or at least put his own spin on--Norwegian history when it suited him. Narikawa's paper, which I stumbled upon courtesy of the website Medievalists.net, appeared in 2011 in the journal Balto-Scandia and is available here:
http://www.medievalists.net/2013/01/27/marriage-between-king-harald-fairhair-and-snaefridr-and-their-offspring-mythological-foundation-of-the-norwegian-medieval-dynasty/

Why did Snorri include this fairytale in his history of the kings of Norway? Scholars have generally thought of it as an origin myth. It explains the founding of the kingdom of Norway by Harald Fair-Hair, in about 860, in one of two ways. Either Snaefrid is a nature goddess, whom King Harald has to symbolically possess, or she represents the reindeer-herding, fur-harvesting Sami (called the "Finns" in the sagas) of the far north. In order to unify Norway, King Harald has to bring together its two halves--human/divine, Norse/Sami, south/north--and, indeed, future kings of Norway do descend from Harald and Snaefrid's son, Sigurd.

But Narikawa's paper pokes a hole in this theory that Snorri was simply relating a colorful origin myth. It points out that Snorri is the only one to say Sigurd--called "the Giant," by Monsen, though his nickname is usually translated as "the Bastard"--is a son of Snaefrid.

The sleeping beauty tale itself appears in Snorri's source, the anonymous Ágrip af Nóreg's konungasögum (or Synoptic History of the Kings of Norway), nearly word for word. Only three sentences differ--including the one that names Snaefrid's four sons. In Ágrip, there's only one son, Ragnvald, a notorious sorceror.

Sigurd is well known in Norwegian history. Other sources, for example, trace the genealogy of King Harald Hard-Rule (who reigned from 1047-1066) back to Sigurd, the son of Harald Fair-Hair.

Why does Snorri--and only Snorri--connect Sigurd with the mysterious and bewitching Snaefrid?

Narikawa suggests it has to do with the civil wars in Norway, nearly continuous from 1130 to 1240. Snorri presents Harald's infatuation with Snaefrid as cursed, Narikawa says. Snorri insinuates "that such foul elements as a talent for sorcery in the royal blood were caused by Harald's marriage to her" and that these foul elements explained the fighting: "The ancestor of the medieval Norwegian dynasty, Sigurd the Bastard, himself was also half-Finn and not immune to this curse. The discord and murder among members of the royal family were to be inherent in the Fairhair Dynasty," Narikawa writes.

Because of this curse, Snorri argued that a true king of Norway needed to be descended, not only from Harald Fair-Hair, but also from a second king, Harald Gilli (1130-36). During Norway's civil wars, all the pretenders who represented the "Birkibein" (Birch-Leg) party in Norway were descended from King Harald Gilli. Most of their opponents were not.

In particular, the kings and earls for whom Snorri wrote praise poems--King Sverrir, King Ingi, Jarl Hakon, Jarl Skuli, and King Hakon IV--all belonged to the Birkibein faction. "Snorri seemed to be politically attached to this faction since his adolescence," Narikawa says, and, when writing Heimskringla, he shaped his history of the kings of Norway to enhance their legitimacy.

When reading Snorri's history, Narikawa suggests, "we should also keep Heimskringla's own agenda in mind." That is, Snorri's agenda. "He needed to find a cultural as well as political supporter abroad," so that he could become the ruler of Iceland. By writing a flattering history, Snorri hoped to get a king on his side. How that worked out, well, you can read in Song of the Vikings.

The Saga Man: Arni Magnusson

Lovers of Icelandic sagas are celebrating these days: It's the 350th birthday of Arni Magnusson, the man who, more than anyone else, saved Iceland's medieval manuscripts.

Brought up at Snorri Sturluson’s ancestral estate of Hvamm in the west of Iceland, Arni went to Copenhagen in 1683, when he was 20 years old, and found work as a copyist and translator for Thomas Bartholin, Jr. With Arni's help, Bartholin published a 700-page history of the Danes in 1689. Drawing examples from Snorri’s Heimskringla, Egil’s Saga, and other sagas, Bartholin’s Danish Antiquities Concerning the Reasons for the Pagan Danes’ Disdain for Death made popular the Viking stereotype of the bold, blond, laugh-in-the-face-of-death hero.

Arni became a professor at the University of Copenhagen in 1701, and the next year the king sent him back to Iceland to gather statistics on his country’s land and people. His massive Land Register, compiled over ten years, describes every farm in Iceland, its size and shape, buildings, people, cows, sheep, horses, the bulk of butter and cloth it owed in tithes, the quality of its turf, peat, hay, and woodlots, its fishing and driftwood rights, and the extent of the property ruined by volcanic ash or sand or rendered useless by quagmires, bogs, erosion, or flooding.

Off the record, Arni asked every farmer about manuscripts—and poked about in every farmhouse. In his novel Iceland's Bell, Halldor Laxness imagines Arni searching every nook and cranny, even the stuffing of the mattress:

Dust and poison gushed up from the old and moldy hay within the woman’s bed as they began their search. Mixed up in the hay was all kinds of garbage, such as bottomless shoe-tatters, shoe-patches, old stocking legs, rotten rags of wadmal, pieces of cord, fibers, fragments of horseshoes, horns, bones, gills, fishtails hard as glass, broken wooden bolts and other scraps of wood, loom-weights, shells both flat and whorled, and starfish. 

There were often also scraps of parchment in hiding places like this: Arni collected every one. He found two leaves from a 13th-century manuscript with holes punched in them to make a flour sifter. He found sheets used as dress patterns, shoe soles, knee patches, and even the stiffening in a bishop’s mitre. He pieced them back into books: One 60-page manuscript came from eight different farms.

When Arni's collection was packed for shipping to Copenhagen in 1720, it filled 55 wooden chests and required 30 packhorses to carry it.

Then in 1728 Copenhagen caught fire. Half of the city was incinerated, including the university library. Arni, disbelieving that fate could be so cruel, refused to evacuate his private library until the fire reached the end of his street. He and two other Icelanders had time to rescue only the oldest books. The rest were lost, including, Arni cried, “books that will never and nowhere be found until doomsday.”

We can only guess what wonderful sagas they held.

But the rest of Arni's collection now fills two libraries named for him, the Arni Magnusson Institute in Iceland and the Arnamagnaean Institute in Copenhagen. The Icelandic one held its birthday celebration last week; Copenhagen's is coming up on Friday. (For details see http://nfi.ku.dk/kalender/arne350-seminar/) I'm looking forward to tipping a glass to Arni's memory.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

The Death of Snorri Sturluson

In 2010, on the night of Snorri Sturluson’s murder, September 23, I sat on the stones surrounding his hot tub at Reykholt in western Iceland and dabbled my feet in the warm pool. The weather had turned: A cold mist replaced the sunshine of Thingvellir, where I’d walked, picking blueberries, that afternoon, memorizing the verse on the bronze plaque beside Snorri’s Althing booth, the place he called Valhalla. In English the lines run:

Snorri’s old site is a sheep-pen; the Law Rock is hidden in heather,
blue with the berries that make boys—and the ravens—a feast.

I knew the next two lines of this poem by Jónas Hallgrimsson (in the translation by Dick Ringler):

Oh you children of Iceland, old and young men together!
See how your forefathers’ fame faltered—and died from the earth!

And knew its fears were unsubstantiated: Researching Snorri Sturluson’s life for my book Song of the Vikings, I had concluded that Snorri, who lived from 1178 to 1241, was the single most influential writer of the Middle Ages.

For that we must thank the king of Norway, Hakon IV. Only fourteen when Snorri met him in 1218, King Hakon preferred the fashionably new French legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table to traditional Viking skaldic poetry and tales of the gods Odin, Loki, and Thor. Snorri must have been shocked. It also hit him in the pocketbook. Poetry was Iceland’s cultural capital, to use a term popularized by sociologists. It was all Snorri had to sell on the international market. Iceland’s other exports were wool and dried fish. The bright-colored alum-dyed cloth from England and Flanders was more highly prized, and Norway had ample fish.

Perhaps, Snorri thought, King Hakon was just ill-educated. He simply needed a good introduction to the lore of the North. Snorri began writing his books to teach the young king to appreciate his own heritage.

His motives were not pure. Snorri was not only a poet and lover of books. He was one of the richest men in Iceland, holder of seven chieftaincies, owner of five profitable estates and a harbor, husband of an heiress, lover of several mistresses, a fat man soon to go gouty, a hard drinker, a seeker of ease prone to soaking long hours in his hot-tub while sipping stout ale, not a Viking warrior by any stretch of the imagination, but clever. Crafty, cunning, and ambitious. A good businessman. So well-versed in the law that few other Icelanders could out-argue him. At age forty-two, he was at the height of his power.

His secret ambition was to rule Iceland—and he almost succeeded. On the quay at Bergen in 1220, departing for home, he tossed off a praise poem about the king’s regent, Earl Skuli, said to be the handsomest man in Norway for his long red-blond locks. In response, the earl gave him the ship he was to sail in and many other fine gifts. Young King Hakon honored Snorri with the title of landed man, or baron, one of only fifteen so-named. The king charged Snorri, too, with a mission: He was to bring Iceland—then an independent republic of some 50,000 souls—under Norwegian rule.

Or so says one version of the story. The other says nothing about a threat to Iceland’s independence. Snorri was not asked to sell out his country, simply to sort out a misunderstanding between some Icelandic farmers and a party of Norwegian traders. A small thing. A few killings to even out. A matter of law.

This trip to Norway was the turning point of Snorri’s life. One quick, persuasive speech to the king, along with one colorful poem pronounced on the quay at Bergen, would mar his reputation—and seal his doom. When he sailed to Norway in 1218 he was, by most calculations, the uncrowned king of Iceland. When he returned in 1220, he was a suspected traitor.

The voyage did not go well. It was late in the year to sail, and the weather in the North Atlantic was fierce. His new ship lost its mast within sight of Iceland; it wrecked on the Westman Islands off the southern coast. Snorri had himself and his bodyguard of a dozen men ferried over to the mainland with their Norwegian treasures. They borrowed horses and rode, bedecked in bright-colored cloth like courtiers, wearing gold and jewels and carrying shiny new weapons and sturdy shields, to the nearby estate of the bishop of Skalholt. There Baron Snorri’s new title was ridiculed. Some Icelanders even accused him of treason, of having sold out to the Norwegian king.

From then until his death in 1241, he would fight one battle after another (in the courts, or by proxy) to see who, if anyone, would be Earl of Iceland, deputy to Norway’s king. He would die in his nightshirt, cringing in his cellar, begging for his life before his enemies’ thugs. He did not live up to his Viking ideals, to the heroes portrayed in his books. He did not die with a laugh—or a poem—on his lips. His last words were “Don’t strike!” As the poet Jorge Luis Borges sums him up in a beautiful poem, the writer who “bequeathed a mythology / Of ice and fire” and “violent glory” to us was a coward: “On / Your head, your sickly face, falls the sword, / As it fell so often in your book.”

Yet his work remains. In the twenty turbulent years between his Norwegian triumph and his ignominious death, while scheming and plotting, blustering and fleeing, Snorri Sturluson did write his books: the Edda, Heimskringla, and Egil’s Saga. He covered hundreds of parchment pages with world-shaping words, encouraging his friends and kinsmen to cover hundreds of pages more.

I had come to Reykholt to keep vigil on the night of his death. The clouds crept up on me as I drove north from Thingvellir, slowly, on the torturous, washboard roads of Uxahryggir and Kaldidalur, alone for hours, no other cars, not even a bird, only the gleaming presence of Skjaldbreidur over my shoulder, the inverted smile of Ok, a chunk of rainbow here and there, a hidden stream, patches of dirty snow, a cairn. Now, at Reykholt, I sought darkness—some place I could see if the northern lights were shining in celebration of Snorri’s life and art.

Snorri’s Reykholt is much the same as it was in 1241, though nothing medieval but his hot-tub remains: Beside an imposing church is a school, hotel, and library. Up a spiral stair is a writer’s studio. But the modern designers were in love with light. Streetlamps and spotlights washed the night sky everywhere but here, at Snorri’s pool, tucked beneath the hill beside the school. I leaned back and looked up—no northern lights; the stars were faint, veiled in cloud. I imagined Snorri’s last moments.

His enemy (and former son-in-law) Gissur of Haukadal had spies watching Reykholt. Late at night on September 23, 1241, he rode up with seventy men. They broke into the building where Snorri slept. He leaped out of bed in his nightshirt and ran next door into the fine Norwegian-style loft-house he had built at the height of his power twenty years before. He was heading, perhaps, for his writing studio and the secret spiral stair that led from it down into a tunnel to his hot-tub and escape…

It is cold in Iceland in late September. The birch leaves are bright gold, the berry shrubs crimson, the songbirds have all flown. Swans flock in the marshlands, sounding their haunting note. Night falls quickly and lingers long, the wind has the bite of ice. An old fat man in his nightshirt, barefoot, would not get far in the cold and dark of a late-September night.

Snorri hid in a cellar. A priest gave him away. Gissur sent five men down.

I dried off my feet and headed back toward the Snorrastofa writer’s studio, which I had booked for five days. On the way I heard people oohing and aahing. They were halfway down the drive, looking up at the northern lights, they said. I saw nothing. “They’re breaking up now,” said a man standing in the road.

Turns out that I, like Snorri that fateful night 772 years ago, had been looking the wrong way.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another writing adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

Wagner and Iceland

Wagner's grand opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen returns to the Metropolitan Opera in New York on Saturday in Robert LePage's excitingly technological production. We all know the story, with its stirring Wotan, evil dwarf Alberich, tragic valkyrie Brünnhilde, heroic Siegfried and the cruel dragon he slays. It's the German National Epic.

Even if Wagner's main sources were not ultimately German.

They were Icelandic.

Who is Wotan? None other than the God of Wednesday, Odin. And if you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you'll know that the main source for stories of Odin is the 13th-century Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson.

In a well-known letter from 1856, Wagner jotted down the names of ten books that inspired him to write The Ring. 

Number three was Jacob Grimm’s German Mythology of 1835, which cites Snorri Sturluson's Edda, the Poetic Edda, Snorri's Heimskringla, and other Icelandic sagas. (In fact, if you take the Icelandic sources out of German Mythology, all that's left is an empty shell.)

Number four on Wagner's list was "Edda" (like most people at the time, he didn't discriminate between Snorri's Edda and the Poetic Edda).

Number five was the Icelandic Volsunga Saga, which Snorri did not write, but which was written in Iceland at roughly the same time Snorri was active. (Some scholars say it is earlier than Snorri's sagas, some say later.)

Number ten on Wagner's list was Heimskringla, Snorri's collection of sixteen sagas about the kings of Norway.

Wagner made this list just after completing Das Rheingold and Die Walküre; he wouldn’t finish Siegfried until 1871 and Götterdämmerung until 1874. The first full performance of the four-opera cycle was in 1876.

It was twenty-five years in the making. The idea for a cycle of operas based on Siegfried—or Sigurd—the Dragon-slayer and the accursed gold ring of the dwarves came to Wagner in 1851. A German translation of the Poetic Edda and some tales from Snorri’s Edda, he wrote, “drew me irresistibly to the Nordic sources of these myths,” the most expansive being the Icelandic Volsunga Saga.

Wagner had, three years before, written a libretto called Siegfried's Death based on the medieval German Nibelungenlied, or "Song of the Nibelungs." This libretto, according to Edward Haymes in his book Wagner's Ring in 1848, is quite similar to Götterdämmerung; "in fact," Haymes told me, "some of the scenes are taken over verbatim."

But Wagner wasn't satisfied. Only after he had discovered what he called "the Nordic sources," Wagner said, "did I recognise the possibility of making him [Siegfried] the hero of a drama; a possibility that had not occurred to me while I only knew him from the medieval Nibelungenlied."

The German "Song of the Nibelungs" was written at about the same time as Snorri was writing his Edda in Icelandic (c. 1220-1241). Some of the same characters appear: Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer (Wagner's Siegfried), Brynhild (Brünnhilde), Gudrun (Gutrune). But half of the "Song" takes place after their deaths; it has no counterpart in Wagner's Ring.

And much that Wagner loved about the Sigurd story exists only in the Icelandic sources: the dragon, the ring, the valkyries, the sibyl; the characters of Odin and the other gods, the giants, the dwarfs, Idunn’s apples, the rainbow bridge, the magical helmet, Valhalla, the Twilight of the Gods.

In his 2003 book, Wagner and the Volsungs: Icelandic Sources of Der Ring des Nibelungen (which is online here: http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Wagner.pdf), Icelandic scholar Arni Björnsson concludes that 80 percent of Wagner’s motifs are Icelandic. Five percent are German. Most of the remaining 15 percent are shared, appearing in both the Icelandic and German sources, though some—like the Rhine Maidens—are Wagner’s own invention, for he was nothing if not creative.

Like Snorri, Wagner took bits and pieces of myth and made of them something magical.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world. And don't forget to enter the raffle for a free, autographed copy of Song of the Vikings. For details, click here.

The Most Influential Writer of the Middle Ages

Who influenced your favorite writers?

As Laura Miller reported in Salon recently, a group of mathematicians led by Daniel Rockmore of Dartmouth College analyzed the works of 537 authors who wrote in English from 1550 to the present. The mathematicans concluded that “today’s literary writers have little use for the classics,” in Miller’s wording. She continues, “They are, the study asserts, much more influenced by their peers than they are by the most revered authors of earlier centuries.”

The Dartmouth study focused on style--word usage--and I won’t disagree that no one these days writes quite like Shakespeare, Donne, or Milton. But look back farther than 1550 and you'll start to see more similarities. 

Take Snorri Sturluson. A few years ago, when I began writing my biography of Snorri, Song of the Vikings (due out in October), I read Neil Gaiman’s best-selling genre-bender American Gods (published in 2001). I was delighted to see how heavily Gaiman was influenced by Snorri Sturluson, in both style and content. 

American Gods won the Hugo and Nebula awards, was the first “One Book One Twitter” title in 2010, and is being made into an HBO television series. But put aside the fact that it’s a great story. What intrigued me is that American Gods essentially updates Snorri’s masterwork, the Edda, for both Gaiman and Snorri ask, What do we lose when the old gods are forgotten? 

Gaiman’s Mr. Wednesday is closely patterned on Snorri’s Odin One-Eye, the god of Wednesday. In this passage from American Gods, Mr. Wednesday reveals himself—by paraphrasing Snorri: “His right eye glittered and flashed, his left eye was dull. He wore a cloak with a deep monklike cowl, and his face stared out from the shadows. ‘I told you I would tell you my names. This is what they call me. I am Glad-of-War, Grim, Raider, and Third. I am One-Eyed. I am called Highest, and True-Guesser. I am Grimnir, and I am the Hooded One. I am All-Father, and I am Gondir Wand-Bearer. I have as many names as there are winds, as many titles as there are ways to die.’”

Mourned Snorri in his Edda, “But these things have now to be told to young poets.” They have forgotten the names of Odin. The old lore is dwindling and will soon vanish into neverwhere: “But these stories are not to be consigned to oblivion,” he insisted. 

And because of the books he wrote, they were not.

More than eight hundred years after his death, Snorri’s books are the basis of a best-selling American novel and a TV series. And Neil Gaiman is not the only author Snorri influenced.

Wellspring of Western Culture

Snorri Sturluson died, accused of treason by the king of Norway and murdered by thugs, in 1241. His books over time were forgotten, though manuscripts of them were preserved in Iceland and Norway. 

Then in the early 1600s Snorri was resurrected. Translations from Old Norse began to appear throughout Europe. The craze led to the Gothic novel and ultimately to modern heroic fantasy. 

Snorri has influenced writers as various as Thomas Gray, William Blake, Sir Walter Scott, the Brothers Grimm, Thomas Carlyle, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Richard Wagner, Matthew Arnold, Henrik Ibsen, William Morris, Thomas Hardy, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jorge Luis Borges, W.H. Auden, Gunther Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A.S. Byatt, Seamus Heaney, Jane Smiley, Michael Chabon, and Neil Gaiman.

Through Tolkien, Snorri has inspired dozens of writers of fantasy. Fantasy and science fiction now account for ten percent of books published, and few books on the fantasy shelves of modern libraries or bookstores are free of wandering wizards, fair elves and werewolves, valkyrie-like women, magic swords and talismans, talking dragons and dwarf smiths, heroes that understand the speech of birds, or trolls that turn into stone—all drawn from Snorri’s Edda and Heimskringla. 

An incomplete list of fantasy writers indebted to Snorri includes: Douglas Adams, Lloyd Alexander, Poul Anderson, Terry Brooks, David Eddings, Lester del Rey, J.V. Jones, Robert Jordan, Guy Gavriel Kay, Stephen King, Ursula K. LeGuin, George R.R. Martin, Anne McCaffrey, and J.K. Rowling.

Snorri has inspired countless comic books—from Marvel’s Thor to the Japanese anime Matantei Loki Ragnarok—and games, including the wildly popular Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft, and Eve Online. The hit movie The Avengers would not exist without Snorri.

Snorri Sturluson is the most influential writer of the Middle Ages. His Edda, according to one translator, is “the deep and ancient wellspring of Western culture.” That comment was published in 1909—how much more true it is today. 


Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.