Saga and Society

"This is a much more balanced book. It was first published in 1977, and most of the ideas in the book are still pretty reliable and fairly generally accepted by scholars of the subject. It summarises the history of Iceland in the medieval period, not least the history of the church. Initially the church was quite congenial to the chieftains in sharing the balance of power, but its attitude changed towards the end of the 12th century, in that it wanted an independence of its own, and this contributed to the internal strife that led to the submission of Iceland to the Norwegian crown. The second part of the book is about early Icelandic literature, and gives a very balanced and sensible account of it, drawing attention first of all to the two main theories about the origins of the sagas: oral as against written. He says one shouldn’t think in terms of too rigid a distinction here, that the two theories inter-relate. No. Iceland was converted to Christianity in the year 1000, when the Althingi, the ancestor of the Icelandic parliament, adopted Christianity by decree, and the sagas were written much later than that. On the other hand, there is a considerable residue of the pre-Christian religion in the sagas, and also in the poetry, much of which dates from relatively early, and on which the sagas rely to some extent. It was a polytheistic religion, of course. We know about it partly from a collection of poems put together in the 13th century, the Poetic Edda, although many of these poems – eddic poems, as they are called – date from earlier than that, some from the pre-Christian period. We also know about it from the Prose Edda, an account of pre-Christian mythology written around 1220 by Snorri Sturluson. “Iceland was converted to Christianity in the year 1000, when the Althingi adopted Christianity by decree.” The Poetic Edda is an anonymous collection, and, since much of the poetry contained in it must originally have been transmitted orally, it’s doubtful how far we can speak of authors of individual poems. Snorri Sturluson was writing partly on the basis of the kind of poetry that is preserved in the Poetic Edda. The major gods were Odin, the god of poetry, Thor, the warrior protector of farmers and peasants, and Freyr, who was a fertility god. Well, Freyr in the form in which I gave the name is a god, and male, but his sister and consort is the goddess Freyja, so these two deities are very closely bound up with one another. Yes, indeed. Old Norse is essentially the language of medieval Scandinavia, and it’s divided into West Norse, represented today by Icelandic, Faroese, and Norwegian, and East Norse, represented by Swedish and Danish. We’re talking mainly about West Norse here. Anglo-Saxon belongs to the West Germanic group of languages, and shares a common ancestry with Old Norse, because both are Germanic languages."