Last week, we discussed the two saga genres of Fornaldarsögur (mythical-heroic sagas) and Konungasögur (king sagas). This week, we will be discussing the third genre of saga literature:Íslendingasögur (family sagas). This final genre actually makes up the bulk of saga literature we have. It is also the genre that is most studied for historical information, in regards to medieval Icelandic society and culture. In this lesson, we will seek to understand what makes this genre unique. We will also uncover how they are created and in what context they were made.

Contents:

1. Íslendingasögur
2. History or Fantasy?
3. The Contemporary Sagas
4. Saga Style

Íslendingasögur

The sagas of the Icelanders are quite unique, maintaining a careful sense of realism and familiarity. Although most were written in the thirteenth century, also referred to as the “Sturlung Age” (Snorri and his powerful family), the stories they tell take place between ca. 870 and 1070. We will discuss the complications of this in a moment, though. 

There are around 40 of these sagas, telling the tales of those families that migrated from Norway to Iceland, telling of intricate family connections and the lives of the early settlers. Most importantly, these sagas give some insight into life in Iceland during the medieval period.

Some of the most popular family sagas are:

1. Njal’s saga
2. Egil’s saga
3. Laxdaela Saga

History or Fantasy?

To be straightforward, they are a mixture of both. It would be a waste of time to attempt to confine these sagas into one category or the other. However, this is a debate that has been going on for quite a bit, though the general direction today is to understand them as a mixture.

One thing is certain: the family sagas have a strong sense of realism. It is better stated by William Ian Miller, so I will share with you some of his words:

“The sagas, unlike romance and even most heroic fare, are consciously realistic. Their plots, except for occasional trips to the continent, are set in familiar countryside, in familiar interiors, among familiar faces. And in Iceland the number of surviving written artifacts is too scarce to allow the categorical rejection of a significant portion of them because they do not accord with conventional notions of what a historical source should be. … The family saga world is thus not merely the world of the author’s time; it is an amalgam representing the effects of temporal compression that included whatever the culture knew or wished to believe about its own past.”

That being said, the picture is actually a bit more complex than history or fantasy. They, in many ways, are examples of memory intermingling with imagination and observation…but I will save you from the details. There are generally two types of sagas: free-proseand book-prose:

1. Free-prose = Origins in oral tradition.
2. Book-prose = Imaginative, or works done later.

The best thing to understand, if you happen to be reading an Icelandic saga, is that they most certainly do not reflect the Viking Age. At least not entirely. The reflect instead the period that directly followed. These family sagas often use the past to represent their own time, although their narrative is historically bound (but only to the limitations of their collective memory).

The Contemporary Sagas

The Contemporary sagas are a bit more direct in that they are set during the relatively same time that they were written. The date range for these sagas are the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Again, many family sagas were also written during this period. It was a time of tremendous literary activity. This in itself is quite interesting, for this was also the time when there was a great amount of feuding between powerful families. In Iceland, these matters got to a point of civil war, armies against armies nearly, until the Norwegian crown stepped in and restored order.

Some popular contemporary sagas:

1. Saga of the Sturlungs
2. Saga of the Icelanders

There are also other sagas under this type of category referred to as Bishop’s sagas, telling the lives of prominent bishops in Iceland.

Saga Style

The sagas were composed by aristocrats and church aristocrats alike. They were commissioned and made sometimes for the purpose of making one’s family sound heroic and admirable. They are carefully composed and well-thought out. There is no single masterpiece (although Njal is often perceived as the height of the tradition). They exist together in a network, making references to one another and even outside events (like the battle of Clontarf in Njal’s saga). They exist in the real world and in real time.

Language and language patterns are familiar and structured across the many types of sagas. They often present a patterned, predictable sequence of action in multi-episodical structure. This is one reason why they cannot be taken at face value, historically speaking. Some works are fairly dramatic, such as Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum, while others are more simple, such as Snorri’s Heimskringla. But, as far as the family sagas go, they often aim for realism, with an “every day” type of setting. Here is the general family saga set-up:

1. Introduction
2. Conflict
3. Climax
4. Revenge
5. Reconciliation
6. Aftermath

The most central aspect of the Icelandic sagas is feud. Amid the sheep-breeding, cooking, and farming, we have countless instances of servants killing servants and men and wives ordering it. It is a very complex and interesting subject, but I will reserve that discussion for another time, perhaps.  Vengeance in these sagas is an unstoppable force (this can be seen in some heroic and kingly sagas as well, mind you). As a result, legal procedure and deceit play major roles in governing action.

Key Terms

1. Íslendingasögur – Icelandic family sagas, written during the thirteenth century generally, but take place during the Viking age.
2. Sturlung Age – Roughly the thirteenth century, with Snorri and his family as having a prominent role within society.
3. Free-prose – Origins in oral tradition.
4. Book-prose – Imaginative, or works done later.
5. Contemporary sagas – Sagas that take place during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
   1. Bishop’s sagas – Contemporary sagas about Icelandic Bishops.
6. Saga Style – Introduction, Conflict, Climax, Revenge, Reconciliation, Aftermath, with feud at the center.
   1. Feud – For Iceland, this sometimes meant generations of conflict between families for long forgotten reasons. Complicated subject area, but quite interesting.
   2. Vengeance – That old heroic concept of slaying those who have done you wrong, rather rampant in Icelandic sagas.

Wrap-up

“The Icelanders, it seems, were anxious to record and preserve monuments of their experience as Icelanders at the very time that the social arrangements enabling that experience were being destroyed or had already been superseded.”

Although many of you enjoy mythology and heroic deed far more so than the deeds of average men, the Icelandic realm holds much to be desired. There is much we can learn from the lives of the medieval Icelanders. It was a unique situation and applicable to life in general. This lesson will end our discussion of Viking Age-related literature, but a great deal of the knowledge in later lessons will have come from careful analysis of these sagas in particular. Much of what will come up again can be seen while reading these incredible works of historical literature.

Next week’s lesson: Lesson 10 – Viking Age Society.

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Sources

1. Jennifer Dukes-Knight, “Literature and the Sagas.” Lecture, Viking History, University of South Florida, 2015.
2. William Ian Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 43, 46, 47, 50. (…and honestly this entire book.)