This post was originally delivered as a virtual lecture to the New York Ancient Cultures MeetUp on September 20th, 2020. It was a group effort between myself (fjörn) and Joshua Gillingham (author of The Gatewatch). Below is the transcript I used while giving my portion of the talk. As such, I don’t have any footnotes, so I must apologize for my past neglect. I may return to add what I can, but for now I ask that you have trust in my own academic background.
Historical Sources
Poetic Propaganda?
Contemporary evidence about King Harald Fairhair, from the late-9th century, comes from his entourage of poets, who were called skáld in Old Norse. In the words of Bruce Lincoln, who wrote a wonderful (but somewhat expensive) book on this subject, they were his “propaganda corps.” But to speak of them with those terms alone would be an injustice, I think, to their actual reputation in Norse society, because they weren’t actually just hired goons spreading misleading information. Their craft actually required incredible skill, as Joshua will soon tell, and the importance of words, especially when skillfully sown, in shaping reputations cannot be understated.
The key to power and prestige in the medieval north was, more or less, a matter of public perception. This meant that poetry was a precious commodity in Norse society, because it could either enhance a person’s reputation or utterly destroy it. For instance, a skald might praise a person’s valor in battle, claiming that they had Odin’s blessing for victory and slew many of their foes without breaking a sweat. The result would be an image of a courageous warrior who ought not be lightly challenged. Yet, a skald could also slander a person, asserting that they were bested by their foe in an embarrassing or shameful way. This would therefore have the opposite effect, painting their foe as the heroic leader instead.
What made their poetry even more significant, though, was its connection to a specific occasion. Skalds acted as supposedly first-hand witnesses to great events, and it was part of their job to relay those events for others to hear. The results partially depended, rather cynically, upon who was giving them more coin—but also to protect themselves from potentially life-threatening wrath. Skalds thus recorded historical events, but often colored them to best suit their patrons. In other words, their poetry was less about recording history as an unbiased, uninvolved party, but rather about influencing public memory about an event and thus shaping the perception of the people it concerned.
Yet, we should not be overly dismissive of the credibility of their work, because it would have been an insult to attribute exploits to a king, in front of other witnesses, that he did not actually undertake. Thus, there was a social responsibility for skalds to preserve events for the sake of communal memory—they did not, therefore, invent material; instead, they emphasized the praiseworthy features of a given event by highlighting favorable exploits that they witnessed rather than inventing them altogether.
Now, as the keepers of history and distributors of both fame and folly in Norse society, skalds were actually granted great social prestige. Chieftains and kings often gave them gifts, such as golden arm-rings, to reward them for their praise—but also to ensure their continued good grace. Although it might be a risky move, skalds could slander their patrons just as easily as they praised them. But King Harald avoided such a fate by being particularly generous to his skalds, as it is said in chapter 8 of Egil’s Saga:
“Of all his followers, the king held his poets in highest regard, and let them sit on the bench opposite his high seat.”
Now, seating arrangements are nothing to laugh at here, for they were often the catalyst for the deadly feuds between Norse families. So, in return for such lavish gifts and respectable seating, his skaldic retinue delivered––because their praise-filled poetry circulated far and wide. According to the 13th-century Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson, who we will soon discuss in more detail:
“There were skalds with King Harald, and people still know their poems and likewise all other poetry about all other kings who have ruled in Norway since.”
So that’s great, but…we still have a problem: their poetry was part of an oral tradition, which means that it wasn’t actually written down or preserved as a text until much later, after Christianization. Generally speaking, this oral tradition can therefore only be studied through later written literature that either claims to rely upon such poetry for its own source material, or quotes it directly. Yet, this means that the already fluid poetry of those skalds, which never completely served as unbiased history in the first place, is presented to us through yet more filters: the memory and the politics of later authors and their audiences.
Penning Politics
So although we should prefer sources that are contemporary (or near-contemporary) with the events in question…we don’t actually have that poetry until it was written down and incorporated into later historical writing. And what’s more, most of that later writing doesn’t even come from Norway—Instead, most of it comes from Iceland, for reasons that we’ll discuss in more detail later. Our most detailed source concerning the life, reign, and death of King Harald Fairhair, then, comes 3-and-a-half centuries later in a 13th-century collection of prose narratives about Norwegian kings called Heimskringla written by an Icelandic politician and historian named Snorri Sturluson.
In the prologue of that work, however, Snorri tells us (albeit somewhat vaguely) what his sources supposedly were when preparing this work, claiming (and frequently quoting) skaldic poetry as a primary source. As he puts it:
“…some is written according to old poems or narrative songs which people used to use for their entertainment. And although we do not know how true they are, we know of cases where learned men of old have taken such things to be true.”
And then, a short while later, he continues, saying:
“…we have mostly used as evidence what is said in those poems that were recited before the rulers themselves or their sons. We regard as true everything that is found in those poems about their expeditions and battles. It is indeed the habit of poets to praise most highly the one in whose presence they are at the time, but no one would dare to tell him to his face about deeds of his which all who listened, as well as the man himself, knew were falsehoods and fictions. That would be mockery and not praise.”
Thus, Snorri acknowledges the potential shortcomings of skaldic poetry, yet knew well that such an art embodied a delicate balance between real history and catered praise—this is all the more true considering that it was also Snorri who wrote The Prose Edda, which was a guide book for aspiring, 13th-century skalds. In other words, he was intimately familiar with the art. So, considering all of this, the reliance on skaldic poetry as a source for this work can be seen on nearly every page of Heimskringla, as it is frequently quoted. Yet, Snorri isn’t actually the first person to have done this, for his fellow historians had already been substantiating their accounts by quoting a contemporary skald as evidence (though, it seems that Snorri was more discriminating and systematic than his predecessors).
On that note, though, at least 3 Icelandic historical surveys of Norwegian kings actually do come before Heimskringla (both from the late 12th century and the early 13th)—but Snorri’s work seems to have been the best, which isn’t surprising if it’s seen as a culmination of Icelandic historical work. In fact, it seems that virtually all writing of new sagas about Norwegian kings stopped after Heimskringla. The trend in the 14th century, at least, was supplementing Heimskringla with more material rather than producing a replacement.
But no matter how good a historian’s work is, the historian is always a product of their own time, place, and position in life. Snorri was, first and foremost, an Icelander rather than a Norwegian; and although his ancestry certainly had roots in Norway, his attitudes about Norway, and especially its politics, were seen by him through an Icelandic lens. In the 13th century, Iceland had been an independent country governed by assemblies rather than kings for over 300 years—and their own founding story features proud, independent landholders boldly leaving Norway for faraway lands in light of King Harald’s attempts to unify it under his sole rule. Yet, in Snorri’s time, a handful of powerful families descended from those fleeing landholders violently competed for political prominence in Iceland. And what’s more? Snorri was himself one of Iceland’s most prominent political figures and a member of its most powerful family: the Sturlungs. He was therefore directly involved in politics, which included a few visits to Norway wherein he hoped to win the favor of the Norwegian royal court.
I’d like to dwell on this point for a moment. In the spring of 1220, there was a bloody altercation between the Norwegians living in Bergen and some Icelanders. This conflict nearly threatened war between Norway and Iceland, but Snorri, who was in Norway at the time, seems to have quelled those tensions by promising to persuade his fellow Icelanders to accept Norwegian overlordship peacefully (for that was an ambition, peaceful or not, pursued by many Norwegian kings after Harald Fairhair). For this deed, and much else (including some flattering poetry), Snorri was rewarded by the Norwegian court, which included fancy titles and lordly gifts.
Upon returning home, however, Snorri showed no interest in keeping his promise—perhaps because he himself had no interest in giving Icelandic independence up. Yet, after a falling out with his own family, Snorri returned to Norway—possibly hoping to use his connections there to regain his lost property and honor back home. Things soon got messy, though, when Snorri ended up on the wrong side of a rebellion against the Norwegian king and then defied the king’s ban on travel from there to Iceland. It wasn’t long after returning to home, then, that Snorri met his not-so-glamorous end in a cellar at his home in Reykjaholt.
My point in this digression, though, is to show just how ambiguous Snorri’s own relationship with Norway was in his political life and to emphasize that such a relationship inevitably influenced his work. As a powerful, independent Icelandic chieftain, he both schmoozed and snubbed Norwegian kings—but it seems that he merely used them for his own political ambitions. This is perhaps why his historical work on that subject, Heimskringla, also seems ambivalent, for scholars argue that it both celebrates and criticizes Norwegian kingship. But, lest we descend into the rabbit hole that is the historiography of Heimskringla, I’ll leave us with this conclusion: Snorri was towing a fine line; his criticism, if any is truly present, is subtle enough to be denied among a Norwegian audience, but emphasized among an Icelandic one. After all, Theodore M. Andersson has argued that Heimskringla was written with both audiences in mind—though some scholars, such as Magnus Fjalldal, argue otherwise, of course.
Sagas & Society
As I mentioned already, though, Snorri wasn’t actually the only Icelander writing history and literature in Old Norse—in fact, we have several other sources that mention King Harald Fairhair from Iceland between the 12th and 13th centuries, and looking at those might help us better understand how Icelanders viewed their relationship with Norway. Ari Thorgilsson, for example, who was the first Icelander to writer vernacular history (that is history in Old Norse rather than Latin) in the 12th century, begins his work titled The Book of Icelanders with this line:
“Iceland was first settled from Norway in the days of King Harald Fairhair, son of Halfdan the Black, at the time…when Ivarr, son of Ragnar Lodbrok, had St. Edmund, king of the Angles, killed; and that was 870 years after the birth of Christ…”
Although stated rather plainly by Ari, the connection between King Harald Fairhair and the settlement of Iceland clearly went beyond a matter of timing, because over 15 sagas begin with stories of Icelandic ancestors fleeing his tyranny. When looked at collectively, then, Icelandic literature presents a founding story claiming that King Harald Fairhair was the primary reason that their families came to Iceland. And to provide an example of that, here’s a quote from the first chapter of Eyrbyggja saga:
“This was at the time when King Harald Fairhair came to power in Norway. Because of hostilities, many distinguished men fled their ancestral lands in Norway, some east across the Kjolen mountains, and some west across the sea.”
And even Laxdæla saga:
“During Ketil’s later years King Harald Fairhair grew so powerful in Norway that no petty king or other man of rank could thrive in Norway unless he had received his title from the king. When Ketil learned that the king had intended to offer him the same terms as others, namely to submit to his authority without receiving any compensation for kinsmen who had been killed by the king’s forces, he called a meeting of his kinsmen and addressed them…”
Needless to say, Ketil and his kinsmen decide to leave Norway.
Despite what these sagas say, however, the reality is obviously more complex than that—but the point here is that Icelanders, who were responsible for writing down much of the Norse history and lore that we rely upon today, generally believed that their roots as a society laid in opposition to Norwegian kingship.
The most telling example of this foundation story comes from Egil’s Saga, which was written in the early 13th century and, ironically, possibly written by none other than Snorri Sturluson (who was actually related to characters in this saga through his wife’s family and even lived at the same place where the saga’s protagonist once did). But wait…how could he have written Heimskringla, which is ambivalent about Norwegian kingship, and Egil’s Saga, which is overtly opposed to (and weary of) Norwegian kingship?
My guess is that Egil’s Saga was intended specifically for an Icelandic audience, whereas Heimskringla was for a mixed audience (meaning that I side with Theodore M. Andersson on this one)—they also belong to different genres (sagas about Icelanders vs. saga about kings). If that is true, then Egil’s Saga is a reflection of the attitudes and assumptions of a 13th-century Icelandic audience—and since an author cannot be wholly removed from the experiences and expectations of their audience, this saga can tell us more about what Icelandic authors may have assumed, remembered, and imagined about their homeland.
That said, the main theme of Egil’s Saga is a historic struggle between independent farmers and overbearing kings. In the words of Bernard Scudder, who translated this saga into English:
“It glorifies the powerful farmer who is ready to defend his honor and that of his family against anyone who seeks to diminish it, be it a fellow countrymen or a foreign king.”
Yet, there is also a bitter acknowledgement that this was becoming a thing of the past:
“This picture of the proud chieftain may be all the more clearly presented because the author and his contemporaries were aware that such individuals were now becoming figures of the past. …We can detect in Egil’s Saga a certain nostalgia for the times when an Icelandic farmer was able to hold his own against powerful rulers of other countries.”
To better understand what Bernard scudder means by this, though, we need to consider the social context behind this saga’s production: the consolidation of power into fewer hands, and the looming threat of Norwegian overlordship (which became a reality between 1262 and 1264). That was the state of Iceland in the early 13th century—but before I get too carried away, I’ll emphasize the relevance of yet another digression by saying that context is important to understanding every historical source, and so it is crucial to read every text, whenever possible, within its own history.
To summarize it briefly, even while Icelanders were producing a plethora of literature, it was drowning in a blood-bath of political and social turmoil. In the roughly 300 years between 960 and 1230, the amount of chieftains in Iceland went from 39 to 5 or 6—with most of this change taking place from 1200 onward. Snorri]s own family, as I mentioned earlier, was the most prominent of those 5 to 6 aristocratic families. In 1220, amid this consolidation of power, the Norwegian crown made its first attempt to annex the country, for the king at that time, King Hakon the Elder, adopted the policy that Norway should hold all of the lands in the North Atlantic that were inhabited by Norse people.
This was, you’ll remember, when Snorri was in the country and made his promise to convince Icelanders to agree to such a policy peacefully. But instead, to gloss over much political mess, the Icelandic families in power violently fought over dominance and inheritance, leading to confusion and instability—the Norwegian crown never gave up, though, and continued to push their expansionist agenda amid that chaos. The end result of this history likely came after Egil’s Saga was written, but it was the Norwegian crown that won, for the Icelanders signed their independence away, more-or-less willingly, in 1262. While their reason for doing that is debated, I agree with those who argue that people were simply tired of the endless fights between oversized chieftains and their families; they hoped that a foreign king would bring them peace by removing the reason for those families to compete.
It should make more sense, then, why Bernard Scudder says that Egil’s Saga seems to long for the past, when Icelandic farmers were independent from overbearing, foreign kings—for that was now a looming threat. Yet, the final tone of the saga makes us pause to wonder…because despite spending so much time rallying against Norwegian kingship and glorifying the independent Icelandic chieftain, this is what Bernard Scudder has to say about the saga’s conclusion:
“Egil’s grandson…achieves his fame through fighting alongside a successful contender to the Norwegian throne rather than challenging the royal authority: the farmer no longer gains his glory by opposing the king but by supporting him.”
This is, perhaps, the saga’s bitter acknowledgement that the old days were indeed behind them, and that they must instead look forward and adapt.
But I suppose all of that is enough, if not too much, to prepare everyone for hearing more about King Harald’s life and reign, as well as how Norse culture actually migrated (and changed) as people flocked to Iceland. As we move forward in this talk, try to keep this complex relationship between Icelanders and Norwegians in mind and remember that there is a significant gap in our sources in regards to time, place, and even purpose. But with that, I’ll end my lengthy discussion of our historical sources and allow Joshua to speak about the man himself.
[Lacuna]
Egil’s Saga Highlights
Now that Joshua has shared an overview of King Harald’s rise to power and the diaspora of Norwegian landholders that fled him, I’d like to take us back to Egil’s Saga to highlight how Icelanders remembered him and their roots—for many of them were the descendants of those very landholders. But, more importantly, they were the north’s primary lorekeepers, as far as written history and literature in Old Norse is concerned, so considering their perspective on the matter is all the more necessary. After all, sagas like this aren’t merely fictions taking place in an invented past, but rather deeply-rooted social memory highlighted by an author’s creativity to make it resonate with the present, for themselves and their audience.
Like skalds from the Viking Age reciting oral poetry, these saga authors didn’t invent history for fear that their audience would deem the memory of their ancestors dishonored. As a result, the passages from Egil’s Saga I’m about to share reflect how Icelanders of the 13th century, at least, truly remembered the events surrounding King Harald’s unification of Noway, and their subsequent migration to Iceland.
So, without further rambling, the first passage I want to share comes just after King Harald subjugates several provinces—which are probably better left unnamed lest we spend too much time consulting old maps. A man named Solvi Chopper, however, escapes from one of those provinces and heads south to seek aid and muster the men there in an attempt to resist King Harald’s expansion. This is what he says:
“Although this misfortune has befallen us now…it will not be very long before the same happens to you, because I think Harald will be here soon, once he has brought slavery and suffering to everyone he chooses in North More and Romsdal. You will face the same choice we had: either you defend your property and freedom by staking all the men you can hope to muster…or follow the course taken by the people of Naumdal who voluntarily entered servitude and became Harald’s slaves. My father felt it an honor to die nobly as king of his own realm rather than become subservient to another king in his old age.”
The very beginning of this saga, then, depicts King Harald as a tyrant who’s rule brings slavery and suffering to everyone—though it is clear that the saga-author is referring specifically to land-owning, free men. Through Solvi, however, we see that Icelander’s remembered their ancestors as having only two options: to become a slave or to fight for the chance to remain free. This is, perhaps, an analogy for their own time, of course, when Icelandic farmers were threatened by dwindling independence, both by foreign kings and power-hungry chieftains—so this was not only a matter of the past, but a renewed concern for their own present. But, regardless, it’s clear that Icelanders valued their independence, an idea that they inherited from their ancestors and a memory they continued to uphold in later literature. But to offer more about how Icelanders typically characterized King Harald, we’ll turn to another passage.
In this passage, we see how Icelanders remembered King Harald treating their landholding ancestors following their eventual defeat at his hands. This time, however, it is the saga-author’s own direct commentary rather than the words spoken by a saga-character:
“Once King Harald had taken over the kingdoms he had recently won, he kept a close watch on the landholders and powerful farmers and everyone else he suspected would be likely to rebel, and gave them the options of entering his service or leaving the country, or a third choice of suffering hardship or paying with their lives; some had their arms and legs maimed. In each province King Harald took over all of the estates and all the land, habited or uninhabited, and even the sea and the lakes. All the farmers were made his tenants, and everyone who worked the forests and dried salt, or hunted on land or at sea, was made to pay tribute to him.
Many people fled the country to escape his tyranny…”
As direct commentary from the author, I choose to read this passage as a direct condemnation of King Harald’s character and a victim’s perspective on his accomplishments—despite being written much later, it’s clear that Icelanders were still bothered by the memory that many of the ancestors were threatened and forced to flee from their ancestral homes. Furthermore, since the saga-author and much of their audience were likely landholding farmers themselves, it’s likely that Icelanders felt resentment towards anyone who threatened their way of life—and that could include the Norwegian kingship as a whole, which is being represented solely by its founder, King Harald Fairhair, here.
Yet, even these Icelanders, as bitter as they were, acknowledged that the past, like the present, was not so simple—because some of their ancestors were actually open to embracing this new order rather than fighting to preserve an old way of life. Consider this passage, which is spoken by Thorolf, the bother of Egil’s father:
“…I feel I will earn great honor from him. I’m determined to go and see the king and join him, for I know for a fact that there are nothing but men of valor among his followers. Joining their ranks sounds a very attractive proposition, if they will take me. They live a much better life than anyone else in this country. And I’m told that the king is very generous to his men and no less liberal in granting advancement and power to people he thinks worthy of it. I’ve also heard about all the people who turn their backs on him and spurn his friendship, and they never become great men–some of them are forced to flee the country, and others are made his tenants. It strikes me as odd for such a wise and ambitious man as you, Father, not to be grateful to accept the honor that the king offered you.”
This speech must have resonated with contemporary Icelanders like Snorri, who actually sought favor from the Norwegian court themselves in their own time. This passage thus uses the remembered past to speak more directly to the present, since Icelanders couldn’t quite deny that there was indeed wealth and prestige still to be won in royal courts. Yet, the saga-author doesn’t admit this without noting the dangers of serving a king, as well, for the next few chapters recount Thorolf’s struggle to serve King Harald without incurring his wrath. While I don’t want to spoil too much about the saga, it’s important that I at least mention that Thorolf gains too much prestige while serving King Harald, which arouses the king’s suspicion and eventual enmity—which leads us to our next passage.
When things don’t go well for Thorolf, though, his entire family gets caught up in the fallout—mostly because they were honor-bound (and bold enough) to avenge the king’s treatment of Thorolf. Yet, this lands their family in the same exactly position that Solvi Chopper described earlier in the saga: to surrender, fight, or flee—and this is what they decide to do:
“Kveldulf and Skallagrim discussed over and again what to do and were in complete agreement that they could not stay in the country, any more than other people who were engaged in disputes with the king. Their only alternative was to leave Norway, and they were attracted by the idea of going to Iceland, where they heard of the fine land that was available. Their friends and acquaintances, Ingolf Arnarson and his companions, had already gone to Iceland to claim land and settle there, and had found land for the taking and were free to choose wherever they wanted to live. The outcome of their deliberations was to abandon their farm and leave the country.”
This wasn’t, of course, their only option—but their Icelandic descendants had deemed that it was the only honorable option. Yet, it was also a grim acceptance that one family fighting against King Harald alone would only result in their deaths, either literally or figuratively applied to their way of life. Thus, while running away might seem like a cowardly thing to do, later Icelanders reasoned that fleeing was an honorable choice aimed at preserving their much-valued independence as landowning farmers—and as I’ve said many times already, our sources clearly show us that Icelanders were proud of their independence, and so it isn’t surprising that their memory of historical events is colored by the fact that they inherited such independence from those ancestors who allegedly decided to flee from King Harald.
This glorification of Icelandic independence, however, is made particularly clear when Thorolf’s brother, Skallagrim, arrives in Iceland.
“Skallagrim was an industrious man. He always kept many men with him and gathered all the resources that were available for subsistence… Skallagrim was a great shipbuilder and there was no lack of driftwood west of Myrar. He had a farmstead built on Alftanes and ran another farm there, and rowed out from it to catch fish and cull seals and gather eggs, all of which were in great abundance. There was plenty of driftwood to take back to his farm. Whales beached, too, in great numbers, and there was wildlife for the taking at this hunting post; the animals were not used to men and would never flee. He owned a third farm by the sea on the western part of Myrar. This was an even better place to gather driftwood, and he planted crops there and named in Akrar (Fields).”
In other words, now that Skallagrim was free from an overbearing king, he was able to flourish as an “industrious man” and build not just 1 successful farmstead, but 3—not including the 4th that comes just after this passage. Yet, the saga-author also presents Iceland as if it were a paradise filled with bounty and opportunities, for the land itself was prosperous in the king’s absence, have no lack of driftwood, plenty of fish, many whales, numerous wildlife, and rich grazing lands for livestock (which the passage following this one tells us about).
This is clearly an idealization, since other sources (such as The Book of Settlements) include accounts of less fortunate experiences endured by hopeful settlers. Yet, the intention here, perhaps, is to create a distinct contrast between the tumultuous life that Skallagrim fled from in Norway and idyllic life he finds in Iceland—which is only threatened when his ancestors get too involved with the Norwegian kings that come after King Harald.
It is thus immediately after establishing this sense of serenity in Iceland that the saga-author reminds their audience what stands to threaten it: the animosity of kings.
“King Harald Fairhair confiscated all the lands left behind in Norway by Kveldulf and Skallagrim, and any other possessions of theirs he could come by. He also searched for everyone who had been in league with Skallagrim and his men, or had even been implicated with them or had helped them in all the deeds they did before Skallagrim left the country. The king’s animosity towards Kveldulf and his sons grew so fierce that he hated all their relatives or others close to them, or anyone he knew had been fairly close friends. He dealt out punishment to some of them, and many fled to seek sanctuary elsewhere in Norway, or left the country completely.”
For the saga, this passage serves to foreshadow conflict to come between the sons of Skallagrim and the Norwegian crown—but it also serves, then, to show that later Icelanders still worried that their independence and way of life could be threatened by a foreign king, especially as the threat kept creeping into contemporary politics. So, for us, the lesson is this: that Icelanders used their memory of the past to create literature for the present. In doing so, they not only preserved their history, but gave it new life and relevance through each retelling.
Yet, this means that sources like Egil’s Saga, although born from real history, have more to say about the memory and concerns of the contemporaries who retold the story for their own time. Thus, like I said before, the saga-authors of later medieval Iceland were just like the skalds of the Viking Age, for they recorded the past with highlights of social commentary for the present. But it would be foolish to assume that prose writing ever replaced poetry altogether, for even Snorri himself, who may have written both Heimskringla and Egil’s Saga, was known as a skáld and composed much poetry himself.
So, on that note, I’ll hand things over to Joshua again, who’s going to talk more about the actual structure of Old Norse poetry.
The Legacy of Icelandic Authorship
I’ve alluded to this already, but Old Norse literature was the product of both the Viking-Age oral tradition of Skaldic poetry that Joshua just spoke of, and a flowering literary tradition that grew in medieval Iceland during the 12th and 13th centuries. As Preben Sørensen puts it:
“The background to Old Norse literature, if we must reduce everything to a short formula, is the meeting between a living oral tradition and a society which needed—as was able to—to this tradition into literature.”
So…why did Icelanders feel that they needed to turn their oral poetry into written prose? The answer isn’t exactly simple nor singular, but part of it can nevertheless be briefly stated: they were a migrant society that needed some way to retain their Norse identity despite being separated (but not isolated) from their homeland. Of course, this began with the continued life of the Norse oral tradition in Iceland immediately after its settlement in King Harald Fairhair’s day—but the written craft, which developed both from and alongside it, seems to have begun by learned Icelanders, such as Ari Thorgilsson, as an attempt to create an Icelandic identity. As I mentioned before, it was Ari who was the first Icelander to write their history in their native tongue, rather than Latin. It is possible, then, that the art of saga-writing, inspired by early histories and narratives about saints, continued to flourish, in part, because Iceland craved to have the stories of its founding and its ancestors recorded in the same manner.
It is thus that, despite the animosity they seem to show King Harald Fairhair in their collective memory, Icelanders became the lorekeepers of the Norse world, for they desperately clung to their cultural roots while also refashioning them with a distinctly Icelandic flavor—they used their Norse past to give meaning to and help define their Icelandic present. In this way, it was because Iceland was a migrant country that it was so concerned with preserving its connections to the culture that it had been separated from. As a result, Icelanders were always keen to maintain their connections with Norway, even if they had a distaste for its kingship. As Lee M. Hollander wrote in his translation of Heimskringla:
“In this connection it is well to bear in mind that though separated from the motherland Norway by broad and stormy seas, for over three hundred years attachment to it never waned in Iceland. The language had scarcely changed, bonds of kinship in Norway were kept intact, intellectual and commercial relations were never interrupted. Young Icelanders of birth in surprising numbers took passage to the ‘old country’ to acquire a knowledge of the world, and returned enriched with experience, incidentally having sold their cargoes of wool and homespun for good money and things not readily obtainable at home. They brought back with them news of changes abroad—news told and avidly listened to at meetings of the Althing and the local assemblies.”
Thus, because Icelanders maintained their cultural connections with the rest of the Norse world through both poetry and literature, they managed to preserve much that would have otherwise been lost. You might still wonder, however, why Norway itself didn’t do more to preserve its own history and culture in written form—for they did write as well. But the answer still lies in Iceland’s existence as a migrant country. To put it simply, you typically only know the importance of something once it’s gone…and Icelanders, having been separated from the very landscape of their ancestors and older oral tradition, would have known that feeling more than the Norwegians did themselves.
So…what exactly did they preserve, then? Well, we’ve already talked extensively about how Icelandic authors recorded much of what we know about King Harald Fairhair, albeit from a very Icelandic perspective. Yet, no matter what the intention or inevitable bias is in their work, we wouldn’t be able to have such an in-depth conversation about King Harald and his effects on the Norse world without their sources. Moreover, thanks to the fact that those Icelanders wrote over 100 sagas, we have a plethora of material to explore that, if studied and read carefully, reveals much about their culture and society. As Jesse Byock puts it:
“…the sagas approach the type of ethnographic material collected by anthropologists in the field. In one way the sagas may even have an advantage over the most ethnographic observations, which have a weak point. Because they cannot cover an adequate span of time, anthropological observations rarely capture the full range of variability that affected the community under study. That sagas do not have this problem. They capture a wide range of variability, offering deep insight into the mentality of the culture group as well as the changing environment.”
As a result, Icelandic sagas have been vital in providing us with an understanding of the daily lives and social structures of medieval Iceland, which were themselves derived from those inherited from Norway. Of course, these sources inevitably present several problems to historians—the foremost being that a historian cannot use a 13th-century saga to accurately reflect the Viking Age past it claims to present.
In general, these sagas have more to say about the society that produced them, but that doesn’t mean that there are no historical truths imbedded in them—for we know, thanks to archaeological confirmation, that the events described in The Saga of Eirik the Red and The Saga of Greenlanders, which both recount the discovery of North America by Norse explorers, did indeed happen—although they might not have happened in the way that the sagas claim, and therein lies the distinction. Nevertheless, it was because these sagas preserved the memory of that feat that archaeologists knew to look for Norse settlements in North America—and so they did.
Yet, so far, I’ve only mentioned history and sagas that involved Icelanders directly—but they did actually write about subjects with roots long predating the Viking Age and the settlement of Iceland. Some of those sagas include the legends surrounding Sigurd the Dragon-slayer, Ragnar Lodbrok, and King Hrolf Kraki—which involves characters who appear in Beowulf. It must also be said that Icelanders, most notably Snorri Sturluson, preserved much of what we know about Norse mythology.
Despite their complexities due to time and place, without The Prose Edda, and also the anonymously-compiled Poetic Edda, we’d have significantly less material to work with. At the end of the day, however, whether those legends are historically truthful or that mythology accurately pagan, the preservation of that material by Icelandic authors has made much known about the Norse world that otherwise might have been lost to the relentless winds of time—and it’s not only the scholars who have benefitted from them, either, for Joshua himself attests to the profound influence that they have had on modern storytelling and imagination.
Thus, the legacy of Icelandic authorship has been two-fold: they have provided historians with much-needed source material for better understanding Norse history and lore, and they have continued to inspire the storytellers of today, who continue to breath new life into their old tradition.
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