Egil's Saga

Sea Stallion from Glendalough (reconstruction) Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde, Denmark

By Snorri Sturluson in The Sagas of Icelanders, preface by J. Smiley, intro. by R. Kellogg, deluxe ed., New York: Penguin Books, 2000, pp 3-185.

I love Icelandic sagas!  They are so bracing and forthright.  The reader knows Egil is going to be a troublemaker from a very young age.  A bully pushes him down in the playground, and Egil comes back with an ax and splits his head open.  Welcome to the world of the Viking marauders.  I'm a vegetarian and usually frightened of violence, but saga literature lets me tap into my inner 13 year old boy.  I find myself cheering for Egil as he "runs through" his foes in battle.

MAF, my companion in all things psychological, notes that my pleasure in the gore of Viking warfare is permissible because it is a world--largely--without suffering.  Egil does mourn the deaths of his kin in battle, but those slayed by Egil in blood feuds or raids are not granted full subjectivity.  The other warriors are objects to be overcome in the protagonist's quest for honor, riches.  Like action-adventure movies and our government's depiction of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, death is an abstraction.  (Well, unless it happens to one of Our Own.)

The paradox of Egil's Saga is that it feels utterly alien and strangely familiar.  Both Smiley and Kellogg remark on this distinctive feature of sagas.  The content is undeniably medieval, but the prose narrative form is very like the modern Western novel.  Starting with a very specific time and place, the authors link a character's decision about an everyday event to an unfolding conflict.  Kellogg sums it up best, "[t]he development of a prose fiction in medieval Iceland that was fluent, nuanced, and seriously occupied with the legal, moral, and political life of a whole society of ordinary people was an achievement unparalleled elsewhere in Europe."*


*p. xxi.

The Tale of Genji

Tale of the Genji, Tosa Mitsutada (Japanese, 1738–1806), Metropolitan Museum of Art

By Murasaki Shikibu, trans., E.G. Seidensticker, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, p.1090.

The Tale of the Genji is comprised of 54 tales that describe the court of 10th c. Heian Japan.  The book is divided into two sections.  The first half of the text describes the life of "the shining Genji" or Genji Minamoto, technically a commoner but the son of an emperor.  Genji is amazingly handsome.  He possesses a ferocious sexual appetite, however, and ravishes many women.  The action occurs within the imperial households of the Heian capital, modern-day Kyoto.  This is an elegant world filled with the sound of rustling silk, wisteria blowing in the wind, and concerts held on verandas.  Personal beauty and skills appropriate to a life spent at court (e.g., calligraphy, graceful dancing) were highly valued.  Refinement is all.

The last chapters, called the Uji chapters for the town in which the plot is set, center around a romantic triangle between Kaoru, believed to be Genji's son but is really the grandson of his best friend, Ukifune, the hapless step-daughter of a provincial governor, and Niou, a rake of the first order that Jane Smiley calls the first anti-hero to appear in world literature.  The plot is complicated.  Ukifune is seduced by both Kaoru and Niou before being abducted by an evil spirit.  She is discovered by monks and renounces the world to become a nun.

The graceful tone of this proto-novel is distinctive.  There's an endearing melancholy about the tales that's very winning.  The name Genji "means" that the good days are behind us.  The evanescence of life is the main theme. 

The author's style in The Tale of the Genji is not only defined by her artistic choices.  (Its a given that Murasaki Shikibu invented the prose narrative with identifiable characters in the East.)  There are important conventions in Japanese and Chinese culture that shape the tales.  What I see as straight-forward, direct communication is too indecorous for Heian culture.  Discourse happens at an oblique angle; its like two people lie at a 45 degree angle from each other and chat.  For example, visitors accept callers from behind screens; friends and lovers devise poems for each other that play on images from a shared canon of classical literature; notes are slipped under curtains during social calls; and puns dominate casual conversation so multiple meanings float in the air. 

This indirect style of communication extends to grammar.  The protagonists in the Tale don't have proper names in the Western sense.  The characters in Heian Japanese are known by elaborately conjugated verbs and adjectives.  Identity is established through shifting sobriquets.  One of Genji's lesser ladies, for example, The Lady of the Orange Blossoms, is named for a poem cited in the chapter where she makes her appearance.

It's this context of high cultural sophistication that makes the sexual violence in the tales so disconcerting.  It is not useful, obviously, to apply 21st century notions of gender politics to such a fantastic world, but I grew weary of reading about of rapes.