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.