Gripla - 01.01.1975, Page 110

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GRIPLA
encroachment. The dramatic events of this age of savagery and artis-
tic creativity provided both tragic material as well as compelling
motives for saga writing.
As already mentioned, not a few saga writers reveal a keen aware-
ness of the discrepancy between the nominally Christian cultural
milieu in which they lived and worked and the pagan cultural re-
ference, their largely imaginary re-creation of the dim and distant
world of their pagan ancestors. Much of the irony and paradox and
ambiguity that make the sagas so intriguing stems from the ambi-
valent attitude that saga writers so often seem to have had toward
their own creations. On the one hand they endowed their characters
with almost superhuman dimensions and with a degree of drengskapr
such as few of the figures in Sturlunga saga, their own contemporaries,
possessed. On the other hand they rather consistently portrayed pagan
heroes as inferior to Christian ones, and frequently attributed the
misfortune and tragedy of their characters to pagan beliefs and prac-
tices. Thus the golden age of Icelandic history that saga writers con-
jured up was both a model and a warning to their contemporaries,
whose own personal and political disasters derived in no small mea-
sure from a resurgence of the truculent Viking spirit that had been
held somewhat in check during the heyday of the Commonwealth.
Snorri tells us that Skalla-Grím’s descendants were diverse in nature.
Some, like Þorsteinn Egilsson, who was strong in the faith and well-
mannered, and Kjartan Óláfsson, who was the first Icelander to
observe the fast during Lent and who chose to be killed rather than
to kill, were among the most handsome men ever to live in Iceland.
‘But the greater number of the Mýramenn were very ugly.’ This
quotation from the conclusion of Egla is meaningful only within the
context of the moral and social disintegration of Snorri’s own day.
In this paper I should like to discuss with you a representative
selection of saga passages in which the authors directly or indirectly
express their opinions about paganism and/or Christianity. I wish
neither to question nor to defend any of the prevailing theories re-
garding religious bias in the sagas, nor shall I attempt to develop a
thesis of my own. Rather, I propose to consider with you the testi-
mony of the sagas themselves, and in so doing, to ignore (to the