The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1967, Page 100

98
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Summer 1967
A HISTORY OF THE SAGAS
Excerpts—translated by BOGI BJARNASON from the Icelandic of Petur SigurSsson (c. 1930)
Of all the Northerly peoples the Ice-
landers alone preserved the Saga
Literature.
Coeval with the discovery and colon-
ization of Iceland the history of the
Scandinavian peoples emerges out of
the mist of legend and hyperbole. This
is more than co-incidence; for of all
the northerly peoples the Icelanders
alone preserved, orally, through many
generations, the epics and sagas of men
and events, until with the advent of
learning they were reduced to writing
and thus saved from extinction. The
possession of learning sufficient to this
task was peculiar to the Icelanders,
wherefore memory and tradition re-
verts hack only to the pioneers of Ice-
landic colonization, but rarely beyond.
It is the reverse of obvious why the
field of material for song and saga
that the Viking era provided was al-
lowed to lie fallow among the Norse,
Swedes and Danes, and to finally pass
out of the memory of men. Yet such
are the facts. But the important aspect
of the matter is the further fact that
the descendents of the pioneers in Ice-
land preserved in memory, in the form
of song and tale, through many cen-
turies, the history and lore of that
colorful age. They preserved and pass-
ed on orally to succeeding generations
the story of the colonization of Iceland,
the origins of the settlers, their beliefs
and traditions, the founding of the
state and its statutes, till the advent
of the art of writing provided a more
secure medium of preservation. In like
manner they preserved, and later re-
duced to writing, the history of Nor-
way, their motherland, its kings and
national heroes, with due attention to
their feats, at home and abroad. Not
did they stop at this, for they recog-
nized as alien nothing that had a bear-
ing on the history of the Scandinavian
peoples. They preserved inviolate the
histories of the Faroes and Orkneys.
The history of Sweden would be less
complete but for the wealth of in-
formation contained in the Icelandic
writings from ,the period following the
Viking age. The same, and to an even
greater degree, may be said concern-
ing the history of Denmark, -for the
Icelandic writers were zealous in their
self-imposed task of recording accounts
of events in, or touching upon, the
Danish nation, as Saxo Grammaticus,
the Danish historian (in his Gesta Dan-
orum), gratefully acknowledges.
▲ A A
Instances of the Preservation of
Reliable Accounts in the
Memory of Men.
The Icelandic Sagas and older Sagas
of the Norse Kings are accounts of
men and events of an earlier day. The
subject-matter of each had been pre-
served orally and passed on from one
generation to the next for varying
periods up to 300 years 'before their
contexture was realized in writing. It
may well appear incredible to the mo-
derns that reliable accounts could be
preserved in the memories of men for
so long a time; but the fact is well