The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1982, Blaðsíða 17

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
15
They tell stories. They tell them, in an epic
strain, in strong and lucid prose, with every
word having its part to play in carrying
forward the narrative. They have no axe to
grind. They do not preach a message; nor
do they teach a lesson, nor illustrate a
theory. They offer no philosophic discus-
sions on the fickleness of fate, nor any
lengthy descriptions of nature’s hidden
face. The best of them are informed with a
poetic vision. They are the sap and blood of
great literature. As James Norman Hall, of
the Mutiny of the Bounty fame, puts it:
“All the Icelandic sagas and this one in
particular (the specific reference is to
Njal’s Saga) spoil one for the reading of
contemporary tales. The people ‘come
alive’ of themselves by what they say and
do; one is completely unconscious of any
narrator.” John Masefield confirms this
verdict. “I found in them,” he said, “a
reality touched with romance that seemed
the perfection of storytelling.”
In speaking of the Eddas, Edith Hamil-
ton invokes the mighty name of Homer.
The writers of the sagas were cut from the
same block as that blind old man, who
begged his bread through seven cities, all
of whom claimed him when he was dead.
“The thing that endures,” says Homer,
“that gives value to life, is comradeship,
loyalty, bravery, magnanimity, love, the
relations of men in direct communication
with each other, personally, as persons.”
Above and beyond, the brutal realism, the
savage violence, the gory accounts of the
hacking off of heads, and the slitting open
of stomachs, recounted in the sagas, they
do affirm that these are the values that
count. Homer’s words run in step with the
thoughts of the writers of the sagas, lesser
men than he, but still giants.
The age of the sagas spanned one hun-
dred years — from 930 to 1030. They were
passed orally from generation to generation
until they were committed to writing be-
tween about 1200 and the early days of the
fourteenth century. Some thirty of what are
known as the family sagas have been
exempted from the wrongs of time and
chance. The authors are unknown, with
one possible exception.
What purpose did these authors have in
mind? In the first and last resort, they were
writing literature, not history. As Hermann
Palsson says, “(they) were more concerned
with moral and aesthetic truths than with
historical facts.”
De Quincey divides literature into the
literature of knowledge and the literature of
power. The function of the literature of
knowledge is to teach — instruction. The
function of the literature of power is to
move — entertainment. The saga writers
were aiming at these two functions — in-
struction and entertainment, giving enter-
tainment the edge over instruction. Pro-
fessor Gwyn Jones, in his happy way with
words, says this of them: “The sagamen
were in general of serious purpose and
well-stored mind; they were organizers of
material, both oral and written; and to think
of them as mere transcribes by ear does
them scant justice.”
In September, 1936, when he was Gov-
ernor-General of Canada, Lord Tweeds-
muir visited Gimli. In an address to an
audience of Icelandic-Canadians, he said:
“For myself I put the Icelandic Sagas
among the chief works of the human
genius.”
Lord Tweedsmuir had an energetic mind,
cast in the Scottish mould. His active con-
science would not allow him to give praise,
when he did not think that praise was due.
His words can be taken at their face value.
As a young man, he studied Icelandic so
that he could read the Sagas in the original.
Let us think about his words for a moment.
He places the Sagas in the company of the
poetry of Homer, Shakespeare and Goethe,
the art of Leonardo, Michaelangelo and
Rembrandt, the music of Mozart, Beethoven
and Verdi. In all truth, that’s reaching for