The Icelandic Canadian - 01.04.2006, Side 29

Vol. 60 #1
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
27
Vengence and Violence: Honour, Love
and Revenge in Saga Iceland
by Brynn Enright
Violence in saga Iceland and violence
in our contemporary culture are at first
glance treated very differently, both in the
way each society understands or responds
to it, and in the ways in which it is depict-
ed.
For the most part, that is a fair state-
ment to make. After all, one could quite
rightly point out the general lack of neigh-
bours chopping each other up over an inci-
dent of name-calling. But there are some
similarities which our modern society
might tend to overlook. By studying the
Icelandic family sagas, I intend to explore
violence in saga Iceland in a way that may
uncover some of the reasons for this vio-
lence, and also question just how violent a
society they may have been. In doing so,
we may discover that much of the modern
world has the same desire to protect hon-
our or reek revenge on that irksome neigh-
bour that the early Icelandic settlers appar-
ently did, albeit in a less active way.
We must first decide whether or not
the sagas themselves can be used as a reli-
able source for describing the saga time, or
soguold.1 Helping with the impression that
sagas did represent actual events, is the way
in which they are written; "The narrative is
presented simply as a report of events,
without any comment, interpretation or
other intervention from the narrator."2
Furthermore, the sagas tend to be full
of elaborate genealogies, which does noth-
ing to guarantee that they are historically
accurate, but certainly helps the reader to
make that assumption. At the very least, we
can use these genealogies to date the saga
beginnings, "anchoring the events of the
saga in real historical time"3 and we can
verify some events as having actually hap-
pened -- the birth or death of a historically
real person, for example, as recorded in the
Icelandic text Landnamabok. "But we can
only rarely check the sagas against any
other source."4 Perhaps the conclusion that
we may come to in regard to the historical
accuracy of the sagas, then, is that we may
consider them to be the closest thing to a
record of the soguold we have, and thus
suitable for this discussion.
There is one more hurdle to get over
with respect to the sagas. As a reader, it is
difficult to separate the multiple layers of
time presented in the sagas. We must first
remember that the soguold was not written
about until much later. There is a span of
several hundred years between the time in
which the events may have occurred,
(around the 9th century) and the time in
which they were finally written down
(thought to be the 12th century and later).
Additionally, looking at them today we
find another degree of separation between
when they were written and the current
time of the contemporary reader. Having
such a separation between us and the events
of the sagas immediately makes it harder to
appreciate the Icelandic society and culture
of the time, and also results in the
inevitable comparisons to our own. Since I
intend to compare one aspect of both cul-
tures later on, this is not a problem unless
we give in to the temptation to judge either
culture while making these comparisons.
Having established the above, we can
now begin to explore the topic at hand. The
sagas seem to depict a society that is much
more casual about violence than we as a
reader may be accustomed to or even com-
fortable with; "Readers are amused, or
repelled, by the laconic way in which
rather gruesome events and grievous loses
are experienced or described."5 It is not dif-
ficult to locate an example of this in many
of the family sagas; a quick read of Gisli's
saga will recount for us oozing entrails
which hardly seem to bother the owner,6 or
nearly humorous descriptions of chopped
limbs as in Njal's Saga.7 Whether we finally