meaning ‘strands in a rope’. While each individual episode or strand may have
originated in oral tradition, plaiting them together was a task that required a literate
author. For a long and well-integrated saga form was hardly possible to achieve for an
oral storyteller who had to divide his saga into several episodic instalments, as the
Icelander entertaining King Harald’s court evidently did. It is thus not very surprising
that the earliest saga texts are either short or very loosely structured, consisting
of several semi-independent episodes. At a later stage, however, writers like Snorri
Sturluson or the author of Njáls saga managed to integrate material from many different
sources into large and complicated literary structures.
The world picture of the sagas usually appears to modern readers as ‘pagan’ or at least
as distinctly different from that of Christianity. Events seem to be governed by Fate
(auðna) or Luck (gæfa, gipta, hamingja) and anticipated in prophetic dreams or visions.
The ethic of retribution prevails, prompting men to take revenge whenever their honour
has suffered a serious blow. Heathen rituals are sometimes described, sorcerers cast their
magic spells, and mythical figures such as fetches (fylgjur), trolls or giants may occasion-
ally appear. Yet the pagan gods are almost never present in the narrative, except in a
few fornaldarsögur, and the attitude to the heathen religion is decidedly critical. It is
characteristic of the noblest pagan heroes that they refuse to worship Odin, Thor and the
other æsir but instead believe in their own power or in some unknown and invisible
Creator, who will eventually turn out to be identical with the Christian God. Heroes
living in the period after the conversion of Scandinavia are pictured as good Christians,
even though their religious faith is rarely emphasised in the text. It would therefore be
mistaken to characterise the world picture of the sagas as pagan, even though it is only
rarely piously Christian either. Perhaps one can say that the sagas are told from a
Christian perspective but nevertheless reveal a great deal of genuine admiration for the
lost world of pagan ancestors.
To what extent, then, can the sagas be said to mirror this lost world? This is a
question which has been much debated by historians. Generally speaking, scholars
nowadays agree that you cannot trust the sagas as sources about major events and
developments in the Viking Age, for example the settlement of Iceland, the conversion
of Scandinavia, the battle of Svolder, or the Danish invasion of England. The testimony
presented by the sagas about such matters has often been proved wrong when compared
to archaeological evidence or earlier written documents. It is also obvious that the
sagas give a rather distorted picture of the pagan religion and a much too idealised
presentation of certain legendary heroes such as Olaf the Saint or Olaf Tryggvason,
even though the ideological bias of the narrators is usually cleverly concealed under a
protective layer of formal objectivity.
Nevertheless, the sagas are often good sources concerning mentality, ideas, social
structure, farmlife and everyday customs in Old Norse society, because that society
evidently had not changed very much in Iceland – except in the religious sphere –
between the Viking Age and the Sturlung Age. As we can see from contemporary sagas
about the Sturlung Age, people at this time still lived the same kind of lives in similar
houses and with similar customs as their legendary ancestors. They also still followed
the ethics of revenge, even though they considered themselves Christian, and they evi-
dently believed in Fate, Luck, fetches, giants, troll women, skaldic poetry and prophetic
dreams, even though they rejected Odin and Thor. Although political historians no longer
read the saga texts with the same veneration as their nineteenth-century colleagues,
–– chapter 23: The Icelandic sagas––