CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE ( 2 )

THE SAGAS OF ICELANDERS

Guðrún Nordal

T

he sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur) are often mentioned in the same breath as the
Vikings. It is true that the sagas dramatise events and vividly portray the lives of
people that hypothetically lived in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries in the Viking
diaspora, and by noting the Norwegian king who is in power at the time of events the
saga’s narration seems to be anchored in time. The listing of genealogies of many of the
saga characters, some stretching back to their Scandinavian, Irish or British ancestors,
and the evocation of well-known locations in the northern region, Iceland, Scandinavia
and the British Isles, renders a further air of historical truthfulness to the narrative. But
can we evaluate the factual evidence of the sagas of Icelanders as regards their depiction
of the settlement period, the migration from Norway and the British Isles to Iceland,
and their representation of the period in which the pagan religion was practised? The
sagas of Icelanders have caught the imagination of the modern reader not least their
portrayals of the pagan period, but these portrayals are borne out of, and modified by,
a culture which is certainly closely rooted in the scholastic and Christian learned
traditions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Europe. The complex relation-
ship between the orally transmitted memories of the past and the literary culture of the
Christian Middle Ages draws attention to the challenge of using the sagas as reliable
sources for the Viking period.
The generic characteristics of the sagas of Icelanders (in contrast to other saga genres,
e.g. fornaldarsögur and the kings’ sagas) are determined by three features in particular:
the time of events, the scene and place of events, and the time of writing. However,
these three criteria are by no means consistent in all forty sagas. The sagas’ sense of time
of events is not the same from one saga to the next, even though they seem to inhabit the
same timeframe, c. 870 – 1070. Some sagas begin in the ninth century and do not cross
over the significant line of the conversion to Christianity c. 1000 , while other sagas focus
on events in the Christian period of the eleventh century. The time of writing is equally
widely spread: spanning the period from the early thirteenth century to the beginning
or the middle of the fifteenth century. The earliest manuscripts of some of the sagas are
even dated to the seventeenth century, even though it is clear that they are copies of
older, now lost, manuscripts. It is therefore important to distinguish on the one hand
between sagas portraying the earlier pagan period in contrast with the later period, and