Vatnsdæla saga (The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal) is one of the regional feud sagas: it tells the story of a community in a specific place, running over several generations. The central character is the paterfamilias Ingimundur, but he doesn’t cut a particularly heroic or striking figure. On the contrary, he’s a peace-loving, practical and pragmatic man who tries to avoid and defuse conflicts as far as possible. The saga is thus the story of a mainly successful, happy community, with no major feuds or killings mucking things up.
Just over the hills in Laxardal, the inhabitants have a much worse time of it, with killings and jealousy and all the rest of it – no wonder Laxdæla saga is a much more famous and artistically interesting text. The problem with Vatnsdæla saga, of course, is that peaceful, sensible people don’t make for great stories, and Vatnsdæla saga has usually been considered inferior to Laxdæla saga and the great warrior/poet/outlaw sagas. But I don’t know – I enjoyed reading it a lot, almost in spite of the dramatic flaccidity. It has a certain pastoral charm. A bit like a novel by Turgenev, which though you know it’s not as good as Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky in almost every way, does something which those more muscular writers can’t.
There’s a useful discussion here which makes honour the central idea of the saga, and argues that the saga has a distinctive feel. I’d go along with that, although I think that feel has less to do with the saga’s attitude towards its material than with its (lack of) dramatic drive.
There’s no full text at the Icelandic Saga Database, but Vatnsdæla saga is one of the sagas included in the Penguin selected Sagas of Icelanders, which is the best current introduction to the sagas for English-speaking readers.
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