Outlaw: The Saga of Gisli

Film adaptations of sagas seem to be thin on the ground. The most interesting I’ve yet seen is Outlaw: The Saga of Gisli, an Icelandic adaptation with English subtitles of Gísla saga Súrssonar (The Saga of Gísli Súrsson). It seems fairly faithful to the text (though I haven’t carried out a detailed comparison), and it’s well worth watching.

Auden on saga narration

In his lecture ‘The World of the Sagas’ the poet W.H. Auden is at the more amateurish end of his critical range – he makes a few sweeping observations that don’t really stand up. But he gives this clear sense of the sagas’ narrative strategy (even if the idea that the sagas are historical is problematic):

The historian, or social realist, begins by asking ‘What do I know for certain about my fellow human beings?’, and his answer is: ‘What they do and say in the presence of others who can bear witness to it. I may be able to make plausible guesses about their unspoken thoughts, but guesses are not evidence, so I must exclude them.’ … Similarly, when considering the motives of human beings for their actions, the Historian will say, ‘I must confine myself to what is public knowledge. I may and should report the reason a man gives for acting in a certain way, if he gives one: but if he remains silent, I am not entitled to assign him a motive myself, however convinced I may be that I knew it. I can and should report the motives attributed to him, by his neighbours, but I must report these as their conclusions without comment.’ (p60)

Auden, W.H. The World of Sagas. Secondary Worlds. London: Faber, 1968, 47-84.

This austerity, whereby the narrator is largely limited to reporting external events and explanations that people have given, creates a distinctive irony, in which saga characters’ thoughts, feelings and motives are supposedly inscrutable, but actually are often plainly rendered by their actions. In this sense the sagas are closer to scriptwriting than the novel. It means that there can be no special pleading for character, which is almost always determined in the reader’s imagination by what they do and say, not by any emotional wheedling their subjectivity may engage in.

Perhaps this is one source of the idea that the sagas are realistic – they follow a kind of materialist philosophy, and our perception of the action is less mediated by the efforts of characters to interpret it. (Of course the narrator does mediate the action, and where the ‘action’ is said to consist in the inner turmoil and reflection of the characters, the saga form is ill-placed to depict it.) Saga realism is a complex question and one I’ll come back to.

Sagas of Icelanders

My current research interest is in the sagas of Icelanders – medieval prose narratives about the lives of farmers during the settlement age of Iceland. As medieval prose, the sagas are conspicuous in being particularly novel-like. They are often spoken of as being ‘realistic’ in style and approach, though what that means in practice is complicated. Though they are similar to novels in some ways, there are significant differences, such as the lack of interiority and the extremely terse narration, which in turn produces a sometimes disconcerting pace.

I’m interested in how the sagas have fed in to the development of the novel. Most often they have provided source material for retellings, usually by historical novelists. In other words, the subject matter of the sagas has been exploited but their structural and stylistic qualities have often been jettisoned. I’m interested in novels (not necessarily ‘saga’ novels in any obvious sense) which draw on and learn from those qualities – and in learning from them in my own writing.

The best introduction to the sagas of Icelanders in English is probably this selection with a preface by Jane Smiley, whose own novels are central to my research. There’s also a complete set of all the sagas in translation, which is superb but costs an arm and a leg.

One of the ways I hope to use this blog is to offer brief readings of individual sagas, not necessarily from a critic’s point of view but as a reader, just to record my reading experience and help me remember some of the more obscure ones afterwards…

Welcome

 

Hey up. This is my new blog for recording stuff to do with my creative writing research. It supersedes my old one which was focused on writing and dog-walking – this one is a bit more general, though at first it will mainly cover my research into Icelandic sagas and their relation to the modern novel.