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Viking Age Iceland Paperback – September 1, 2001
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- Print length447 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateSeptember 1, 2001
- Grade level12 and up
- Reading age18 years and up
- Dimensions7.58 x 5.4 x 0.85 inches
- ISBN-100140291156
- ISBN-13978-0140291155
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Review
"A vital and original reinterpretation both of the sagas and of the society which created them. Byock's book is an essential guide at once to living conditions and to mentalities."The London Review of Books
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Each society’s social drama could be expected to have its own ‘style’, too, its aesthetic of conflict and redress, and one might also expect that the principal actors would give verbal or behavioural expression to the values composing or embellishing that style.
Victor E. Turner, An Anthropological Approach to the Icelandic Saga
The Sagas differ from all other ‘heroic’ literatures in the larger proportion that they give to the meanness of reality.
W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages
The family sagas, dealing with the tenth and early eleventh centuries, and Sturlunga sagas, covering the years from approximately 1120 and 1246, are the most important, as well as the most extensive, source for a study of social and economic forces in medieval Iceland. These two related groups of vernacular prose narratives are rich mines of information about the normative codes of Iceland’s medieval community.
The Family Sagas
The family sagas are called in modern Icelandic Islendingasogur, ‘the sagas of the Icelanders’. They have no close parallels in other medieval European narratives, which are mostly in verse and are often of a more epic character than the sagas. Some family sagas tell us about the settlement of Iceland, but most of them concentrate on the period from the mid tenth to the early eleventh century. In a crisp and usually straightforward manner they describe the dealing between farmers and chieftains from all parts of the country and among families from diverse elements of the society. They explore the potential for an individual’s success or failure in the insular world of the Old Icelandic Free State.
Whereas the Sturlunga sagas are mostly about individuals engaging in the power struggles of an emerging overclass and give almost no information about the personal lives of ordinary farmers and local leaders, the family sagas tend to concentrate on precisely these concerns. With regularity the stories focus on private matters and offer insights into personal problems of families and the health, good of ill, of marriages. The family sagas often exaggerate situations of crisis. They deal less with extended kin groups, as the name ‘family sagas’ might imply, than with regional disputes in Iceland. Similar actions involving different characters are repeated in different locales. With constantly changing detail, the literature present potential issues and the responses that individuals in the society needed to make to them if they were to succeed. Among the matters stressed were methods of reacting to overly ambitious or otherwise dangerous characters, precedents for various legal positions and modes of action, successful interventions by advocates, different means of settlement, and the principles underlying the establishment and maintenance of ties of reciprocity.
In the oral saga, as elsewhere in oral tales, one may assume that adherence to strict fact was never an issue. Nor was the saga-teller required to memorize a fixed text; a general outline of a story that was perhaps of historical origin was sufficient. The medieval audience expected the narrator of a family saga to observe certain strictures. Most importantly, the saga had to be credible, that is, the story had to be portrayed as possible, plausible, and therefore useful within the context of Iceland’s particular rules of social order and feud. The sagas served as a literature of social instruction.
In an earlier book, Feud in the Icelandic Saga, I suggest that feud served as a cohesive and stabilizing force in Old Icelandic society. Because the rules of feuding, as they developed in Iceland, regulated conflict and limited breakdowns of order, violence was kept within acceptable bounds throughout most of the history of the Free State. The ways in which feud operated provided a structure for the sagas. In examining the question of the oral saga, I found probable the existence of a pre-literate stage of well-developed saga-telling employing a compositional technique that became the foundation for the written saga. This simple, easily adaptable technique was based on the use of active narrative particles that occur in no particular order and fall into three categories: conflict, advocacy, or brokerage and resolution. Guided by the parameters of socially recognized conduct, the storyteller or storywriter arranges these action particles in various orders and with different details. By using the particles he (or she) translates social forms into narrative forms. In anthropological terms the particles reflect the phases of Icelandic feud. These discrete units of action, the hallmark of the saga style, were a convenient means for an oral or a literature teller to advance the narration of a complex tale.
Working within a tradition of known characters, events and geography, the saga-teller chose his own emphasis. He (or she) was free to decide what details and known events to include and what new actions to introduce. These choices not only made for variety in the small clusters of actions that linked together to form chains of saga events, but also served to distinguish one saga from another. Although the medieval audience probably knew in advance the outcome of a particular dispute, the essence of a tale could be put forward differently each time. This economical and effective technique of forming narrative prose applied to both oral and written saga composition. Freedom from reliance on a fixed, memorized text allowed individual authors to incorporate new elements, such as Christian themes and changing ethical judgements.
Thirty or more major family sagas are extant. These texts vary markedly in length: some, like Hrafnkels saga, are approximately twenty pages in modern volumes; others, such as Njals saga and Laxdoela saga, fill 300 or more pages. The family sagas are preserved in a wide variety of manuscripts, none of which is an original text definitely attributed to a specific author, despite the educated guesses of scholars. The oldest surviving examples of saga writing are fragments; the earliest are usually dated to the mid thirteenth century, although it is possible that some fragments pre-date 1200. Among the presumed oldest fragments are sections from Eyrbyggja saga, Heidarviga saga, Laxdoela saga, and Egils saga. These, like later copies of entire sagas, give no information as to when the earliest versions of the texts were compose; thus dating the sagas has always been a difficult task and scholarly conclusions are open to question. Decision on the age of the family sagas have been influenced by different theories of saga origins, a point underscored by Hallvard Mageroy: ‘A chief argument for placing the production of the family sagas in the thirteenth century us that only by this means can saga literature be seen as a natural branch of European literature in the High Middle Ages.’
Copies of complete family sagas are preserved in vellum books dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For example, the fourteenth century compilation of Modruvallabok is the chief source for many of the eleven sagas it contains. Many other sagas are preserved in paper manuscripts from the sixteenth century and later. In the medieval period there were many more family sagas than have survived. Landnamabok, for example, names several that are now lost. Except for Droplaugarsona saga, which notes at the end that a certain Thorvald, descended from one of the main characters, ‘told this saga’, all the family sagas are anonymous.
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Books (September 1, 2001)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 447 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0140291156
- ISBN-13 : 978-0140291155
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Grade level : 12 and up
- Item Weight : 11.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.58 x 5.4 x 0.85 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #447,596 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #195 in Scandinavian History
- #731 in Archaeology (Books)
- #2,276 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Jesse Byock is Prof. of Old Norse and Medieval Scandinavian Studies at the University of California(UCLA) and Prof. at UCLA's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. He directs the Mosfell Archaeological Project in Iceland.
He is author of: Viking Age Iceland (Penguin); Medieval Iceland (UC Press); and Feud in the Icelandic Saga (UC Press). His translations from Old Norse include The Prose Edda: Norse Mythology (Penguin), The Saga of the Volsungs: The Norse epic of Sigurd (Penguin), The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki (Penguin), and Grettir´s Saga (Oxford). Download a -FREE ANSWER KEY- to Viking Language 1 learn Old Norse, Runes, and Icelandic Sagas at www.vikinglanguage.com
The Viking Language Series is a new method for learning Old Norse, runes, and Icelandic sagas. It concentrates on the most frequent words in the sagas, and beginners to advanced learn quickly. For two MP3 download audio albums with clear pronunciation of sagas and runes, search on Amazon Jesse Byock under All Departments or MP3 Music: Viking Language 1 Audio Lessons 1-8 (Pronounce Old Norse, Runes and Icelandic Sagas)-- and -- Viking Language 1 Audio Lessons 9-15.
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Nevertheless there was was a society and that society was highly litigious--an alternative to lethal 'solutions'. This was also necessary because Scandinavians of the time were inclined to violence at the drop of a hat. Rules to direct these aggressive impulses into survivable channels were simply mandatory. It was also necessary because available land filled up quickly so there came to be an eternal jocking for land and postion in limited territories.
Although legalistic to a fault, Icelandic law had little--and much--in common with present law. Might pretty much made Right and there was a continual scamble for allies--interested allies, to be certain--to 'back' your position at the local Thing or Althing. You won if you could back your opponent and his supporters down, although this sometimes involved bloodshed and killing. Still, this 'decision' didn't always stick. If you reckoned that you had more to gain by a killing than peaceful acquiesence...well...you killed and hoped you judged the consequences properly. If not, you stood to be 'Outlawed' which meant ANYONE could kill you on sight. Police and military weren't necessary. Most individuals were evidently happy to participate in a free kill.
Although not included in this book, there is an instructive tale in one of the Vinland Sagas--Sagas primarily about Icelanders. Our Scandinavians are sailing down the coast or a river in North America and chance on some 'skraelings' sleeping under an overturned canoe supported by timbers. Our Europeans quietly land on the bank and kill the native-americans because they were obviously 'Outlaws' A free kill. A kill to be taken advantage of.
As rough as Icelandic Law was by our standards, it worked. If you think about it, present legal systems are very much designed to shortcut the more direct satisfaction of a killing duel. Amazingly, when religious push-came-to-shove in 1000 A.D.--and despite the fact that most Icelanders were Pagan--they abided by a decision that ALL would convert to Christianity, in the interest of order. To be certain, many people must have 'converted' entirely tongue-in-cheek but they converted nonetheless and Iceland became a more-or-less Christian nation. I say 'more-or-less' because Pagan prists became Catholic Priests and our primary knowledge of ancient Scandinavian religion was written down--quite proudly--by Icelandic Catholic priests about 200 years following this mass conversion.
I also enjoyed discussions about the legal status of women and children. They were IMMUNE from killing violence and protected from family violence. Although women couldn't personally prosecute legal cases [probably to protect them], their status was similar to their fathers, brothers and husbands. There was something like sexual equality which was not unlike that followed over much of the northern world, although obviously not in the rest of the world. Our present laws fixing female equality must therefore derive from northern law and tradition.
This book covers a wide range of topics, from the effects of human settlement on Iceland ecologically to the legal mechanisms that allowed blood feuds to play a stabilizing role on society. Along the way, he covers questions of how Icelandic society was stratified, the role of the chieftains/godhar, and the economics of the island. In an appendix he discusses the construction of turf buildings.
In terms of questions of the uses of the Sagas as sources for history, Byock discusses the problems of doing so and the changing debate among historians, covering a large number of viewpoints here. This section in particular is very helpful for those who may be trying to make up their minds as to whether the family sagas can be useful in the study of history.
The book is very detailed in what it covers and provides a compelling picture of early Iceland. Highly recommended.
Of course, this book will not explain Iceland's rise to financial success and despair in the early 21st century, but that is a tale for another time.
(review by Kendall Giles)
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