In Our Time - Icelandic Sagas

Episode Date: May 9, 2013

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Icelandic Sagas. First written down in the 13th century, the sagas tell the stories of the Norse settlers of Iceland, who began to arrive on the island in the late 9th century. They contain some of the richest and most extraordinary writing of the Middle Ages, and often depict events known to have happened in the early years of Icelandic history, although there is much debate as to how much of their content is factual and how much imaginative. Full of heroes, feuds and outlaws, with a smattering of ghosts and trolls, the sagas inspired later writers including Sir Walter Scott, William Morris and WH Auden.With:Carolyne Larrington Fellow and Tutor in Medieval English Literature at St John's College, OxfordElizabeth Ashman Rowe University Lecturer in Scandinavian History at the University of CambridgeEmily Lethbridge Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Árni Magnússon Manuscripts Institute in ReykjavíkProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the late Middle Ages was a period when literature flourished across Europe as never before. Italy produced the masterpieces of Dante and Petrarch. English literature began in style with the works of Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer, and the medieval poets of Wales and France laid the foundations of great national literary traditions. But some of the richest and most original writing of the early Middle Ages was produced on a remote island in the North Atlantic, that even today has a population slightly smaller than that of Leicester.

Iceland was first settled in the 9th century by Vikings, and the deeds of these first Icelanders and their families are recorded in the Icelandic sagas. Around 40 of these sagas written down between the 13th and 14th centuries are known to exist. Their dramatic tales, which mix the domestic, the historical and the supernatural, as they chart the fuse and love affairs of early Icelandic. life. With me to discuss the Atlantic sagas are Caroline Larrington, fellow and tutor in medieval English literature at St John's College, Oxford, Elizabeth Ashman Row, University of Lecture in Scandinavian History at the University of Cambridge, and Emily Lethbridge,

post-doctoral researcher at the Arne Maglinson Manuscripts Institute in Reykjavik. Caroline Larrington, I'm mentioning Icelandic that Iceland was founded by North Settlers in the 9th century. Why did they go there? Well, according to their own origin myth, own histories. The Norwegians migrated from Norway because King Harold Fairhair was centralising power there. He was uniting the Norwegian kingdoms and various members of the aristocracy took against this. And Iceland, having just been discovered, they decided to try their luck in a completely new country. But there was also quite an admixture of Scandinavians from the British Isles also moved to Iceland, bringing with them a Celtic injection into the Icelandic

population as well. So quite a lot of the women in particular seem to have come from the Celtic islands of Britain. And they found there a central mass which was barren, except for geysers, fuming geysers. And around the ages though, land that was very sympathetic to the way they lived their lives. Yes, well you can imagine that the western Norway, where in particular they came from was a steep field landscape and there was lots of lush farmland. We're told that there was also forest in Iceland when the Norwegians first arrived there. But if there was, it seems to have been cut down very quickly. But there was certainly, particularly in the south and in the west,

some very good land for farming. Of course, the climate was slightly better in those days. And you say the aristocrats went, how many, what have we? Are we any idea in the 9th century of the numbers? I think it's very difficult to establish that and figures very enormously. But it was sort of households would pack up and sail off in the, their boats. Some members of the household resisting, it has to be said. So you're suggesting almost a political act at the beginning, getting away from a man who's

centralising their country, getting out of his power, but also finding new land? Yes, and what they set up in Iceland, of course, was a rather different kind of polity from what they had at home in Norway. They brought their own laws with them, but of course they didn't have a king and they were, I think, quite anxious to keep it that way. So they instituted the system of, in the end, 36 chiefsancies, and they had local assemblies for sorting out local legal matters. And then once a year everybody would meet at the Althingir, the big general assembly, where serious lawsuits were discussed.

The earliest saga seemed to have been written down, first written down in the 13th century, around about three or four hundred years after the Vikings arrived. Had it changed much in those 400 years, population growing, Had there been any dramatic changes? Well, of course, the most striking change in that time is the arrival of Christianity, either in the year 999 or the year a thousand. And that, at least according to the Icelandic historians,

resulted in a more or less overnight conversion to Christianity, that everybody at the Al Thinghi decided on a vote more or less, that it would be better for the country to have a single religion, and that would be Christianity. It also got the King of Norway off their own. back to some extent because he was very keen on converting them. And of course with Christianity came writing, came Latin literature, came access to the European culture. And that made possible eventually the writing of sagas, though some other text, history, saints' lives and

so on were being written before then. Elizabeth Thro, there are various different types of sagas. So in these early stages, can you explain what different sorts of sagas there are? Yes, certainly. The modern classifications of sagas is based on their subject matter. So there are groups of sagas about Scandinavian kings, about Icelandic bishops, about saints of all kinds. Also, there are a group of sagas about heroes of chivalry, such as King Arthur and Charlemagne. There's another group of sagas about the heroes of Germanic legend, such as Sigurd the Dragon Slayer, and also heroes from the early Viking Age, such as Ragnar, Shaggy Breaks. And then there are sagas about the other North Atlantic settlements, such as the Orkney Islands, the Faroes, Greenland, and even North America.

And then centrally important are the sagas about Iceland itself. So these are about events that take place in the period between the settlement in the 9th century going up into going up to the loss of independence in the 13th century. So of the sagas taking place in Iceland, of course, critical are the one. that takes place in the 9th, 10th, 11th centuries about the Icelanders' own ancestors. These are often called the family sagas because they're multi-generational, the original epic sweeping dramas of emotion and violence. And then within those sagas of Icelanders, there are some subgroups. There are a number of sagas whose protagonists are poets,

and there are another group of sagas whose protagonists are outlaws. So you mentioned the uninhabitable interior and so there are dramatic sagas about men who are outlawed. They don't leave Iceland. They're not exiled, but they try to survive in these uninhabitable areas or on the fringes of society. Are the family sagas, are the family sagas the most numerous? Well, I think that's about right.

There are at least 40 of them. But, well, the sagas of the Germanic heroes and the Viking Age heroes, there are actually quite a large number of those as well. But certainly the family sagas must be among the most numerous of these groups. When we're talking about family sagas, are we reverting to what Caroline was saying about the being from the aristocracy. We read it in the 13th century there was something like 30 or 40 chieftains.

Are those families still leading the way even in the sagas as well as in the polity of the country? For the most part, yes. Saga writing changed over time. So the saga's written at the beginning of the 13th century can be quite different from the sagas written at the end. And so certainly the interests of those leading families feature prominently in a number of sagas, such as the saga of Ail, son of Skotlgrimur. And that's a saga which is supposed to have been written by one of the leading chieftains of Iceland. But then there are also sagas that are more satirical that poke fun at the chieftains, for example. And one thing that certainly happens over that historical period is that power is concentrated in Iceland. And so of the original 36 or 39 chieftains, once you get to the first part of the 13th century, power is concentrated into the hands of just really half a dozen families. So it's whittled down to a very strong hierarchy. We're going to talk here

We're talking here about an oral tradition Before they were written down We have three or four hundred years Three and fifty years Something like that Of these sagas passing through history orally Can you talk about that

Because that's On these very graphs I find That's generally thought of As a much lower Level of evidence But I'm not so sure sometimes Well it depends on how you look at it It's probably not the case

That the long sagas As we have them written down in the manuscripts, that they were not transmitted word for word over these centuries. But very often the sagas do have a historical core of events about actual people. And of course, the more dramatically events were, the more likely they were to be remembered or if there are events in somebody's family, those stories get passed down. In addition to the narrative in the family saga's genealogies are often included. And so these are another way that the Icelanders remembered their their history, their own ancestry in the oral period. Another aspect of sagas that goes back to

the oral transmission are the verses that are found in sagas because a number of the family sagas include verses that are composed on this spot. And so these are important in the narrative to possibly reveal the emotions, for example, of the characters. But the way in which the verses are composed is a very complex, tightly woven piece of poetry, which makes it very likely that they were preserved pretty much as they were composed. Are there any reflections on the early written versions of what happened before the written versions? Do any of the writers say, we owe a debt too, or this comes from the family of, that sort of thing? No, they don't say it in those terms. Icelandic histories that are not

in the form of sagas, histories such as the book of the Icelanders written by Arieth Erie Thurkelson in the beginning of the 12th century, he actually talks about his sources, and he says, I heard this from my foster father who remembered being baptized at the age of three, something like that.

Or in the King's sagas, the author of Hameskringla, Snorri Sturthlason, talks about his sources as the report of men who we consider wise and truthful, and they believe these things to be true. And he also talks about the use of court poetry

as an important source. He says that we have, have to essentially believe what this poetry says because it's recited before the people who took part in these events and they would know if it wasn't true or not. And so any deviation from the truth would be mockery and not praise. Emily Nethbridge, the sagas are preserved in medieval manuscripts. Caroleon's pointed out, Christianity came to Iceland in about the year a thousand, is that right? Can you tell us how they were preserved in the medieval manuscripts and by whom? Sure. Well, we have about 400 or so manuscripts from the medieval period by which the 13th century through to about 1550. Of these 400 or so manuscripts that contain saga texts, about 60 contain the texts of these sagas of Icelanders or family sagas. But these 60 odd manuscripts aren't most of them whole. A lot of them are just fragmentary, so a few leaves here.

here and there. So in the 11th century, the technologies of book production and writing came to Iceland were introduced by clerics and the writing of literature began to be, began to come into effect then. But in fact, there's a gap between the time when we know that people must first have been writing these texts down and the evidence that we have today. So the earliest fragment of a saga manuscript dates to about 1250 and that's just a single leaf. And were they produced in monasteries, were there a few monasteries there?

I'd just like some idea of the physical context. Yeah. Well, they would for the most part have been produced by professionally trained scribes who would have been cleric. and centres of book production would for the most part have been monasteries or religious houses, perhaps priests attached to churches that were set up by the wealthiest chieftains. So a handful of key centres of production where we know a number of manuscripts, where we know there were a number of scribes producing manuscripts.

but for the great part we don't know where most of these manuscripts we have were written. It's very difficult to date them precisely, and we don't know for the most part who actually wrote them. But we know there were, you call it book production. What do you mean, in this case, by book production? What was the book like? The book was made from parchment, mostly, well, we think calf skin or vellum, and producing a book, or a book, or a book,

a codex, a manuscript was an enormously time-consuming and costly enterprise. The parchment obviously comes from calf skin, so firstly we have the whole process of preparing the parchment

before it's possible to write on it. And then scribes producing ink from natural ingredients and spending many, many hours painstakingly copying out these texts.

We've talked, Elizabeth Roe was telling us that there are quite a number, perhaps an effectively bigger number than any other, massage about domestic events, as it were, domestic subjects. Can you give, let's just this, from some examples, one or two ideas of what these subjects are?

Well, if we look at the manuscripts that survive, so there are some 35, 40, or so of these family sagas. And a number of manuscripts contain two or more sagas. The golden age of manuscript production really was the 14th century. From then, a manuscript called Mother of Atlebulk

is one of the most famous manuscripts. And this is a manuscript. It's a large, heavy volume, and it contains 11 sagas of Icelanders. The organisation of these texts So it's quite interesting because seven of these sagas are organized geographically. So the sagas, well, one thing that hasn't been mentioned is that most of these sagas are very local in character. And they kind of focus on a specific local area.

And the sagas in this mother-a-attel-book manuscript have chart around the country east to west. and the material is organised that way. Caroline Larrington, just pursuing this, could you give us just a rough idea of what the stories are about? Well, in some ways, I think it's not too much of a generalisation to say that lawsuits are critical to sagas, and perhaps that's the context in which the earliest oral forms might have survived in accounts of what happened in a particular case.

So what would be typical, I guess, would be a feud starting between two groups of people, usually perhaps quite minor people, but then it escalates into a power battle between two families. And then there's a kind of crisis, somebody very important gets killed, the case comes to the Alfingi. And one of the problems, I suppose, about the Icelandic setup is that you have a very complex law system, but you don't have any executive. power to put legal findings into force. So whether somebody has made an outlaw or whether somebody is fined really depends on whether somebody's got the muscle to go around and enforce it. And so a feud very often escalate until the point comes where the killing has to stop and there's some kind of settlement, perhaps somebody from one side marries somebody else, and then everything calms down again. So that, I think, is a kind of broad outline of quite a number of

sagas, but at the same time you have all sorts of extraordinary bits of domestic detail in the middle of them, like one feud which kicks off at some level really because one woman is a bad housekeeper and she sends her slave to steal cheese from somebody else's pantry. And when her husband finds out he slaps her and a very long way down the line, he pays for that with his life. Were they influenced the sagas by other literatures? I said they were early Middle Ages and rather later on the European countries began their surge forward in their vernacular. Were these influenced by any other literatures?

Certainly we can find traces of Latin learning in them and increasingly now that quite a lot of studies being to focus on the translations of Arthurian romances in Norway these got from Norway across to Iceland, and they're preserved, many of them, in Icelandic manuscripts, the idea perhaps that emotion and interiority, and really talking about love in the kind of express way,

may have come from the romances into some of the sagas. Generally, the sagas don't talk about love in the kind of terms that you recognise, but in one saga, Laxeyla saga, which is very interested in love, both love of two foster brothers for one another, and the kind of complicated love between one particular woman and the men that she marries.

The word love begins to be mentioned quite a lot. So there's certainly, I think, a sense in laxiler saga that something has changed in saga writing at that point. Elizabeth Thro, what about the influence of the Bible? Christianity came in, therefore, I presume the Bible came in, and they heard it, even if they couldn't read it. What do we find that? That was about a year 1,000.

We've got 300 years on there, writing it down. Can we note any influence? from the Bible in the sagas? Yes, I would say we definitely can. One aspect of medieval Christianity that was very important to the Icelanders was the fact that what is called salvation history, the span of time from God's creation to June's Day, was regarded as being divided into two halves,

and the turning point is, of course, the incarnation of Christ. And so the early half is the time of the Old Testament, and the time after Christ is essentially. essentially the Christian age, the time of the New Testament. And events in the Old Testament period were thought to foreshadow and look forward towards their Christian perfection. And so in Scandinavia, in a place with a long pagan history, the arrival of Christianity, the conversion was often seen as a historical dividing line that turned Scandinavian history into a kind of Old Testament period and then a Christian era. and so because Scandinavian writers, Icelanders didn't like the idea of their ancestors burning in hell because they didn't have the opportunity to become good Christians.

Icelandic saga authors sometimes portrayed their ancestors as virtuous pagans or divided their sagas into two halves with the conversion of Iceland coming in the middle. Nial Saga, for example, which is one of the great feud sagas, is divided in this way. but it's also possible to see specific allusions to events in the Bible as well. Can you give us an example? Yeah, certainly. There's a smaller feud saga, the saga of a man called Ravenkell. And so the feud begins with a scene that's very much like what happens in the, what happens in paradise,

when God says to Adam and Eve of this tree, thou shalt not eat the fruit of. And so there's an Icelandic chieftain, a pagan who has devoted. his livestock, in particular, his favorite wonderful stallion to the fertility godfair. And he made a vow that nobody should ride this horse. And if they do, they have to be killed. And so at one point, he hires a shepherd to guard his sheep. And he says, you can ride any of my horses except this one. If you ride this one horse, you will die. And so, of course, events transpire that the sheep stray off the shepherd has to find a horse. The only horse that will stand still for him is this one stallion. He rides it. And of course, the chieftain kills him.

So it's very interesting that the saga author portrays or depicts or puts this Icelandic chieftain in the position of God in Genesis. Emily Nathbridge, you mentioned it earlier, but maybe you could tell us a little bit more about how the sagas are influenced by the geography of Iceland and the regional nature of them. Yeah, absolutely. I think the landscape, when we think about the landscape and the sagas,

actually there are two dimensions to this. Firstly, the preservation or the transmission of the sagas, these stories, anecdotes about notable characters or events, and the way that the landscape, the Icelandic landscape, held these stories. Are we still able to trace back, were they still in the 13th session, maybe? Are we still able to transpect families to those families that were there at the time? They were talking about their own immediate ancestors. They were, and in fact, every Icelander today really can trace their ancestry back to the very first settlers in the 9th century.

So genealogy has always been extremely important to Icelanders. Genealogy combined, I would say, with a very strong sense of local belonging and identity. So on the one hand, you have the texts of the sagas that are preserved in the manuscripts. And on the other hand, I think very much you can see how these stories did live in the landscape,

the landscape, the hills, cliffs, rivers, natural features of the landscape being sort of mnemonics for characters and events, and particularly place names, which commemorate characters whose stories are told in more detail in these sagas. And Caroline Lange, one of the best known is a saga you've already mentioned, lexdolage, is that how you pronounce it? Lexdala, South.

That's right. Can you just give us a bit more detail? We haven't yet had a, I've got told, well, we had. We have with the Old Testament. Give us a bit more detail, though. Then we got some idea of what's going on. I suppose the central story in Laxile,

although there's quite a long prelude, which explains the genealogies of the characters, and in a sense how the hero, Qatan, is brought up as the favourite and sort of blessed son of the household. And the story centres really about a kind of betrayal, Kiatan has a foster brother called Botley And before he goes off on a kind of right of passage trip to Norway

Kiatan has become involved with a very spirited young woman called Guthrun Guthran wants to go to Norway with the foster brothers But it's out of the question for an unmarried woman to travel alone So she's left behind And when Kiatan and Botley get to Norway Kiatan very soon makes friends with the king And converts to Christianity And Bottley I think feels somewhat left out

Bodley decides to go back to Iceland and takes no greeting from Kiartan to Guzran Guzran is rather hurt by this and then very soon Botley shows his hand by making a bid to marry Gudran and Guzran's father gives her to him so when Kiartan comes back he's heartbroken to find that the woman that he loves

and the foster brother who he loves have betrayed him in this way and it's only a matter of time really before either Kiartan kills Botley or Botley kills Kiartan. And in the end, it's Botley who kills Kiatan, who more or less offers himself to Bottley and says, if anyone kills me, I'd rather it was you. But of course, once Kiartan is dead, things don't rest there because Qatthan's brothers will then kill Botley.

And when Bottley is killed, Guthron is pregnant. And as one of the slayers wipes her husband's blood on her apron, she laughs. and they ask each other, the killers ask each other why this is the case. And the one who wiped the blood on the apron says, I think my killer is under that apron, still in the womb. And so 18 or so years later, sure enough, bodily bottle-bottle-a-son, the baby that was in the womb,

grows up to kill the killer and the couple of the others, not in fact Kiartan's brothers. That the killing is quite selective. And this woman, Guzran, who's really at the heart of the saga, marries four times, and we hear about four different husbands, some of whom she loved and some of whom she didn't particularly. And at the end, Botley, her son, asked her whom she loved most. And she says very famously, the one I love most was the one to whom I was worst.

And that's all she said. And the assumption, of course, is it's not any of her husbands, but it was Qyartan. A lot goes on, isn't it, really? Yes, it's a lot of incidents. A lot of incidents. Can I come back to you? Did you make an intervention? I just wanted to add a lot certainly goes on

and one of the remarkable things about these sagas is that almost all of the places named in these sagas, all of these farmsteads and the locations where these dramatic, passionate, bloody events that Caroline has just been describing, we know and we can visit and see the specific sites of all of this action. The place where Kiartan is said to have been slays,

by Botley for example. There's a large stone, not far from a road that runs through this part of the country, a stone that bears the name of Kihatan's state. And this stone is mentioned in the saga. It's the stone against which Bodli, Keatan puts his back while he's defending himself against Bottly's attack.

So it's an extraordinary, I think in Iceland you have this extraordinary coming together of written texts and stories and their physical locations. Elizabeth Roe, you want to come. Yes, it's also worth mentioning that Lach-Styla Saga has a good example of this sort of religious prefiguration in it, because when Kirtan goes to Norway,

one of the first things that happens to him is that he finds himself on the shore involved in a swimming contest with a man who turns out to be quite strong and succeeds in ducking him in the water several times. And then once they end the country, contest and go back on the shore and dry off, the man comes over and offers him a cloak and says, here, you should have a gift for being such a strong swimmer. And it turns out to be King Olaf Trigvison, the first missionary king of Norway. And so that contest in the water and the ducking under is

interpreted as a kind of foreshadowing of the baptism that Kirtan will soon choose. And the gift of the cloak prefigures the baptismal robes that he will receive. So there's definitely, a religious element in that historical perspective appears as well. And if I could just come back in on the earlier part of Laxdala Saga, it does show the kind of Celtic influence because Kiatan's father is somebody called Olav Rpao and Olava's mother is an Irish slave who is picked up by the great-grandfather in his travels and brought home much to the annoyance of his legitimate wife, it must be said. And Mel Corker, the Irish slave, never speaks to anybody.

But she speaks to her son when he's born, and she teaches him Irish. And it turns out that she's in fact the kidnapped daughter of the Irish king. And her son makes a journey back to Ireland, speaking his Irish and describing his mother. And although you would think that every slave would turn out to be an Irish princess in disguise, the Irish recognised her and her old nurse agrees with the story. And so Olava comes back to Iceland, not just the son of a slave, but the son of an Irish princess and his standing appreciates accordingly. And that in some ways is why Qatan has quite such a high opinion of himself,

that he's from aristocracy on both sides, it turns out. Emily Lathbridge, couldn't you tell us briefly something about outlaws because of the outlaw sagas, but we haven't got a great deal of town. Anyway, there you are, outlaws. Well, there are three of these Outlaw Suggars, and they share structural features in common, essentially their biographies of these three Outlaw figures. These are, they're amongst the most popular of the family sagas, and possibly because the figure of that Outlaw hero seems to have a universal appeal,

if we think of Robin Hood or many other examples of medieval heroes. But these sagas basically tell the story. of these men, the events leading up to their outlawry, the years which they survive on the run in Iceland, in Greta's case, in the highlands, in the very inhospitable central wastes of Iceland. And these sagas end with these characters' deaths, and then the deaths are followed up by vengeance chapters

in which family members perpetrate further killings, in order to avenge the deaths of these heroic. Because as I understand it, once you're made an outlaw, anybody can kill you without being charged in any way. And Greta particularly holds up with his brother in a supposedly inaccessible, top of an inaccessible mountain. And either a lazy slave or a carelessness on his part of his brother, leaves the ladder down one day,

and those over after him climb it and kill him and his brother. Well, Gretter, he dies actually on this. It's an island, a sort of bastion fortress island in the north of the north of Iceland. And a combination of witchcraft, curses and sorcery and carelessness on this slaves part lead to Greta's death after a lengthy, prolonged and very bloody final battle on this island. Caroline, can you give us any idea? I think the most difficult question of all, really, because Very few of us know, Icelandic.

I put my hand up, no, not at all. But still, how do you describe the language? What would you... The language of the sagas is generally very clear and very objective. And saga style is famously one in which the narrator of the saga doesn't have a particularly distinctive voice. So he tells you what people say, he tells you what they do. But he doesn't very often tell you what they're thinking.

and you have to judge that from their actions and their speech. Sometimes he will give a sense of whether something is ethically right or wrong by saying, and people in the district thought this was a bad idea, or many men said that this man had behaved badly. But the saga author is not judgmental himself. And as Elizabeth mentioned earlier, sometimes it seems as if the very dense poetry, which punctuates many of the sagas

and which is said to be uttered in the middle of a battle, say, by somebody, give some sense of the violence or the internal turmoil or the joy of battle or the sorrow of the aftermath, which the narrator doesn't actually express in his own voice. But basically we're talking about the Norse group of languages aren't really. And it did stretch quite a way because in the, there's a very good account in the Second World War, this is a digression, excuse me,

but people, soldiers from Cumberland went to, in the North Pacific England, went to Iceland and Santerranean. exercise and found that the Cumbrian dialect, which at that time was entirely Norse, made them quite easily after a few weeks understood in Iceland. So we're talking about that grouping. It will get you a long way, I think. Icelandic is essentially a North Germanic language, whereas English is in origin a West Germanic language. But there are certainly many dialect words in the northern dialects, which are the same, and there's a kind of fundamental recognizability.

One thing to note is because of the Viking settlement in the British Isles, there are parts of England that have quite a lot of words derived from Norse, as Caroline said. But also, it's not surprising that when the Vikings settled down in England, they became farmers. And so those dialect words have to do with farming and animals and so forth. And landscape. Indeed. So those are the words that would be most likely understood by the Cambrians in Iceland, during the Second World War. While I'm with you,

can you give us some idea of how women are generally portrayed? We've had one rather vivid example in Carolina. Can you tell us how women are generally portrayed in the saga? Yes. Like the male characters, the women are portrayed in a life-like manner.

They are rarely completely good, completely bad. They all have mixed characteristics. One of the important aspects of Icelandic society, is that women really had little legal standing. They could not participate in legal affairs. They could not hold chieftaincies. Really, their main sphere of responsibility was in the farm.

And so that meant that if they were going to act in the public sphere, they had to act through their male relatives. And they would, being people of honor and reputation, as much as the men were, they would really do anything to get done what they felt had to be done. So we have women of great strength, but also women who behave badly. Emily Lerbridge, can you tell us what, if any, the role of the supernatural plays in the sagas? Well, there's a great deal of supernatural activity, actually, in the sagas.

It varies from one saga to another, but we have, well, I mentioned curses, sorcery, witchcraft, that kind of supernatural magic on the one hand. And then also a number of sagas including these outlaw sagas describe fights that the main characters have with living dead, zombies, ghosts, men that come back, refuse to lie quietly and come back from their graves. we have, well, the use of dreams and prophecy is found throughout the sagas and is used in many cases as a kind of structural anticipatory device.

And there is a sense that, you know, the paranormal or the supernatural is more of a central, if not every day, part of people's existence, part of life then in the medieval period or at least in the society portrayed by the sagas, then it is certainly today. Caroline, can I ask you if there's any way of judging the balance between fact and fiction in these domestic sagas?

Well, as Elizabeth mentioned earlier, we do have some texts which look more like histories. There's the Book of Icelanders, and in particular the Book of Settlements, which exists in different versions. And the Book of Settlements tells us about the original settler families where they settled, and has some stories of lawsuits, feuds and various other notable incidents.

So it's possible to check many of the details in the sagas against the book of settlements. And sometimes we find that somebody didn't belong to one generation but belonged to another. And we sometimes find no record of somebody, in which case we suspect that perhaps the saga author has made this person up for their own purposes. So in some ways, I think it would be correct to say the sagas are broadly here. historical novels that they must invent a great deal of dialogue, which nobody has really preserved from 200 years ago in its exact form, though there are clearly some pithy last words or famous things that people say, which I think could be passed down over 200 years. And clearly the supernatural

elements as well are perhaps not necessarily something that we would regard as true in the sense that somebody being burnt alive in their farm is true. Elizabeth Ro. We can also get another source of corroboration from the Icelandic law code of the period known as Graugas or Grey Goose. And so we can compare the laws that pertained at the time to the saga description of them. And sometimes we do find discrepancies and anomalies.

And so clearly a later writer has been substituting the law of their own time for the law of the earlier Commonwealth period. Amelahattsbridge, could we say that the sagas played a role in Icelandic society? And if so, what was it? I think the sagas were, they're central to the construction of Icelandic identity. Identity actually is that one of the key motivations that presumably drove people to write these stories down in the first place. And right up until the 19th century, for example, the sagas, Nyaal saga in particular, these sagas were used. used as sort of political propaganda, almost part of the fight for Icelandic independence

from Denmark. So the sagas, they've always had a very important role as entertainment. Over the centuries, up until the 19th, 20th century, they were read aloud in winter, evening, communal gatherings. and they really are at the heart of Icelandic identity and culture. Caroline Larrington, we forgot to say that Norway conquered, as it were Iceland, but conquered Iceland in the early ages, and Iceland seems to have kept its distance, and then Denmark, they all came together,

and it was Denmark, which was really in charge. It doesn't seem to have much, had much influence in the sense. in a sense of grinding them down or making them different. And the remarkable thing is the continuation of these sagas until when Iceland went for independence in 1944, one of the first things they did was they wanted their sagas back from Copenhagen and after about 30 years they got some,

more of them back. A huge section of the population stood on the docks waiting for the sagas to land. Yes, this is in 1971 finally that two absolutely vital manuscript collections, the poetic edda, which contains mythological and heroic poetry, and Flat Air Bulk, which is a big collection of various texts, including a lot of sagas, came back to Iceland on an Icelandic destroyer and were welcomed by vast crowds who came down to the docks to see them.

And nowadays, where Emily works in Iceland, the manuscripts which pertain to Icelandic matters are now all kept in Reykjavik, and the manuscripts which are more to do with Scandinavian or Danish matters in particular live in a sister institute in Copenhagen. But it's certainly the case that wherever you go in Iceland, people will come up and tell you about the sagas that took place in the spot where you are and retell you the stories. They're still living in the landscape.

Finally, Elizabeth, how important are the saga still more than a thousand years on to Icelandic identity? The sagas are extremely important. Not only as Caroline and Emily have been describing, are they a crucial part of the Icelandic identity and consider cultural treasures, but also in the wider Scandinavia area, the sagas are very important. I mentioned the group of sagas about the heroes of the Viking Age, for example.

And so these are all heroes who come from outside of Iceland. So there are Norwegian heroes such as Fritiaf, for example, who are still cultural treasures in the 19th century very valuable. And also the saga's construction of the larger Scandinavian world is still considered important by the Scandinavians today. Well, thank you very much. Elizabeth Roe, Caroline Larrington, and Emily Lethbridge. Next week we were talking about cosmic rays, radiation from outer space.

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