Evolving narratives: oral prehistory and manuscript fluidity of the sagas

It all starts with a sea. The North Sea, to be precise, across which those Norwegian chieftains unwilling to bend their knee to King Harald Finehair sailed westwards to the Viking colonies in Britain and then further northwards to Iceland where they founded a new nation. However, there, at the origin, was also an entirely different kind of sea, det muntliga havet, or ‘the open sea of orality’:Reference Danielsson³ the vast, fluid volume of narratives about a common past that were told and retold, forgotten and remembered across the lands and generations. It was in this sea of oral tradition that, scholars now agree, the stories about Icelandic settlers and their descendants first began to take their many shapes, until eventually these ‘immanent sagas’Reference Clover⁴ were given concrete forms by the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Icelandic authors and scribes. Set in writing, the sagas entered calmer waters, but even in the scribal havens of manuscript variants, they preserved fluidity through an ongoing relationship with the oral tradition. They continued to be retold and the written versions were read out aloud. In this way, the stories spilled over the brim of the manuscript pages as they were read aloud and retold, seeping through the lines and replenishing the sea of orality in novel ways. What is more, the written versions themselves were transmitted manually for centuries – the practice of manuscript writing persisted in Iceland well after the introduction of the printing press – in fact, to the end of the nineteenth century. Even though the transmission was in writing, Icelandic authors and scribes (especially the early ones) still worked under the precepts of oral poetics, which means that they were nothing like human typewriters, instead often introducing such changes into their copies as they saw fit. This could be as minute as updating spelling or as substantial as changing the narrative according to the version of the story that was more familiar to them, or perhaps more to the liking of the chieftains and clerics who were their sponsors. This manner of manual written transmission was itself fluid and in a way oral-like. In other words, between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, Icelanders appeared to have gradually traversed the scribal spectrum of attitudes, from the content-sensitive reproduction of narrative to the content-insensitive replication of letters and punctuation.Reference Ranković⁵

In this way, the sagas are unlike the texts with which we are more familiar – those with unambiguous copyright date and ownership that gave birth to the mythical figure of the solitary author-genius whose creativity appears to owe nothing in turn. The sagas, in contrast, are traditional narratives that evolved over long periods of time and were produced not merely by single individuals, but rather by the distributed authorReference Ranković⁶ – the entire creative networks of generations of storytellers (and their audiences), writers, compilers and scribes, all of whom played some role in the shaping of the narratives as they reached us. This means that traditional stories such as the sagas have a special aesthetics and thus require a special way of reading – distributed reading – that is sensitive to the fact that a newly rendered version of the story always falls within an already existing web of inherited idiomatic meanings that it draws upon and that it will further enrich. Thus, beyond the perceptiveness and advanced psychological insights on the part of their individual writers, the famous saga characters known for their depth have acquired some of their complexity and ‘realism’ through the evolutionary process itself, not only inheriting features of their various mythic and heroic ancestors, but also constantly adapting to the present needs and interests of a particular interpretative community.

Hidden in Plain Sight: the Aesthetic Economy and Power of Traditional Formulae

The basic carriers of traditional inheritance ubiquitous to communal narratives such as the sagas are traditional formulae, or recurring phrases, motifs and themes that for a long time were confused with clichés, those little literary embarrassments, aesthetically barren places better left unmentioned if the text discussed is to be appreciated. The pioneers of modern folkloristics, Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord, started to change these attitudes. Their expeditions to the 1930s’ Balkans and their encounters with illiterate South-Slavic singers who could perform long ornate epics the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey made them realise that formulae are indispensable aids to oral composition. What is more, despite the apparent repetitiveness, formulae, Lord noted, ‘must resound with overtones from the dim past whence they come. Were we to train our ears to catch these echoes, we might cease to apply the clichés of another criticism [i.e. literary] to oral poetry and thereby become aware of its own riches.’Reference Lord⁷ However, the fact that the main emphasis remained on the formulae's ultimate role as mnemonic/improvisational devices, the reusable building blocks of traditional narratives, meant that the connotation of utilitarian dullness was not entirely disposed of, nor could it help the modern audiences to ‘train their ears’ better so as to catch the rich semantic echoes that Lord suggests are there. It was his student, John Miles Foley,Reference Foley⁸ who in the last 20 years has made some important strides in this direction, by showing with varied examples drawn from Ancient Greek, and South Slavic and Old English epics how the formularity of traditional narratives enables them to produce meanings and create aesthetic effects in the most effective and economical way. By ignoring formulae, Foley maintains, we blind ourselves to an aesthetically rich play of association (‘traditional referentiality’), which formulae trigger by reaching out of their immediate narrative contexts and drawing on the semantic acumen of the entire tradition. In this way, they can convey very subtle and complex meanings to the informed audiences and this is what makes the traditional idiom ‘liberating rather than imprisoning, centrifugal, rather than centripetal, explosively connotative, rather than claustrophobically clichéd’ (Ref. 8, p. 7). The rest of this article will be a short example of distributed reading, dedicated to illustrating how traditional referentiality works in the sagas of Icelanders and what important nuances in meaning are lost if we fail to take into account this play of associations that the formulae carry.

Grettir the Strong, the Jeering boy and the Fatal Loss of Temper

As an example, I have chosen one of the pivotal scenes in the story about the most famous saga outlaw, Grettir the Strong. Grettir is a young Icelander of noble lineage, prodigiously gifted with strength, martial prowess, cunning, wisdom, and who is also a poet. Nevertheless, he is at the same time said to be unruly, unjust and suffering from bad luck, which in the Old Norse world was not something conceived of in terms of pure chance and fate, but was in a certain sense a part of someone's character, a flaw in it. For Grettir this fatal flaw is his violent temper which, being the hero that he is, he makes up for with many noble deeds, such as ridding the helpless folk (in Iceland and abroad) from rapacious Vikings, wild berserks, trolls and ghosts. Just before the scene that will be my focus here, Grettir seems to be at the height of his glory, having slain the most malevolent of ghosts, Glam, and heading to Norway in hope of entering the service of the king Olaf Haraldsson. The hero's chances of success seem high since the king is his distant relative and, having just come into power, is giving plenty of skilled young man an opportunity to earn honour and renown. On his way, however, in an attempt to fetch fire for his stranded, freezing ship-mates, Grettir accidentally causes a fire in which 12 Icelanders burn to death, two of them (Thorgeir and Skeggi) being the sons of a prominent Icelandic farmer and seafarer, Thorir of Gard. Upon arrival in Trondheim, Grettir's ungrateful ship-mates spread vicious rumours about his alleged arson and it takes the hero three days before he is even admitted before the king. Instead of being instantly accepted into the king's service as Grettir had every reason to hope, he now finds himself in the position of humbly requesting an opportunity to clear his name. After hearing his version of the story, the king is inclined to believe it and grants Grettir his chance to prove his innocence by undertaking an ordeal in the church that would involve carrying hot iron. Everything seems back on course now, but as the people are gathering in the church, ‘curious’, we are told, ‘to see Grettir after all that had been told about him’, ‘a young and quite ugly boy’Reference Hreinsson⁹ runs up to Grettir and starts heaping abuse on him, saying that it is an outrage that a criminal such as Grettir should be given the chance of an ordeal.

A little later, the king concludes: ‘Rashness always breeds trouble. If any man has ever been accursed, it must surely be you’ (Ref. 9, p. 113).

In his book, The Matter of the North, Torfi Tulinius relates an anecdote about a farmer from the beginning of the twentieth century whose habit was to have Grettir's Saga read to him once a year. He would listen to it quietly and intently, apart from a few occasions when he would exclaim: ‘you would have been better off not doing that, my dear Grettir – then you would still be alive!’Reference Tulinius¹⁰ The scene with the jeering boy, I imagine, must have counted among those rare occasions that provoked the farmer's reaction, since it leads directly to the hero's ruin: after Grettir's temper gets the better of him and the ordeal is aborted, the king declines to take the hero into his service – not because he believes the rumours to be true but because of Grettir's ill fortune. And although he tolerates the Icelander's presence in Norway during the winter, the king tells Grettir in no uncertain terms that he fully expects him to go back where he came from in the summer. Nothing good awaits our hero in Iceland. When he returns he is struck with a triple blow, as he finds out that his father has died, his brother Atli has been killed in revenge without being given a chance to defend himself, and, finally, he will learn that he was tried for arson in his absence and sentenced to full outlawry. And so begins Grettir's 19-year long lonely life on the run, during which the great hero and troll-killer is forced to live like a wild animal, to stoop to robbing people and stealing sheep to feed himself, all the while dogged by misfortune and haunted at night by the sight of ghost Glam's terrifying eyes. In fact, the scene with the jeering boy and Grettir's subsequent fate could be seen as the realisation of a terrible curse that the undead ghost uttered as he was finally laid low by Grettir. At the same time – curse or no curse – the scene seems perfectly in character with what is said about Grettir throughout the saga: as already mentioned, he is frequently described by the narrator, other characters and even by himself as being short-tempered, overbearing, impetuous, arrogant and unruly. The failure to restrain himself should be a sure sign that he has fallen short of the more noble breed of heroes, the men whose ability to remain in control of their mental as well as physical faculties even under the most trying of circumstances is the indispensable ingredient in their heroic makeup.

‘No Reaction’ Formula: Expectations and Transgressions in Grettir's Saga

The sagas feature many a hero showing ‘no reaction’ to an offence against his honour, or, in a similar vein, we are told that the hero pretended not to see, hear, or take any notice of an insult. For example, when the eponymous protagonist of Killer-Glum's Saga returns from Norway, he is greeted by the news of how his overbearing neighbours ruthlessly imposed on his defenceless mother, and exploited his absence to take unlawful possession of a hayfield they were supposed to share with her. However, we are told that Glum ‘had the same nature as before, reacting little and behaving as though he had not heard what had happened out here in the meantime’.Reference Hreinsson¹¹ Another valiant saga hero, Killer-Styr (The Saga of the Slayings on the Heath), is similarly said to have ‘pretended not to notice’Reference Hreinsson¹² what everyone else in the neighbourhood did notice and talk about too – the inappropriate advances his berserk thrall was making to his daughter. The ‘no reaction’ formula thus bears witness to the saga heroes’ ability to keep their tempers under control. As William Miller explains, ‘a hasty revenge was [considered] vulgar’Reference Miller¹³ yet it was certain to come without too long a delay, and sure enough, the offenders from the quoted examples soon end up dead. This is an effective way of both heightening the suspense and showing the heroes’ actions to speak louder than their words. Moreover, as already noted, the heroes demonstrate that, in addition to their physical prowess, they are also masters of their mental faculties, including their temper.

Grettir apparently seems to lack this vital heroic ingredient, yet it is difficult to explain how the impetuous outlaw Grettir emerges from among such an impressive gallery of heroes featuring the likes of Gunnar of Hlidarendi, the wise lawman Njal, Olaf Peacock and his son Kjartan and many other noble Icelanders of old, to capture his nation's imagination to the point that he would come to personify it in the famous verse by the nineteenth-century Icelandic poet, Matthías Jochumsson: ‘You, Grettir, are my nation’.Reference Jochumsson¹⁴ Why is it Grettir who continues to inspire Icelanders to this day too?¹⁵ How could anyone love the brute? What are we missing?

Well, if we forget for the moment all the things that are explicitly said about Grettir's temper, we will notice that in sharp contrast to them, Grettir is shown to behave exactly like the heroes in the above quoted examples. In fact, in some 300 pages of the saga, the hero will only truly lose his temper twice, one of those times being in the scene with the jeering boy. When put to the test, time and again Grettir rises to the occasion and gives an exemplary, formulaic demonstration of restraint that everyone, including himself, claims him to be incapable of. And so, to the boastful Bjorn's repeated provocations Grettir will say no more than that he ‘shan't make a big fuss about that’ (Ref. 9, p. 84); when he sees Odd cheating his brother Atli at a horse-fight, Grettir will at first show ‘no sign that he noticed this’ (Ref. 9, p. 96); and when the worthless son of Snorri Godi attacks him since he is certain to gain quick fame by his slaying, he finds his blows merely deflected by Grettir who will finally grab hold of the wretch and seat him as if to reprimand a child (Ref. 9, pp. 156–157). In fact, the offending parties are often given as many as three warnings before Grettir makes his fatal move, as in the following case involving a local troublemaker, Thorbjorn the Traveller.

Thorbjorn was a member of a party that stopped a fight between Grettir and his men on one side, and the people from the neighbouring farm of Melar on the other. Although Grettir's side was winning, Thorbjorn spreads rumours about Grettir's alleged cowardice, which is a grave offence in a culture where honour is the most prized possession a person can have. Regardless of his past conduct and despite the attempts of his kin to dissuade him, Thorbjorn is determined to board the same ship as Grettir, bound for Norway. When asked by fellow travellers of the news in his district, Thorbjorn says that Asmund Grey-locks, Grettir's father, must have died by now, and adds scornfully: ‘That warrior did not meet a great end. He suffocated in the smoke of his own fireplace like a dog. But it was no loss, he'd gone senile anyway’ (Ref. 9, p. 109). Grettir, we are told, has heard this ‘quite clearly but did not interrupt Thorbjorn while he was telling his story’ (Ref. 9, p. 109). Instead, he comments forebodingly how Thorbjorn himself is unlikely to ‘suffocate in the smoke of his own fireplace’ and reprimands him for talking ‘so scornfully about innocent people’ (Ref. 9, p. 109). Thorbjorn retorts: ‘I don't plan to retract anything. And I did not think you put on a very brave show when we saved you from the people from Melar who were pummelling you like a bull's head’ (Ref. 9, p. 109). To this second insult, the hero delivers another warning, this time in verse, upon which Thorbjorn proceeds to the third offence, instantly dismissing Grettir's words: ‘The day I will die is the same as ever, however much you babble’ (Ref. 9, p. 109). Only after all of this does Grettir finally kill the scoundrel, but not before bidding him first to defend himself, which is in sharp contrast to how his brother is subsequently killed in revenge by Thorbjorn's relatives. The example illustrates well that not only can Grettir control himself, but he can do so persistently, and with some sense of decorum, when others would have reacted already.

Back to the Jeering Boy: the Distributed Reading of ‘No Reaction’

What then is so special about the jeering boy? Now is the time to return to the scene we started with and see whether our experience of traditional referentiality with regard to heroic restraint can help us see what we may have missed before. The scene in the church now summons the echoes of the ‘no reaction’ formula that reverberates throughout Grettir's Saga and indeed throughout the entire corpus of the sagas of Icelanders. We see Grettir resonate through this formula with all those confirmed heroes of old, these formidable witnesses of his present fall. Only, inheriting their eyes and ears, we no longer accept Grettir's flight into a rage as fitting with what is said about his self-control, but protest instead against an intolerable incongruence with what the hero has trained us to expect of him. And as our disciplined scholarly distancing from the riches of traditional narratives is beginning to fail us, we find ourselves entangled in the object of our study (Grettir, the character), who can no longer endure its objecthood. We find ourselves sliding dangerously close to the Icelandic farmer from Torfi Tulinius's anecdote I related earlier. The conspicuous absence of the ‘no reaction’ formula in the jeering boy scene is thus experienced as a protest: ‘Why have you done this, my dear Grettir?’ But then we see that one of the main ingredients for the formula to play out in the proper way is missing, namely the legitimate opponent, a warrior of equal or at least similar social standing: ‘Nobody seemed to know where the boy came from or what became of him, but the most common explanation is that he was an evil spirit sent to bring Grettir bad luck’ (Ref. 9, p. 112). ‘Wait! It's not fair! It doesn't count!’, one feels like exclaiming. When the boy suddenly appears in the church, Grettir is preparing to undertake an ordeal, and we find ourselves joining the large congregation in anticipation. If this were a sporting event and one side scored a point before the referee even blew the whistle to start the match, there would be likewise much protesting: ‘It's not fair! It doesn't count!’ And, even if the higher powers were to allow the point to stand, it would be annulled in the hearts of the fans who would feel personally wronged.

The situation with Grettir was similarly a trial before a trial. It came just too soon. For when is a hero more vulnerable than in such an in-between state, in the midst of preparation for another great test of his valour? Note the precision. And again, it is similarly hard to think of anyone more likely to get his ‘ears boxed’ than an ugly boy jeering disrespectfully. It is in the all-knowing efficiency of a catastrophic minimal difference that the cunning of the supernatural lives. Grettir thus never stood a chance to begin with. Magic is unfair that way. But, because it is not fair, because the success of evil spirits lies in exploiting the irreducible lacunae in any code (heroic or otherwise), the scene of Grettir's failure to control his temper is also disqualified even as we fully witness how he ‘flew into a rage’ and will see him pay dearly for it. In fact, the only other instance when Grettir loses his temper as an adult, the one that will finally spell his imminent doom, is likewise under a spell whose economy required no more than an ugly enchanted log and another occurrence of insolence of an already insolent servant. In this scene, Grettir strikes the evil log with his axe, but the blow is deflected and he cuts his own thigh (Ref. 9, p. 171). It is this festering wound rather than the might of his miserable opponents that will finally be the death of the famous outlaw.

Looking through the referential lens of the ‘no reaction’ formula, these two instances come across not as Grettir's failures to control himself, but more as failures to recognise that the restraint was necessary in the first place. In the scene with the jeering child, it is not that Grettir ‘relies on his own anger-driven strength’,Reference Hamer¹⁶ but rather that he swats the brat like an annoying fly. It is that the ugly boy does not qualify as a hero's adversary in the first place, and neither does the ugly log. And although, with the benefit of hindsight, these two will turn out to be the moments when restraint was most desperately needed, the vital cues for reading them as calling for a heroic ‘no reaction’ are missing, or rather, are withdrawn, purposefully obscured. In this way, the keenly felt absence of the ‘no reaction’ formula transforms the scenes of Grettir's outburst.

At the same time, the two ‘disqualified’ scenes of Grettir's fall nevertheless make it impossible for us to take for granted that Grettir will always be able to control himself. The ‘no reaction’ formula is thus transformed by the instances of its conspicuous absence in turn. And so the newly acquired insecurity re-sensitises us to just how hard Grettir has to work against his nature every time he is called upon to do so. In the interplay between the overt narration that emphasises the violence of the hero's temper and the referential cues to his mastery of it, Grettir's internal trials unfold as powerfully dramatised, possibly elevating him above any other saga hero: exercising self-control is much less a feat for someone already temperate than for someone tempestuous. The greatest strength of Grettir the Strong is perhaps not in his muscle, but in the mastery over his own nature. This, the most difficult feat imaginable, is what deserves to personify Jochumsson's nation.

By Way of Conclusion: Formulae as Sites of Communal Identity Formation

Of course, it is precisely the ‘nationing’ of medieval Icelanders that is at work here. In their prokaryotic state, with firmly established laws and legal practice but no dedicated organs to enforce it, the problem of conflict resolution understandably exercises their communal mind more than any other. Certainly, a tit-for-tat strategy has a proven track record as a basis for social organisation in the context of highly decentralised power distribution, but inasmuch as medieval Icelanders aspired to a social order and international presence on a par with their neighbours, they had to disassociate the lawful pursuit of revenge from acts of personal retaliation (the law's exact opposite). They had to weed out passions from justice, nature from nurture. They saw their fledgling social structures emerging out of and at the same time threatened by the sublime nature of their drives as well as of their habitat. The sagas are where and when this community pondered, among other things, whether taming one's own nature is worth the elemental resource thus restrained, and, in the present context, the instances of the ‘no reaction’ formula are the vectors of this pondering, of the in-decision's stretching force flexing its pondering muscle in the aesthetic, moral and emotional space of the tradition, keenly felt by the members of the community whose sense of identity was experiencing the strain.

In presenting the jeering boy scene before and after engaging with the formulaic acumen of the saga tradition, I hope I have demonstrated the potential interpretative gains that become available through distributed reading (corresponding to the sagas’ likewise distributed, networked authorship). Through such reading, each formula instance is considered in both its immediate textual environment and in relation to other such instances from across the traditional corpus. It is precisely through such a web of relations that an instance acquires its specific meaning, its uniqueness. Traditional formula is thus both the constant gardener and the melting pot of communal values and attitudes. While it is there to help the stability of the tradition and ensure a faithful transmission, it fully allows speakers and/or writers to express their individuality, even if this is not their immediate, programmatic aim. And conversely, whatever individual authors do, any new rendering of the formula maintains connections with the older ways of usage. Thus, while the formula is manipulated by creative individuals, it also has inbuilt mechanisms to safe-guard against idiosyncrasy, reminding that the story of this kind evolves: it always comes before its teller (and continues after), and it ever remains under negotiation during our reading and is therefore ever alive, even when the tradition as once was has died out.