Icelandic Antinomies in the Grettis Saga

Parenthetic references are to chapters in the Grettis saga. Bracketed numbers are footnotes.


     Many critics have commented on the singular phenomenon of the Icelandic sagas, an exceedingly rich body of literature from a small and poor land on the margin of civilization. To one translator the Icelanders “were and had been, for a thousand years, the most literary nation on earth.” [1] Though the sagas share some characteristics with Beowulf, for example, and indeed in a broader sense with heroic narratives from many lands, they have as well unique characteristics. Though many modern readers find the sagas of the highest literary value, they are in a sense highly local in their concerns, recording the legendary history of the leading families of the land with many specific details and place names. The Icelanders’ values are, like everyone’s, shaped by the specific conditions of their lives, in particular by tensions and contradictions they must resolve. The fundamental antinomies of the culture generate the form and content of classic Icelandic literature.
     Grettir, the leading figure of the thirteenth century saga named after him, is a hero of decidedly ambiguous character. [2] Like Gilgamesh before him, Grettir is, even within this heroic culture, too wild. His energy, valor, and ego overflow in such excess that he finds himself outlawed and then outlawed again. People respect him and even admire him, but all agree that he is hot-headed and thus presents a danger of useless violence at all times. He is overweening, arrogant, and rude at the best of times, his impulsive unpredictability always a threat. The best man to have at one’s side in a fight, he is an undesirable house guest. Though he subscribes to the values of his people and appeals through legal channels to plead his case, he is constantly on the lam or accepting hospitality from more solid citizens. Through much of the action of the story he is either abroad or isolated in the barren central portion of Iceland. Is Grettir a hero or an anti-hero? In his own nature he straddles the gap between a masculine ideal and a feared villain.
     Though Grettir never marries, female figures do play a significant role in his life. In general in a heroic narrative like the Grettis Saga values are hypermasculinized, leaving women in the shadows and on the margins, vulnerable things requiring male guardianship, hardly mentioned. [3] Yet, in the precisely structured world of this saga, the female gets her due both as a positive and a negative archetype. Eros plays no role in either.
     Grettis’ life is saved by Thorbjorn, “the mistress of Vatnsfjord,” after he had been disgracefully captured by a troop of farmers. (LII) She is described as “a person of great magnificence” and “tremendously wise,” and she makes a judicious decision in this case, later seconded by her husband. On the other hand, it is Thurid, a sorceress, who finally is able to do Grettir in when the strongest of warriors could not. (LXXVIII) He can wound her but he is defenseless against her spells.
     This depiction of the sexes, consistent throughout, is what makes the adventitious conclusion with its echoes of Tristan so discordant. The seductive Sera’s sexual aggressiveness is as out of place as is its counterpart, her turn toward asceticism when she feels her life is nearing a close. Suddenly at the end an anachronistic antinomy appears, palpably foreign to the structures of the rest of the story.
     In earlier times a person’s identity derived from family and ancestry to an extent scarcely imaginable today. The ancient Greeks and Hebrews took pride in tracing their descent from ancient heroes whom they believed to be historical; this interest lies behind passages that may strike the modern reader as tiresome such as the catalogue of the ships in the Iliad and the family trees of Abraham and Noah in the Torah. The Old Norse author can seem to a modern reader compulsive about providing details of ancestry; indeed, the early sagas are sometimes called “family sagas.” Hardly an individual is mentioned without providing data on his family for several generations with perhaps some information on his wife and cousins as well.
     The sagas are, to begin with, far more based in the facts of relatively recent history than the Iliad and Odyssey, and the odd details of wars and kings, while rarely the center of the plot, both enable and lend significance to genealogical detail. Since the country was settled by a small band of Norse exiles and then was largely isolated until recent times (the country is today one of the most popular travel destinations) it was in fact possible to trace one’s lineage to the early settlers. The information in the sagas constituted an earlier form of the cell phone apps that Icelandic youth use to discern how closely they are related to those they might date. [4]
     The interest in everyone’s ancestry since all in a sense are descended from heroes is reflected in a dialectic between the individual and the social. Since Iceland was established essentially to escape the rule of Harald as overlord, a potent individualistic ethos arose in which each landowner had very nearly absolute power over those in his domain. The sagas barely mention thralls and karls except for an occasional villain. Though each landowner was in law autonomous, to avoid wasteful bloodshed and constant conflict, a social order was established to mediate relations among the bondis. The All-Thing was a highly democratic and legalistic institution at a time when much rule was by fiat. (The Grettis saga makes it clear that the democracy was always imperfect. Such meetings were subject to force of numbers and influence at all times and the Thing did eventually approach more closely to the conventional feudal structure.)
     Religion, which in theory might claim absolute judgements, is likewise presented in an ambivalent light. The characters are almost all nominally Christians, but they make no reference to Christ nor do they live according to Christian precepts. Had Grettis been written before the conversion to Christianity, it would have made little difference. Trolls and ghosts do occur, but they are equivalent to extraordinarily daunting human opponents, endowed with power but liable, too, to defeat when challenged by a great fighter. When Thorarine excludes Grettis from Baldi’s expedition, saying he is ill-fated, one might think of the pagan Wyrd [5], but the fact is he might as well have said Grettir is obnoxious and unstable.
     Surely the monstrous afterlife of Glam as a troll is associated with his spurning Christianity (XXXII), yet the Christian priest who assists Grettir putting a ladder into the lair of the giant proves faithless and cowardly, deserving only obloquy in a heroic context. (LXVI) The text neither protests the prevailing religion nor allows it to influence his world-view, while conceding that potency may be seen in both the old and the new way.
     The story includes the accession of Olaf Haraldsson (XXXVII) to the throne, but, rather than mentioning his policy of forced conversion (itself a self-contradictory testament of Christianity), the author praises him, saying “he took into favour all men who were skilled in any way and made them his followers.”
     Analogous bipolar structures underlie the most significant rhetorical strategies of the saga.  
The simple fact that they are prose, though interlarded with many short poems, is unusual. In the Elder Edda, as in most mythic texts, the form of poetry indicates that the action unfolds in a realm far removed from the ordinary. Prose is the conventional medium for folk stories, which may include plenty of magic, but which do not define the fundamental terms of existence as myth does. Not only tales of gods, but those of legendary and semi-historical heroes such as the Mahabharata, the Iliad, and the Cantico de mio Cid are generally related in poetry.
     Poetry is included in Icelandic sagas such as Grettis, but it is set off by a prose background. The verses, in highly artificial language, typically occur when a character wishes to either signal dominance, such as by insulting an antagonist, or to boast after a victory. [7] The author marks such high points of ego expression by marking them linguistically as distinguished from the language of everyday life. The hero is different from others, not divine - indeed, his vulnerable humanity is what makes true heroism possible for both Njal and Achilles. The individual with powers beyond his fellows is glorified by the very language he uses. Thus the structural distinction between prose and verse serves a dramatically expressive role, heightening the heroic personality beyond that of his fellows while the prose narrative maintains the action in the historical past rather than a mythic realm.
     For instance, when Grettir is quarreling with Bjorn (XXII) he improvises verses several times, ultimately brags and then challenges his antagonist with an insulting poem.


Time was when the bear was slain by my hand;
My cloak in tatters was torn.
A rascally knave was the cause of it all
But now he shall make me amends.


     The Grettis Saga is also full of proverbs, making it a repository of normative community wisdom. Frequently such adages have a riddle-like or paradoxical aspect. For instance “Ale is another man.” (XIX) could be the solution to the question, “When is a man not himself?” Similarly, a surmise may be fact: “The guess of the wise is truth.” (XXXI); and solitude may include company: “ Oft in the woods is a listener nigh.” (LIX)
     Like other old Germanic authors, the saga writer makes liberal use of litotes, a rhetorical figure that typically involves the contradiction of an assertion to express its opposite. The simplest form may be illustrated by Grettir’s prediction when he is convinced against his better judgement to swim to fetch fire: “no good will come to me.” (XXXVIII) The use of such expression, common in Old Norse and Old English compositions suggests the laconic resignation so characteristic of the Germanic world-view, with its harsh weather, perils of sailing and warfare, and the metaphysical prospect of Ragnarok.
     Not all examples of litotes involve negations. Potentially lethal fighting is repeatedly described as “playing.” (e.g. Thorbjorn in LXXVI) Understatement may be used to great dramatic advantage such as when Atli Asmundsson, Grettir’s brother, demonstrates heroic nonchalance as he comments while dying “They use broad spear-blades these days.” (XLV)
     By using figures that may be described as “allegorical” in the broadest possible definition (that is, meaning, saying something other than the explicit message), the author implies two radical propositions. Using language in an indirect, suggestive, associative manner highlights the gap between signified and signifier, thus questioning the ordinary acceptance of words as an adequate representation of reality. The reader may ultimately winder whether even the artful words of aesthetic language with its elaborate socially constructed interpretive codes can convey accurate meaning. In the phrasing of the sagas, such considerations run consistently, if just below the surface.
     Tightly organized oppositions provide the plot’s motive energy: valor and arrogance, individual and family, law and anarchy, Christianity and paganism. Its rhetorical dynamism arises from analogous formal polarities: prose and poetry, what is said and what is meant.
     The Grettis saga moves forward, like all narratives, through conflict and tension. In this story the action is generated by the dualities central to the Old Norse culture: the individual and society, male and female, paganism and Christianity, prose and poetry. Neither is wholly privileged and neither wholly denied. Valor carried too far is arrogance. It is a man’s world, but the skills are women must be recognized. Everyone may be Christian but the old ways retain power. Neither prose nor poetry suits every utterance.
     As Saussure recognized, it is in expressions of difference that meaning arises. We think in dualities and dramatic action can arise only in conflict. Grettis represents one proposal, the working out of a series of oppositions resulting in one version of how to be human. If it does not entirely fit, if incongruities leak from every side of the polarities, this apparent weakness is in fact the inevitable result of imitating the experience of life. Sufficient erratic and unpredictable energies exist to propel the individual to the next hour, the reader to the next tale, and culture to formulations ever new.




1. Introduction by George Ainslie Hight, The Saga of Grettir the Strong, vii. This version, a 1914 Everyman volume translated by George Ainslie Hight, is the source of my quotations in this essay. Iceland today is often called the most literate nation on earth. Ben Myers in ”The Icelandic Sagas: Europe's most important book?” in the Guardian (Oct 3, 2008) notes that the average Icelander reads four books a year and that one in ten has written a book.

2. In Icelandic sometimes called Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar. Translations into English have been titled Grettla, Grettir's Saga, and The Saga of Grettir the Strong. William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon published a translation called The Tale of Grettir the Strong.

3. See Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” which brilliantly analyzes Homeric violence.

4. See the AP story for Apr 18, 2013 appearing in numerous newspapers.

5. Wyrd is the Old English goddess of fate. The Norse cognate is Urðr or Urd, personified as one of the Norns.

7. Note the common use in African American writing and culture generally of “signifying,” the artful use of language, often employed for boasting or insulting.

Travel Pictures

Were I not desirous of keeping this essay free of footnotes, I might well have included an overture paying tribute to that grand opening of Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques: “Travel and travelers are two things I loathe.” After a glance or two in the direction of Sontag’s “On Photography” I might have acknowledged such academic studies as John Urry’s The Tourist Gaze or Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class before concluding my review of literature with a quotation from Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines characterizing nomads as people with “a motive for travel that went well beyond the vanity of documentation.” Simply thinking for a moment about the topic, it seems, provides ample evidence for the deep ambivalence that lurks behind travel. Such contradictions seem to underlie most of our important concerns and that, I suppose, is why we have art.


     Pictures have long been the most popular souvenir. Yet I myself have never photographed the places I have visited, though I am as fond as others of recalling past journeys. Perhaps I have wished to avoid looking like a tourist. After all, I learned as a child the classic satiric stereotype of the tourist with a camera hanging over his tropical shirt. Elders will recall the jokes about the ordeal of watching someone else’s vacation slides that were once common. Perhaps they may even have experienced such shows themselves.
     I also recall, though, community programs on the theme of travel. People would actually assemble in in a school auditorium or a library back room to watch either slides or a film, semi-professional at best, of Austria or Greece or Italy with a live narration by the traveler himself. As late as the nineteen fifties travel abroad was sufficiently infrequent that there was a market for this vicarious version though insufficient money was involved to elicit first-rate showmen.
     Now people are shoulder to shoulder in Angkor Wat and crowds gather in remote Icelandic fields hoping for an unseasonal Northern Lights and virtually all of those people are holding cell phone cameras. The traveler now returns with hundreds or thousands rather than a few dozen images. It is now a real question whether anyone ever looks at most travel photos a second or even a first time. Yet virtually everyone feels compelled to take them. Is it merely a more modern and less destructive form of bringing home trophy heads from a safari?
     The prevalent genres of the travel picture seem to me the least rewarding. Surely the most common type is the traveler posed with a slightly silly grin of satisfaction in front of a monument. It is as though the traveler were intent on preserving evidence for some panel of skeptical judges that the visit to Machu Picchu or the Taj Mahal had actually taken place. Virtually the only somewhat satisfactory version of this travel picture genre I have seen is a series by a couple who took their three year old child around the world, posing him in front of each historic castle or church, resulting in a display of enough wit and cute oddity to have at least a momentary interest for someone outside the family. But for most travelers, if a picture of an Olmec head is desired, why should the traveler enter the frame?
     There is some perverse egotism, never satisfied, lurking here. Not long ago the English queen, known for dignity and politesse, vented a complaint. Her loyal subjects, who all her life had pressed to approach her on public occasions, excited faces showing that they were experiencing the thrill of a lifetime, now invariably turn their backs to her in an effort to take cell phone pictures (the name selfie alone should be enough of a warning). She was quite right to call such behavior rude, but does it not also leave the picture-taker with an image less a portrait of Elizabeth Regina than of the photographer’s bad taste?
     A good number of tourists do omit the traveler and capture an image of the attraction itself, be it cathedral, fortress, statue, or grazing camels. Yet professional pictures of virtually all attractions and works of art are so easily available that I cannot conceive why people make so many new and generally inferior ones. In spite of the fact, picture-taking is more common than careful examination in many museums today. Queues actually form to snap the Mona Lisa, though, if the picture-taker later actually wished to study the painting, surely an online image would be preferable, or in a book, anything but the traveler’s own snapshot.
     I am carping, and, of course, everyone is entitled to select amusements to his or her own liking. Further, photography is a worthy art and being in an exotic environment makes taking pictures tempting indeed. In many streets of India a random shot in any direction would be of at least some interest to an American with curiosity.
     So far as I am concerned, pictures of people and street scenes are the traveler’s best bet. Far from privileging wonders of the world, I suspect everyone would agree that dodgy neighborhoods offer more rather than less opportunities for good scenes, though the rule is far from prescriptive. (After all, the crowd at Ascot might be as good as the shanties of Rio.) One can capture something unique, a record of a moment more likely to reflect the nature of the locale than its historic homes or grand fountains, and the possibilities are omnipresent. The traveler on the lookout for a scene worth the capture is encouraged to keep eyes and ears open, mind discerning, and is this not the point of visiting unfamiliar places? Surely one’s mind is broadening more when buying street food or watching a funeral pass by than when the tour bus pulls up to Mt. Rushmore or the bus driver points out the Monumento a la Revolución in Mexico City.
     Photographing people is also a safe bet, as almost all faces are complex and fascinating. Yet issues of respect and civility come into play. Having lived in the Haight-Ashbury at a time when busloads of visitors would sometimes step down and aim their cameras at me and my family, I know that it can seem an assault. Still, with or without permission, a face is virtually always worth a moment’s study.
     Among the travel pictures I have enjoyed, none are, strictly speaking, souvenirs with a primary appeal based on aiding the traveler’s recall of a pleasant vacation.
     I like several photos in our family albums of my wife’s grandparents traveling back and forth to Europe in the twenties and thirties. In one they are dressed in tuxedo and gown, in another in elaborate costumes for the ship’s masquerade ball, in a third, posing with pride next to a mountain of steamer trunks. They provide vivid detail of the sensibility of the time when few people crossed the Atlantic for pleasure, though I think the pictures would be as engaging for a viewer who had no connection at all with the subjects. These pictures have a solid journalistic appeal.
     On the cover of my chapbook Tourist Snapshots is a picture taken by Patricia of Moroccan street vendors. It provides an adequate suggestion, I hope, of the tone of the poems within. Yet, here too, I may get as well have chosen it from stock images. In fact, this picture was selected largely because it seemed so simultaneously exotic and typical. Even for me it carries no more associations than for another, though I was present when it was taken. My affection for North Africa is founded on intangible memory.
     One of my wife’s pictures we like well enough to hang on the dining room wall. Taken In Sarnath, the town on the outskirts of Varanasi where Buddha did his first teaching, it depicts the most modest of tea houses with two outdoor folding tables, a parked motor bike, and a solitary patron gazing into his cup. Above, a large and crudely painted sign identifies this establishment as the Thinkers’ Cafe. The primary appeal of the image is its contrast of the humble place with its ambitious name, a hot and dusty street where it is still possible for anyone with the price of a cup of tea to think thoughts as grand as a philosopher.
     Yet I realize that it does bring me back to thoughts not only of the message Buddha brought the bikkhus, but also to that museum in which we seemed the only ones examining the marvelous millennia old statues, while other visitors, Buddhist pilgrims, went from one to another touching them to collect mana like bees gathering pollen. I thought, too of the tree beneath which the Buddha was said to have preached, with its images of the five bhikkus, painted as brightly as carousel animals, from which we gathered a few leaves to bring home, unbelieving in magic but believing it possible that people could still their souls.
     So that photograph of the Thinkers' Cafe succeeds for me as a souvenir, as a physical object inspiring memory, in a way that a snapshot of my lovely wife standing in front of the stupa would not have done. A stock photo or a picture by a friend could also not have borne those associations. The picture is not art because its meaning is largely private and unavailable to others. The successful travel picture will combine an initial aesthetic appeal with a lingering subjective strain that diminishes sweetly until the picture is viewed once again, its meaning accessible to one alone, or, if that one is fortunate, perhaps for two.

Notes on Recent Reading 37 (Waley, Wharton, London)

Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet (Waley)

     Waley never fails me. Indeed, all English-speaking readers who love Asian literature must be thankful for his labors. Though he acquired his knowledge of Chinese and Japanese languages under Laurence Binyon at the British Museum, cataloguing visual art, he eschewed academic posts and consistently wrote for that virtually extinct creature, the generally educated reader. He never visited China or Japan, but lived in Bloomsbury in London where he associated with literary figures rather than Sinologists. A friend of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, among others, he was as well an early admirer of Ronald Firbank, for whose first collected works he and Osbert Sitwell wrote an introduction. Ezra Pound recommended his work for the Little Review. His literary value has held up; while his translations are not the most scholarly, they are often the best choice especially for non-specialists.
     Yuan Mei was a poet, artist, and food writer -- a translation of his gastronomic classic Suiyuan Shidan is forthcoming this year as Recipes from the Garden of Contentment. He wrote as well a theoretical work on poetry, the Suiyuan shihua. A brilliant student at a young age, he even left a guide to scoring well on the imperial exams on the Confucian classics. He worked in several government posts of which Waley provides sufficient details that we do not wonder why he abandoned the civil service at the age of thirty-two to devote himself to art.
     Why do I feel such kinship with certain Chinese poets? Surely their participation in academic examinations on the classics is a part of what we share. Add to that the implied pathetic fallacy so widespread in traditional Chinese verse and part of today’s poetry in English since Waley’s first translations and the advent of the Imagists. Finally, there is a profound sympathy in world-view. Yuan Mei paid respects to Ch’an Buddhism while maintaining a position of unashamed hedonism, aesthetic and otherwise, as sufficient for everyday conduct. It is what might a few hundred years ago have been called a kind of natural religion. Simple though it be, such a position has been the refuge of more than one fine soul.
     Waley’s book is unfailingly entertaining and readable. It is astonishing what details about the poet’s life survive in documents and how smoothly and novelistically Waley uses them to frame the many lyrics included in this volume.


In Morocco (Wharton)

     Edith Wharton’s 1920 book describing a month touring Morocco, much of it devoted to Fes and Marrakech, is as engaging as one might expect. Wharton had lived in France for most of the previous decade and toured Morocco as a guest of the French Governor-General Lyautey (her fulsome praise for him cloys). As a dignitary she drove about in a French military vehicle and visited the residences of both French and local potentates where she sometimes participated in dinners served by slaves. She saw a good deal that an ordinary tourist would have missed, including the Saadian tombs and harems (the women she finds boring and a bit pathetic).
     Apart from the well-sketched vignettes of Moroccan life of the time, the book would make a case study in the apologetics of imperialism, as Wharton hasn’t a doubt that France arrived at the invitation of the North Africans and in fact saved them from themselves.
     Though this conviction would find fewer partisans today, many of her comments would be echoed by later visitors including myself. Her sense of having stepped far back in time is familiar even to today’s escorted tour customers, and her exposition of the country’s contradictions is illuminating, even when only half-informed. The phantasmagoria of Morocco is, of course, an illusion born of unfamiliarity, but it is no less intoxicating for that reason.


People of the Abyss (London)

     Jack London’s story of his descent into the city of London’s East End, masquerading with rough clothes to impersonate what he had in fact been only a few years before, an itinerant laborer, remains powerful today, over a hundred years later. London sleeps in sordid quarters when not in workhouses, eats in the filthiest coffee houses, and fraternizes with the urban proletariat at a time when many in the greatest empire of modern times were literally starving. Apart from his own observations and the tales told him by many a hard-working tradesman fallen on hard times, London responsibly provides much statistical documentation of the plight of the poor, though this is perhaps less useful to today’s reader. His transcriptions of dialect seem authentic and his righteous indignation is exemplary.
     The concrete particulars are necessary for a contemporary reader to realize how recently the great majority of the working class, not the lumpen or underclass, was in desperate straits in even the most developed capitalist economies. This book takes its place between Engels’ 1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England, London’s own The Road about tramping in the USA) and Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. London himself said, “No other book of mine took so much of my young heart and tears as that study of the economic degradation of the poor."
     London’s militance is inscribed in the text but not without a certain ambivalence as well. His distaste for the poor and for their wretched conditions is evident, but an even deeper contradiction, expressed in The Iron Heel as well, is his own Nietzschean preference for the strong and his almost eugenic conviction that the urban poor had in fact declined through devolution into something only just barely human.