Shall we start with The Culture of the Teutons?

This is a book I first came across as an undergraduate. It was published in Danish, but, of course, I read it in the translation which appeared in 1931. It’s a kind of introduction, on a massive scale, to early Germanic and old Norse culture – not specifically Icelandic culture, though many of its examples are taken from the Icelandic sagas. It’s an immensely stimulating book, even though quite a few of its ideas need to be revised in the light of more recent research. The author outlines three concepts that he says characterise ancient Germanic culture. These are frith, honour and luck. The word ‘frith’ is a reflection of Old Norse and Old English words meaning ‘peace’. He keeps the word ‘frith’ because peace is not exactly what is meant. What he means is a sense of co-consciousness, a strong feeling of identity with your family, your kin and the group to which you belong.

I was wondering why those concepts might apply more to ancient Germanic culture than they would to other ancient cultures. It’s quite a fundamental little troika.

I think what is characteristically Germanic is the tremendous sense of family feeling, of belonging to a group. You can hardly become an individual in this kind of society – or the only way you can become anything like an individual is by being very much part of the larger group. I suppose there is a potential paradox and irony in that. One thing about Grønbech is that he mixes an awful lot of things together, like poems recited by characters in the Icelandic sagas, most of which were written in the 13^th century, though the characters to whom the poems are attributed may have lived considerably earlier than that, in the 9^th or 10^th centuries. Grønbech would treat these characters almost as real people, and wouldn’t take account of whether or not they might have been fictionally created by the writers of the later sagas.

Are they fictional?

It’s debatable. Not in all cases, certainly – but recent scholarship has shown that these 13^th-century Icelandic sagas are by no means as historical as they purport to be.

Could you give me some saga background?

The sagas are prose narratives written in Iceland, mainly in the 13^th century, and there are different theories about what sort of literature they are. Some people have emphasised that they were originally oral literature; some have stressed that they are predominantly written literature; but, in fact, they are a combination of both. The general view now is that they are works that obey their own laws rather than adhere strictly to historical tradition.

Are they adventures?

There are many different kinds of sagas, but the ones best known outside Iceland are the so-called ‘Family Sagas’, which essentially deal with family feuds in Iceland during the Saga Age. That would be the century or so after Iceland was settled, the decades before and after 1000 AD. The 13^th-century sagas relate events from this period.

The versions that are preserved in manuscripts in Iceland – are these 13^th-century texts, or are they copies of things we assume to have been written in the 13^th century?

Well, they are for the most part preserved in manuscripts rather later than the 13^th century, but from studying different versions from different dates it’s usually possible to get an idea of what the original form was like. You can see some of the manuscripts in Copenhagen, but since Iceland became independent in 1944 a large number of the manuscripts have been returned to Iceland, so you should really go to the Árni Magnússon Institute in Reykjavík to see them there.

Let’s move on to Sigurður Nordal’s Icelandic Culture.

Again, this is someone whose work needs to be revised in the light of recent scholarship.  He treats the characters in the sagas as historical; he would maintain that much of the poetry attributed to the characters in these narratives was actually composed by those characters. That is not necessarily always the case. His point of view is very specifically Icelandic, and the book was published in 1942, shortly before Iceland gained its independence from Denmark. It is a strongly patriotic book, though the patriotism is kept for the most part under control. It’s a history of Iceland up to the time of Iceland’s submission to Norway in 1262-1264. The Icelanders were made to pay taxes to the crown of Norway at that time, and later became subject to Denmark in around 1380.

Is ‘Icelandic culture’ mainly the sagas?

In this book, yes. Nordal is giving an historical account and using the sagas to illustrate that account – sometimes in rather questionable ways.

What do you mean?

Well, one can’t always be sure that things people said in the sagas were historically accurate. He’s particularly interesting on the period of the Icelandic Commonwealth before Iceland became subject to Norway, when the Commonwealth depended for its survival on the co-existence of the chieftains, the independent farmers. This broke down as a result of some families becoming more powerful than others. There are the Family Sagas and then there are the Contemporary Sagas, which deal with feuds in the 13^th century itself. Because there was no single head of state in Iceland, once some of the chieftains became more powerful than others, the question of how they were to hold on to their power arose. Many of them appealed to the king of Norway to help them in their struggles. In a way, that was just what the king of Norway wanted: they were playing into his hands.

Your next choice is Saga and Society, by Preben Meulengracht Sørensen.

This is a much more balanced book.