The BBC is often derided for its pandering to the whims of the lowest common denominator, vis 'Strictly Come Dancing' and 'EastEnders', but sometimes it transcends its role as a purveyor of dross, merely fit only for the unwashed hoi-polloi. (Yes I know that hoi-polloi means THE masses and the definite article is not required but. . .) I was reminded of this by an hour-long documentary by that BBC-favoured siren of historical documentaries, Dr Janina Ramirez; she is just so cute! The documentary was about the Icelandic Laexdala saga.
Who in their right mind would think that a documentary about a little known Icelandic saga would be worth spending money on? Thankfully the BBC did. In keeping with Lord Reith's avowed statement that the BBC was there to educate and inform, as well as to entertain, this was a simplistic, but not altogether crass, attempt to get the few viewers who may have been ignorant of the rich storytelling inherent in the sagas to maybe dip their toe into the water of the most wonderful of historical 'novelists' and poets, Snorri Sturlasson.
Snorri, by his connection with Jón Loftsson, a relative of the Norwegian royal family, who raised him from an early age following a costly legal suit, which left Snorri's father in somewhat dire financial straits, had received an excellent education and he could afford to indulge himself in literary whims and, later, politics. The Icelanders were fiercely democratic at the time; unlike their Norwegian and Danish cousins, who, it must be said, swopped kingship around between them like jelly beans.
Snorri is best known for the prose (not poetic or elder) Edda, which comprises Gylfaginning (The fooling of Gylfi), a narrative of Norse mythology, the Skáldskaparmál, a book of poetic language, and the Háttatal, a list of verse forms; the Heimskringla, the annals of the Kings of Norway that begins with mythical/legendary material in Ynglinga saga and winds its way through the more historical subjects up to the time of Magnus Erlingson, who died in 1184 following a lengthy and bloody civil war, which just went on and on and on....*. For stylistic and methodological reasons, Snorri is often taken to be the author of Egil's saga too.
How much credence that can be given to Snorri's historical accounts is in some doubt, although he would have had a rich store of, at least, oral history on which to base his accounts; he had major dealings with the Norwegian court, keen to elicit his acquiescence in Norway's annexation of Iceland. He was finally murdered in 1241, although I express some doubt that the King of Norway actually ordered what transpired (shades of Henry and Beckett perhaps) and it may have, perhaps, been over-zealousness or a 'land-grab' by the murderers. Politics in Scandinavia could be sometimes fraught at the best of times.
What Sturlasson and the other Icelandic saga writers left us with is an enormous wealth of material about Viking and Old Icelandic culture, customs and politics. The sagas are, perhaps, some of the earliest examples of embryonic 'novels'; rich in detail and psychological insight but with a heavy emphasis on plot and perhaps realism. Yet, I have no doubt that those writers divined imagined motives and reasons and embellished their sagas with imagined conversation and dialogue just as historical novelists do now.
I still have a deep affection for the quote (from Harald's Saga), which Harold Godwinson almost certainly did not say at the Battle Of Stamford Bridge: Sagt hefir hann þar nökkut frá, hvers hann mun honum unna af Englandi: 7
fóta rúm, eða því lengra, sem hann er hæri en aðrir menn. Which loosely translates as: Since he was not content with his own kingdom, said the rider, I'll
give him 7 feet of English soil - or as much, perhaps, as he is taller than other men. They don't write like that anymore!
* Interestingly, Sverre Sigurdsson, only one of many claimant to the throne, who defeated and killed Magnus at the naval Battle of Fimreite, used tactics very similar to Nelson's victory, 'crossing the T', at Trafalgar; attacking lone ships with squadrons of his fleet, which caused Magnus' troops, heavily outnumbered in each longboat, to abandon ship and crowd into fewer and fewer ships, until they eventually sank with the weight of them.
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