Resumo de Saga Of Icelanders

Beginning in the 9th century, settlers from Norway created in Iceland a society of fiercely
independent farmers, fishermen, and traders; in the 13th and 14th centuries
their descendants wrote a whole series of stories about them. These family
sagas tell of feuds, duels and battles, legal conflicts, love affairs, travels
and raids to Norway and the
British Isles and further a field, and the attempted settlement of Vinland.

The focus of the sagas is always on individuals and their relationships.
They offer us strong men and outlaws, legal experts and tricksters, poets and
warriors serving Norwegian kings, respected leaders and arbitrators ? and
powerful matriarchs, faithful wives, and trouble-stirring women. The saga
writers never venture directly into the minds of their protagonists, but they
produce vivid, distinctive portraits of individuals caught up in memorable
events: Egil, imprisoned in York by King Eirik Bloodaxe, with one night to
compose a poem to save his life; the final ridge-top stand of the outlawed
Gisli; Askel working for peace, to the point of trying to arrange in advance
the settlement for his own death; Kormak''s life-long obsession with Steingerd;
Gunnar turning back from going into exile, moved by the beauty of the
landscape; the imperious Gudrun, revealing at the end of her life which of her
men she had loved the most; the burning of Njal and his family and the
protracted legal and armed struggle to avenge them; and many others.

The sagas draw on local family stories, older myths and legends, and the
broader body of medieval literature, along with a good deal of invention and
original creation. While some are awkwardly structured, others rework their
sources in sophisticated ways and some are literary masterpieces. In some,
unity is provided by a biographical focus, sometimes ending with a peaceful
death at the end of a long life, sometimes building with tragic inevitability
to a climactic killing and the resulting resolution. Others are almost
political studies, tracing the shifting balance of power between leading
figures in a particular region. And while this genre of sagas is defined by a
realistic treatment of early Iceland,
many are (or incorporate) comic stories, fantastic tales, and romances.

In their attention to the actions of individuals
within social networks, and the working through of their consequences, the
Icelandic sagas are important precursors of the modern novel. They directly
influenced many writers, among them Walter Scott and J.R.R. Tolkien. The sagas
are also a valuable source of information about medieval Iceland, a
subject of interest to more than medievalists. One of its notable features is
that it had a sophisticated legal system but no executive government, which
makes it a magnet for political theorists ? if you search the web for information
on medieval Iceland,
you''ll find a running fight between the libertarians and anarchists over who can
best claim it as an exemplum.

Some aspects of the sagas do take a little getting used to. They are
episodic, sometimes covering events over several generations and jumping across
decades to continue the story of a feud or the history of a region, and they
alternate between periods of tension and relaxation. Characters are often
introduced with a paragraph or two of genealogical information unrelated to the
main story; and the sheer density of names, often shared by several characters,
can be confusing. And obviously much of the cultural context is foreign to the
modern reader. Elements of foretelling and prophecy, for example, are nearly
ubiquitous in the sagas, though they never replace human actions and decisions
as explanations of events. One soon becomes accustomed to these things,
however, and overall the sagas are among the most accessible of medieval
genres.

Unless your library has a copy or will obtain one for you, The Complete
Sagas of Icelanders is probablt practical for a newcomer to the sagas;
cheap paperback editions of any of the better known ones should be easy to come
by. But if you become seriously interested in the sagas ? and I should warn you
that they are addictive ? then it''s hard to go past The Complete Sagas.

Firstly, the translations are good. My academic friends assure me they are
mostly of high quality, accurate enough to be usable for scholarly purposes.
More importantly for the lay reader, they are lively and readable, avoiding
inappropriate archaism or colloquialism. The sagas are each preceded by a brief
note on when they were written and their manuscript sources, but otherwise they
are clean, mostly unburdened by unnecessary commentary or annotation. The only
regular exceptions to this are marginal glosses for the kennings,
highly figurative stock phrases in the poetry embedded in some of the sagas,
and some explanatory notes where texts are partial or put together from
different sources.

For readers who do want some background information, The Complete Sagas
has a really good general introduction, a glossary of terms which are likely to
be unfamiliar, some maps, and an index of characters. A minor complaint here is
that the maps could show more detail and that they are all at the end of volume
five, instead of in the appropriate volumes ? and the index of characters is
useful enough that it could almost have been repeated in each volume.

Perhaps most importantly, this is the only uniform, coordinated translation
of the family sagas available. Collecting alternative translations of them all
would be a lot of work, if it is even possible, and the result would not offer
as coherent a presentation of the genre. Places, characters and events often
feature in several sagas, and motifs, stock phrases and thematic elements
recur; a uniform translation scheme makes these connections easier to follow.
On the other hand, the sagas do vary in style, mood, and structure, and this
too is easier to appreciate when not obscured by variations in translation
approach.

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