{"id":92382,"date":"2015-11-30T15:04:06","date_gmt":"2015-11-30T20:04:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=92382"},"modified":"2015-11-30T16:29:36","modified_gmt":"2015-11-30T21:29:36","slug":"words-could-not-fell-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/11\/30\/words-could-not-fell-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Words Could Not Fell Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reciting\u00a0sagas in the Westfjords of Iceland.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

All photos by Karl Steel<\/p><\/div>\n

Haymaking time had come, warm, dry, and cloudless, on a late summer\u2019s morning roughly a millennium ago. All the men had gone out to mow, except for Thorkel, who lingered in bed, eavesdropping on the women in the next room, digesting his breakfast, and, with less composure, the revelation of his wife Asgerd\u2019s infidelity. At last Thorkel roused himself, to speak a verse:<\/p>\n

\n

Hear a great wonder,
\n hear of peace broken,
\n hear of a great matter,
\n hear of a death
\n \u2014one man\u2019s or more.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Thorkel\u2019s prophecy came true with the help of a big spear. After an anonymous assailant stabbed Asgerd\u2019s lover, Vestein, Vestein\u2019s and Thorkel\u2019s brother-in-law, Gisli\u2014\u201ca man of great prowess, [yet] fortune was not always with him\u201d\u2014initiated the obligatory, inexhaustible cycle of revenge killings. Honor and familial chore-shirking would doom Gisli to a life of feud, outlawry, and death by mob, but not before he, too, had seized the chance to speak a great many verses.<\/p>\n

When I first heard the medieval Icelandic\u00a0G\u00edsla saga S\u00farssonar,\u00a0<\/em>I was sitting on a mound where archaeologists had excavated a Viking-era burial site, where Gisli might very well have buried Vestein, in the Haukadalur valley, on the banks of\u00a0D\u00fdrafj\u00f6r\u00f0ur, in the Vestfir\u00f0ir<\/em>, or Westfjords of Iceland. It was July, and the grass grew high, spangled with toadstools, wildflowers, and dried sheep dung, but it wasn\u2019t haymaking weather. Under a gray, drizzly sky, beside the subarctic waters of the fjord, I huddled with my husband, Karl, on a gray wool blanket.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you cold? Do you need another blanket?\u201d one of our companions asked in English.<\/p>\n

They stood before us, braced in the wind, booted and cloaked: J\u00f3n, smiling straight at us as he recited dozens of pages of Icelandic text from memory; his assistant, J\u00falla, intently interpreting.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s the thing you sheathe a sword in?\u201d<\/p>\n

Karl, a scholar of medieval lit, said, \u201cUm, sheath. Scabbard?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes! Scabbard.\u201d It was the one word for which she needed a prompt. J\u00f3n and J\u00falla were, over the course of three hours, recounting the entirety of\u00a0G\u00edsla saga<\/em>, in the rain, for an audience of two Americans.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Sagas of Icelanders<\/a><\/em>\u00a0chronicle the settlement of Iceland during the ninth to eleventh centuries, known as both the Viking Age and the Saga Age. \u201cThey\u2019re not stories,\u201d J\u00f3n gently reproved me: \u201cthey\u2019re\u00a0sagas,<\/em>\u201d a unique medieval prose form that upends the conventions of domestic drama, genealogy, historical fiction, adventure, and myth. They date not from the Viking Age but from the Christian, multilingual literary society that succeeded it. Around 1130, Ari\u00a0\u00deorgilsson, the first recognized Icelandic author and historian, wrote Iceland\u2019s origin story in\u00a0The Book of Icelanders<\/em>. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, editors, translators, and even critics abounded, and celebrity poets, such as Snorri Sturluson, toured the royal courts of Scandinavia and England. That period of passionate inquiry and composition might yet be called a Silver Age, for its writers were troubled by lost cultural heritage, civil war, the relinquishment of Icelandic independence to Norway, and a sense of belatedness. Ari had composed the\u00a0\u00cdslendingab\u00f3k\u00a0<\/em>with the authority of proximity and living witness, within a generation\u2019s memory of the Saga Age. Two centuries later, the anxious writers committing saga-like oral narratives to parchment cited Ari\u2019s book for credibility.<\/p>\n

Writing the sagas both preserved and recreated them, converting the oral vestiges of pagan culture into definitive, fixed, single-author texts. Some things got lost, others overwritten, and many, no doubt, invented on the spot. But they endured. Their authors wanted us to know that words had value. They portrayed the Saga Age as the time when Odin himself was the patron of poets, and farmers and fishermen spoke verses. Gisli, who styled himself \u201cOdin\u2019s craftsman\u201d and a \u201cwringer of verses,\u201d never stopped throwing down, even at ball games:<\/p>\n

\n

Thorgrim rose very slowly, looked towards Vestein\u2019s burial mound, and said:<\/p>\n

Spear screeched in his wound
\n sorely\u2014I cannot be sorry.<\/p>\n

Running, Gisli took the ball and pitched it between Thorgrim\u2019s shoulder-blades. The blow pushed him flat on his face. Then Gisli said:<\/p>\n

Ball smashed his shoulders
\n broadly\u2014I cannot be sorry.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Gisli was a warrior poet, who heard music in poetry and blades:<\/p>\n

\n

They could not mar my shield
\n with their resounding blows.
\n It protected the poet well.
\n I had courage enough,
\n but they were too many
\n and I was overcome,
\n swords singing loud
\n in the air around me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Centuries later, I looked up Gisli\u2019s valley, Haukadalur, on Google Maps. To reach it, Karl and I drove up a mountain pass into a cloud, where visibility shrank to ten feet. We couldn\u2019t see the ice, the rams, or the dizzying plunges off the sides of the unguarded switchbacks until we were nearly upon them. It was a bit otherworldly. Many travel to Iceland hoping to find, among the natural splendors, something unnatural: rocks that suggest astonished trolls, rocks that house hidden people and impel splits in the highways. Here we\u2019d found something more rare than the einhyrningur<\/em>: a retired commercial fisherman luring tourists with three-hour recitations of Icelandic classical literature, unhurried and unabridged.<\/p>\n

During the performance of\u00a0G\u00edsla saga<\/em>, the sun kept peeking from one spot among the clouds. Time had stopped, somewhere in the tenth century, as J\u00f3n and J\u00falla told of voyages, lawsuits, witch-induced avalanches, squabbles over party decorations, and \u201cthe worst kind of sorcerer imaginable,\u201d who was naturally invited to said parties. J\u00f3n grinned over the saga\u2019s dry understatements: \u201cThey offered him a choice\u2014either he go with them and burn Thorbjorn and his sons to death in their house or they kill him on the spot. He chose to go with them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The saga abided by internal standards of fantasy and reality: it casually, dutifully noted that one neighbor was related to a half-troll, but insisted, with fantastical exactitude, on the location of his farm at the head of\u00a0Arnarfj\u00f6r\u00f0ur. (Likewise, as we\u2019d walked the shore road, I\u2019d noticed a house with letters over the door: SAEBOL<\/small><\/em>. Recalling the farm name from the saga\u2014Gisli\u2019s farm, Hol, was separated by a hayfield wall from\u00a0his sister Thordis\u2019s farm, Saebol\u2014I pointed it out. J\u00f3n replied, \u201cThis isn\u2019t Saebol. I don\u2019t know why they have that sign.\u201d The real Saebol, he explained, was still two whole minutes away.) The few times my attention wandered, I watched shore birds and fantasized about hot espresso, hot showers, hot heat back at the hotel\u2014only to yelp with glee, when Gisli\u2019s valiant wife, Aud, swung a silver-filled purse to smash an assassin\u2019s nose.<\/p>\n

Even as it tested my endurance, J\u00f3n and J\u00falla\u2019s performance was no-frills, dramatic, funny, and awkwardly intimate. Just as the sagas\u2019 syncretic origins had straddled Christian and pagan traditions, family lore and scholarship, the performance was at once medieval and contemporary: bilingual, reworking an eight-hundred-year-old text into a new oral translation, uniting folk culture and interactive outdoor theater. We were in the presence of skalds, minstrels, actors, readers, reenactors; they were tour guides to the remote, magical land of narrative.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Once Gisli had leapt to his death, Aud had gone on pilgrimage to Rome, and a long-forgotten brother in Norway had settled the last score, there ended the saga of Gisli Sursson. We clapped our mittens and cheered. Then, with no angling expeditions or whale watches\u2014their sideline\u2014booked for the afternoon, J\u00f3n invited us for a sail in his miniature longboat,\u00a0V\u00e9steinn,\u00a0<\/em>whose gunnels\u00a0were arrayed with wooden shields.<\/p>\n

V\u00e9steinn\u00a0<\/em>motored out of the harbor into the open water of the fjord. That was when the sun came out for good, turning the sky blue, and the fjord into a mirror of sky, clouds, and dark cliffs carpeted with evergreen crowberries. Everything glowed green, blue, gold, black, or white, evoking Gisli\u2019s encomia of the \u201cproud sea-flame\u201d and the \u201cpure gold\u201d that was \u201clit by the blue wave\u2019s lands,\u201d even if he was talking about women and bling. J\u00falla cut the engine, and they unfurled the square sails.\u00a0V\u00e9steinn\u00a0<\/em>surged forward. J\u00f3n offered me the rudder, and we sailed the little Viking ship up the fjord.<\/p>\n

I felt something akin to what J\u00f3n had felt, years before, after hearing a lecture on heritage tourism, when he\u2019d rushed home to reread the sagas for the first time since his school days. He\u2019d learned\u00a0G\u00edsla saga\u00a0<\/em>by heart: he, too, would be a wringer of verses, bedazzling the coldest, wettest afternoons with the power of language. In a time of purportedly diminished attention spans, there was something brave and poignant about J\u00f3n and J\u00falla\u2019s uncompromising fidelity to the prose. For Odin has withdrawn his patronage of the poets, not that he ever did much for them in the first place.<\/p>\n

\u201cWords could not fell me,\u201d Gisli bragged, \u201cby the fullest of means,\u201d but it was precisely words that had undone him: words overheard, words sworn in oath, words that even or especially \u201cshould not have been spoken.\u201d Had J\u00f3n taken heed? Karl and I were the only people who\u2019d booked the Saga tour all season. Even if the tour weren\u2019t located in\u00a0\u00deingeyri<\/em> (population 260), in a part of the country only forty-five minutes\u2019 flight from Reykjav\u00edk and full of marvels\u2014red sand beach, puffin cliffs\u2014but virtually empty of tourists, it would have struggled. Like many other expressions of Westfjords creativity, the\u00a0G\u00edsla saga<\/em>\u00a0tour fiercely resisted homogenization and audience expectations\u2014as did the midcentury outsider artist Sam\u00fael J\u00f3nsson\u2019s re-creation, in concrete, of the Alhambra\u2019s Fountain of Lions, and the Sea Monster Museum, a nineteenth-century-style natural history museum of the imaginary, Wunderkammer<\/em> of curatorial fashion, and assembly for all the steampunks of B\u00edldudalur, population 166. J\u00f3n violated generic purity: as a tour guide and small business owner, he couldn\u2019t be taken seriously as a theater performer; as an artist, his work was too classical, rigorous, and medieval\u2014really\u00a0<\/em>medieval\u2014to compete with Viking Lite attractions. I saw him as a fellow word-lover, trying to eat, pay rent, and make beauty in a world that expects creators to work for free, that pays for drivel and corporate content but weaponizes the fear of selling out, that conflates the need for a living wage with a lack of artistic commitment, and that mocks the persistent dreamers as hobbyists, kooks, and amateurs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere has never been a more accomplished and courageous man than Gisli,\u201d the saga notes, \u201cand yet fortune did not follow him.\u201d When we met him, J\u00f3n had just sunk his savings into a Danish Viking house, which he\u2019d shipped to\u00a0\u00deingeyri<\/em> for lamb roasts and fireside saga-telling evenings. For several months, he hasn\u2019t answered my e-mails or messages. He\u2019s let his Web site lapse; his phone\u2019s disconnected. I remember that Gisli, plagued by nightmarish forebodings, dreamed one good dream of his future: in a hall burning with hearths indicating long life, \u201cmen on benches \/ greeted me kindly,\u201d and a dream-woman told him, \u201cBetter things soon await you.\u201d I dream that J\u00f3n still carries on the Viking tradition of loving words.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Alison Kinney<\/a> is the author of a forthcoming book of cultural history, <\/em>Hood<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reciting\u00a0sagas in the Westfjords of Iceland. Haymaking time had come, warm, dry, and cloudless, on a late summer\u2019s morning roughly a millennium ago. All the men had gone out to mow, except for Thorkel, who lingered in bed, eavesdropping on the women in the next room, digesting his breakfast, and, with less composure, the revelation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":907,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[20363,19387,20366,1822,3281,8125,20364,17896,20360,10438,20362,20359,20361,20365],"class_list":["post-92382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-ari-thorgilsson","tag-fjords","tag-haukadalur","tag-iceland","tag-myth","tag-mythology","tag-odin","tag-oral-storytelling","tag-sagas","tag-storytelling","tag-the-saga-age","tag-the-sagas-of-icelanders","tag-the-viking-age","tag-westfjords"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReciting Sagas in the Westfjords of Iceland<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Alison Kinney listens to a three-hour recitation of Icelandic sagas.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/11\/30\/words-could-not-fell-me\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Words Could Not Fell Me by Alison Kinney\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"November 30, 2015 \u2013 Reciting\u00a0sagas in the Westfjords of Iceland. 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