[In the following excerpt from his introduction to a revised edition of Muriel Press's 1899 translation of the Laxdaela Saga, Foote discusses the epic subtext of the poem, its idealized characters, and its generally clear, unassuming style.]

Laxdæla saga, the saga of the men of Salmon-river-dale, was written in Iceland about a.d. 1250. The author was at home in the Dales, the inner districts of Breiðifjörðr, the scene of most of the action of the story.

The saga is the work of a mature and sophisticated artist. After the unique Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, written perhaps some twenty-five years earlier, it is the second of the sagas of Icelanders to be conceived and executed on a grand scale. In so far as it is permissible to speak of the development of these sagas as a genre, irrespective of the idiosyncrasies and merits of individual authors, the Laxdæla saga may be said to mark a culmination and a turning-point. Before it lay a period of about sixty years of practice in the composition of sagas of this kind. In that time the saga-writers established a style and method of narration and achieved freedom and flexibility in their treatment of the stories they chose to tell about Icelandic heroes of the so-called Saga Age, the century from about a.d. 930 to 1030. The conventions thus existed for the author of the Laxdæla saga to follow or adapt, and there was nothing to deter his imagination from shaping as it would the great heroic and romantic drama that lies at the heart of his story. After it was written there followed another period of something over half a century in which many more sagas were written. They include the nearly flawless Hrafnkels saga and the majestic Njáls saga, but in general this period is one of decline. It is not so much a decline in literary competence, however, for in some ways the writers become more and more fluent and adept in handling literary artifice, to the extent that effects of excitement or suspense or pathos often seem bought on the cheap, but the falling-off lies rather in an unwillingness to treat serious themes in a sustainedly serious way. The Laxdæla saga was a deservedly popular and influential work, but to some extent it foreshadows the decline to come, not least in a certain preference its author shows for ornament above substance in the presentation of masculine character. As may be expected, it was easier to imitate the weaknesses of its author than to emulate his great achievements.

A saga like Laxdæla saga may be described by a paraphrase of a well-known definition of epic: it is a long story with history in it. The chief people in it were real Icelanders of the tenth and early eleventh centuries. The family relationship described, for example, and things such as Gudrun's four marriages, or Kjartan's stay as a hostage at the court of King Olaf Tryggvason while the conversion of Iceland to Christianity was in the balance, or his death in a feud against the sons of Osvif—these are historical facts. Some of the historical framework must have been common knowledge in the author's day, some he could learn from books. Most important among the latter was a twelfth-century work, now lost, on the settlement of Iceland, probably chiefly compiled by Ari Thorgilson, the ‘Deep-in-lore’, who lived from 1067 to 1148 (cf. pp. 6, 269).¹ From the critical point of view of the modern historian, the interest of the Laxdæla saga as a source must depend almost exclusively on the author's borrowing of genealogical and chronological information from this early work.

The author was familiar with other written stories, and he refers to two of them by name (pp. 235, 239). He also knew many family and local traditions, and he had heard many stories, of all kinds, that were passed around by word of mouth. What he may have learnt from these in the way of matter and technique is naturally hard to investigate. Even if we are able to decide with some degree of probability what is drawn from local tradition and what is the product of the author's imagination, we are still faced with the virtually insoluble problem as to how far any tradition generally current in the author's day was faithful to the historical facts. Sometimes, as in the story of the execution of the family of Kotkell the wizard, for example, or the story of Harri the ox (pp. 121, 124, 95), a connection is made with place-names, and the author may well be repeating local tales, however little or much truth there may be in them. But the combination of such anecdotes with other matters that have an important bearing on the general progress of the narrative is clearly the result of the author's imaginative ordering. Although it may be thus difficult to distinguish between traditional and imaginative elements, we may certainly admire the author's skill in introducing what is intrinsically interesting and exciting, some of it certainly from traditional tales, in such a way as to serve the larger purposes of his story-telling.

It can also be seen that the author's imagination was prompted by accounts, written and oral, of occurrences in Iceland in his own lifetime and in that of the preceding generation. Perhaps the most striking instance of this is to be found in the parallel between the following event, which occurred in 1244, and the description of the action of Helgi Hardbeinson when he meets Gudrun after the death of Bolli (p. 197):

A party of men under the leadership of Ásbjörn Guðmundarson and Björn Dufgusson set on a man called Magni, a supporter of the enemies of the Sturlungs. Björn gave him a wound which appeared mortal—‘At that Ásbjörn came up and asked why he did not kill him. Björn said he had done as much as he was going to. Asbjörn then went to Magni and cut off his head. Then Vígdís Markúsdóttir, Magni's wife, came up. Ásbjörn dried the blood off his sword on her clothes; and she called down many curses on them and prayed God to be quick to avenge on them their crime.’²

Helgi's similar action in wiping his spear on the end of Gudrun's shawl is barbaric enough, but the author has turned Ásbjörn's piece of raw savagery to artistic account. The characters of Helgi himself, of Gudrun and of Halldor are deepened by the episode, and the whole narrative gains by the link forged with the future: we looked forward to the birth of the younger Bolli and the vengeance to be taken on Helgi.

Out of materials such as these, fused and moulded by the working of a powerful imagination, the author has made an ample family chronicle, which in its middle part is raised to the level of the tragic heroic. This is the part which makes Laxdæla saga the famous work it is, and on this the memory dwells. The story of Kjartan, Bolli and Gudrun is the story of two men and a woman, and the woman loves the man who is not her husband. This is a common theme in the story-telling of any age, and it was popular in Iceland, where a number of early sagas show the same basic situation. It must however seem a rare twist to this well-tried tale, when we find that the wife urges her husband to bring about the death of the man she truly loves. This is what happens in the legend of Sigurd the dragon-slayer, preserved in antique form in some of the poems of the Edda.³ Sigurd ought to be the husband of Brynhild, he is the nonpareil to whom she can fittingly give herself, but instead, by a deceit, she is married to Gunnar, his friend. Sigurd is married to Gudrun, Gunnar's sister. When Brynhild discovers the deceit and after quarrelling with Gudrun, she incites Gunnar to kill Sigurd, and he is an accomplice in his murder. Brynhild's motive is double-edged, in keeping with the hard heroic outlook of this early poetry. On the one hand her integrity demands that the mind-disturber, the temptation, should be removed; on the other hand her pride cannot be content with the second best she knows her husband to be. The death of Sigurd removes the cause of her conflicting loyalties, and after his death her husband would achieve the pre-eminence that satisfies her pride. Her feelings toward Sigurd are never those of hatred, but she is glad that his death means he can be no longer enjoyed by his wife, Gudrun, for whom she feels rankling jealousy and swollen malice. Sigurd falls as a sacrifice that must cause terrible hurt to Brynhild, but her hatred of Gudrun is satisfied and her self-respect is whole, finally fulfilled by self-inflicted death, joining Sigurd on his funeral pyre.

There is here an essential key to the understanding of Gudrun's conduct in the Laxdæla saga. It is only necessary to replace the names of Brynhild and Sigurd, Gunnar and Gudrun, by those of Gudrun and Kjartan, Bolli and Hrefna, and the illumination is given. But it cannot of course be the whole story, partly because the author has to transpose this ancient legend in terms that suit an aristocratic farming society against a familiar Icelandic background of time and place, and partly because he is writing within a convention that imposes its own requirements on the form of the narrative. An essential part of the attitude and technique of the saga-writers depends on the fact that, although they themselves create the personalities of their characters, they yet choose to know those characters imperfectly, as if they were witnesses of their conduct and not the manipulators of it. They only go part way in imposing the characters of their story on the reader, who is given the illusion that he too is a witness, hearing and observing side by side with the writer. The author guides our imagination by describing, at certain selected moments only, the action and speech of the people, but the exploration of the possibilities inherent in their characters is left largely to our own creative curiosity. The author of the Laxdæla saga thus does not overtly attempt to work out the implications of the relationships between Gudrun, Bolli and Kjartan. Insight into Gudrun's mind is given on several occasions, into Kjartan's almost never. No attempt is made to convey Bolli's feelings, the conflict, the ignominy and affliction of his mind both before and after the death of Kjartan, but just once, when it can make its most devastating impact, Bolli's words give us our deepest glimpse into the seething passions that lie just below the surface of this ‘volcanic saga’. This is in the exchange between Gudrun and Bolli after his return from the slaying of Kjartan:

Then spake Gudrun, ‘Harm spurs on to hard deeds; I have spun yarn for twelve ells of homespun, and you have killed Kjartan.’ Bolli replied, ‘That unhappy deed might well go late from my mind even if you did not remind me of it.’ Gudrun said, ‘Such things I do not count among mishaps. It seemed to me you stood in higher station during the year Kjartan was in Norway than now, when he trod you under foot when he came back to Iceland. But I count that last which to me is dearest, that Hrefna will not go laughing to her bed tonight.’ Then Bolli said, and right wroth he was, ‘I think it is quite uncertain that she will turn paler at these tidings than you do; and I have my doubts as to whether you would not have been less startled if I had been lying behind on the field of battle, and Kjartan had told the tidings.’

Nothing could be more vitally concentrated or more ambiguously revealing.

The movement of the narrative in the first part of the book is easy paced. Each episode is told as if for its own sake, but they all bring development to the story of Hoskuld and of Olaf the Peacock, his son. The tempo quickens when we arrive at the generation which is to play out the tragic central story, and episode follows episode in which the future is foreshadowed: the curse on the sword Foot-biter, Olaf's dream after the slaughtering of Harri the ox, Gest Oddleifson's interpretation of Gudrun's dreams and his dark forebodings about Kjartan and Bolli—and there are many other minor notes of premonition. The story of Kjartan and Bolli in Norway, essential for the construction of the whole, is made into a rounded episode, but in Iceland events move swiftly and naturally on to the slaying of Kjartan, the vengeance on Bolli, and in time to the death of Helgi Hardbeinson. Thereafter a gentler pace is resumed, interest dies away, family chronicle returns, though now the story is not much of the men of Herdholt but more of Gudrun's sons by Bolli and of her last husband, Thorkell Eyjolfson. Only at the end does the author, with a consummate sense of timing, lead us back to the great riddle and the real reason why the story was told, when Gudrun, pressed by her son's questioning, says: ‘To him I was worst whom I loved best.’

Of the characters in the saga it is the women who have outstanding vitality and naturalness. There is a whole series of striking portraits, Unn, Vigdis the wife of Thord Goddi, Jorunn, Thorgerd, Breeches-Aud, Thordis Olaf's daughter, and, of course, Gudrun herself. It is appropriate that the saga begins and ends with pictures of two old women, who after imperious and momentous careers are now described with small authentic touches that firmly anchor them in our own sort of reality: Unn the matriarch, who did not like to be asked about her health, and Gudrun, given to solitude and piety but devoted to her granddaughter and glad when her son came to visit her. By contrast the chief men, Olaf, Kjartan and Bolli Bollison, appear still more wooden. The last of these never becomes real at all, while Olaf makes a more natural impression as the solicitous peace-loving father of grown-up sons than he does as the glorified young prince seeking his royal grandfather in Ireland, and Kjartan becomes somewhat more human when he takes his petty and effective revenge on the men of Laugar. But in general the author gives them small scope to persuade us of their outstanding abilities, and they win the high esteem of mighty men far too cheaply. In Kjartan's case an intentional resemblance to the flawless Sigurd of heroic legend may have been sought, but the idealization of these characters must also be partly due to the influence of the lifeless and hyperbolic perfection of the heroes of southern romance, literature that was becoming fashionable in Scandinavia in the lifetime of the author of Laxdæla saga. Influence from the same source may also be detected in the author's taste for the courtly and stately, his love of clothes and colours, the magnificent and the vaguely beautiful. In his description of individuals, he is usually content with brief, stereotyped and rather more than life-size phrases—a more elaborate portrait of Kjartan (pp. 86-7) is an idealized picture of virile beauty, not of any single man. The great exception to this general rule is found in the description he gives of the men who are to attack Helgi Hardbeinson (pp. 220-3), although here much attention is also paid to their clothes and trappings. It is a patent literary device, this episode, and one of venerable antecedents, but few of us would be willing to lose this fascinating series of rapid sketches, where we see real Icelandic faces, spoilt only by the description of young Bolli as ‘aged [literally, swollen] with grief’.

The style of the author has an unassuming ease and propriety, it is smooth yet powerful, an impression not seriously affected by an occasional emptiness of phrase. The story moves on naturally and inevitably, and the whole book must be counted a masterpiece of construction when we consider the great range of the materials to be welded together. The self-effacing manner of the writing concentrates our attention on the progress of the narrative, but the author often surprises us with some quick and unexpected observation of human nature or of a life-like scene—Thord's generous appreciation of Aud's conduct in attacking him (p. 111), the bondswoman's description of Stigandi, the evil outcast, her lover, ‘—and in my eyes very handsome’ (p. 123), the picture of Kjartan ‘slipping on a red tunic’ as he overhears the talk of which woman should have precedence at the feast (p. 161). There are many other moments, great and small, when we recognize the author's mastery, a mastery which reaches its height in his profound realization of the tragic theme at the saga's centre.

Notes

1. On Ari, cf. the Introduction to Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla (Everyman's Library, No. 847, 1961); G. Turville-Petre, Origins of Icelandic Literature (Oxford, 1953), pp. 88 ff., especially pp. 102-8.

2. Guðbrandur Vigfússon, Sturlunga saga (Oxford, 1878), ii. 38.

3. The saga shows closest connections with the very ancient fragmentary poem called Brot of Sigurðarkviðu and the much younger Sigurðarkviða in skamma.