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Adventure on the high seas. Land deals gone awry. Naked power grabs. Sound like the latest James Clavell best-seller? Try the Icelandic sagas — 13th-century tales of violence, feuds, loves and jealousies that would rival any present-day paperback. For much of this century, the prevailing view among scholars was that the Old Norse sagas, told in realistic narrative prose rather than the dominant medieval poetic forms used on the Continent, are pure fiction. But to Jesse Byock, professor of Old Norse in UCLA's Department of Germanic Languages, whether or not the writers took poetic license with their plotlines and characters isn't the point. The crucial factor for Byock, a social historian, is that the saga authors placed their stories within the everyday context of their society — and here, as with any other great written work, the authors knew their territory.
Through an interdisciplinary approach that unites history, anthropology and literature, Byock uses the sagas and legal documents from the period to reconstruct how Viking-age pioneers in the 9th century settled the immense uninhabited Icelandic frontier. In the process, he's opened a window into one of history's most fascinating experiments in state-building. Populated by farmers who sought refuge from the powerful kings and overlords of their Scandinavian societies, Iceland was one of the first true rugged-individualist societies. Isolated by the Atlantic from enemies and without a hostile indigenous population, the immigrants and their descendants feuded over purely domestic issues — love, hate and land. Committed to vellum in the 13th century, their tales make up the medieval West's largest body of vernacular literature and are filled with colorful stories of epic disputes, leaving it to future scholars to argue over their veracity. "Freeprosists" hold that the sagas recount actual historical events. "Bookprosists," who have prevailed in recent decades, use obvious inaccuracies from the texts to bolster their claim that the sagas are the creations of their 13th-century authors and should be viewed only as great literature.
Byock, however, has added a compelling new argument to the debate. In two books and a series of journal articles, Byock weighs in with a third point of view: While often fictional in their presentation of details, the sagas get it right when it comes to the big picture — the social patterns, moral codes and political workings of an evolving society — and thus have great value not only as literary works, but as historical texts.
Byock recently found the most dramatic evidence in the person of Egil, the 10th-century Icelandic poet and Viking. The hero of Egil's Saga, he shared an unusual physical trait with his father and grandfather — a disfigured skull and facial features. At the end of the saga, Skapti, one of Egil's descendants, exhumes his bones 150 years after he'd been buried. Amazed at how large the skull appeared, Skapti, in an effort to determine its thickness, brings a heavy ax down on the skull — producing neither a crack nor a dent.
"Since everyone knows a man's skull that had been in the ground 150 years would shatter on impact, scholars have used this to disprove that the sagas contain any sort of historical memory," Byock says. But Byock wasn't so sure. The poet's later work reveals that he went deaf and blind, often lost his balance and suffered through headaches and lethargy. Turning to the medical literature, Byock found a syndrome, Paget's disease, first diagnosed in 1877, characterized by symptoms remarkably similar to Egil's. Byock's study, "Egil's Bones," a combination of modern medical science and medieval sleuthing published in Scientific American, makes a powerful case that Egil was the first recorded sufferer of Paget's, adding nearly 1,000 years of epidemiological history to a disease. The study also lends credence to Byock's argument that the sagas are historical texts. "You have to ask yourself why generations would tell these stories," says Byock. "It has to be because the sagas answered social and intellectual, as well as entertainment, needs."
— D. G. |