a people’s history of iceland
Foreward
Until recent times, the so-called Isendinger sögur have been touted as among the earliest, “Homeric” accounts of Northern Europe’s settlement, its conflicts, its wars, its larger-than-life heroes: The Saga of Grettir the Strong, Gisli Sursson’s Saga, Njal’s Saga and the like enjoy universal acceptance as epic myths of origin derived from actual events in the Norse world.
Yet Iceland and Norway did not become the countries they are today exclusively, or indeed primarily, because of Hrut Herjolfsson or Bjorn Brynjolfsson, however impressively they rampaged, stormed, and brained their legendary adversaries from one end of the frozen north to the other in an ultimately futile struggle for dominance. Rather, as these anomalous individuals wreaked their havoc on glacier and fjord, volcanic peak and prodigious snowpack, ordinary Icelanders and Norwegians went about their daily lives, knitting the dense weave of their surprisingly complex societies while such brutish and insensible militarists such as Schnorrer the Sheepshearer, Skallagrim the Defiler of Livestock, and Thorir the Grim made merry with their arsenal of crude iron weaponry, laying seige to long-established settlements where civility had long characterized daily life: Hrhelenarubenstein, Cocochanelmarik, Backlessbalenciagaheim, and countless other outposts which survive in our day as nothing more than indecipherable runes.
For generations, readers have been enthralled by the exploits of Kveldulf the Fartless, Brutal Midget Oleif, Gunnlaug the Cannibal, and Hrafn Goatlover. But what of the average, working-class Icelander whose daily lot consisted of the harvesting of guano, the production of mineral-enriched snow cakes, and the search for arable patches of land between the copious lava flows which, at one time or another, threatened the very existence of most human settlements on this remote and, some claim, mysterious land mass in the North Atlantic?
The lot of these unsung Olafs and Olafsdotters was one of crushing hardship and unceasing labor, most often for the benefit, not of themselves or their families, but the warlords and seafaring conquerors, many of them physically deformed and mentally unbalanced, who had no fixed abode, and availed themselves of any settlement they stumbled upon in the course of their wayward peregrinations. Their lack of navigational skills and ignorance of celestial movements caused the early Norsemen to march and sail in circles, periodically returning to the same half-reconstructed villages and towns they had already pillaged only a few months before. Their habits of rapine, murder, braining, arson, and poor grooming caused unending hardship and terror for the commoner, who was neither citizen nor subject, as the territory in question was neither a country nor a province, possessed no sovereign or regent, but lay for centuries at the mercy of foul-smelling marauders in clanking armor and horned headgear, their beards often grown to a knee-length thicket of lice-ridden tangles and smeared with the viscera of uncooked reindeer or, in fallow times, the bloody fur of chipmunks.
How True are the Sagas?
"There was a man named Ulf, the son of Bjalfi and of Hallbera, the daughter of Ulf the Fearless. She was the sister of Hallbjorn Half-troll from Hrafnista, the father of Ketil Haeng. Ulf was so big and strong that no man was a match for him; and he was still only a youth when he became a Viking and went raiding. His companion was Kari from Berle, a man of high birth who had the strength and courage to perform great deeds. Kari was a beserk. He and Ulf shared all they owned and were good friends."
Thus begins Egil's Saga, among the best-known of the so-called Icelandic Sagas. A misnomer in this instance, as Iceland had not yet been discovered in the time of Ulf, nor yet during Ulf the Fearless's lifetime, nor in that of Kari the Beserk. Iceland was, in fact, terra incognita to both Ulfs and the Half-trolls of Hrafnista, who could not have had contact with Kari or with anyone else from Berle, as Berle was not a settlement but a person: Milton Berle the Well-hung, whose name appears in early runes in connection with Karil (not Kari!) the Laemmle of Bell Hair. Karil later acquired the nick name Karil the Incontinent, an affectionate diminutive bestowed by Harald Tangle-hair. While Karil lived to a ripened age, even a perfunctory examination of the pertinent runes place Harald's years of pillage and rapine a full century later than the death of Ketil Haeng in the Viking seige of Margohemingwae, making it impossible for Ulf and Kari(l) to have gone beserk together.
Similar discrepancies, half-truths, half-lies, and prevarications comprise a sort of pseudohistorical acne on what have come to be called the Icelandic Sagas, but would more properly be termed the Norwegian Narratives, bearing in mind that Iceland was unknown before the time of Harald's unification of Norway, at which time he became known as Harald Fair-haired, having vowed never to wash his beard or his person until he ruled over all of Norway.
That the Norwegian Conquest itself was not quite the earth-shattering accomplishment the Sagas represent it as need not trouble us here; I shall merely note in passing that the approximate population of Norway at the time of Harald's ascendancy was less than two thousand people, most of them settled in Urslaandressberg, later known as Oslo. Moreover, forensic archaeologists have demonstrated than fully one-third of this decidedly small population was comprised of trolls, half-trolls, pinheads, dwarves, and hydrocephalic individuals, none of whom could have engaged in a clash of arms with the depraved but normally proportioned Harald.
Runes can fool us. For over sixty years, the lexical ciphers used by runic interpreters reversed the vowel-to-consonant proportion of runic inscriptions; Flao became Olaf, Flu, a disease, was rendered as Ulf, "father of Ulf the Fearless," when a corrected transcription would read, "Hrafnista the Flu-less, home of Flao the Beserker." Such errors have been compounded by generations of belle-lettrist comparison of the Sagas with authentic epics such as Gilgamesh and the achievements of brilliant individuals like Shakespeare.
It's time we let the air out of this
Foreward
Until recent times, the so-called Isendinger sögur have been touted as among the earliest, “Homeric” accounts of Northern Europe’s settlement, its conflicts, its wars, its larger-than-life heroes: The Saga of Grettir the Strong, Gisli Sursson’s Saga, Njal’s Saga and the like enjoy universal acceptance as epic myths of origin derived from actual events in the Norse world.
Yet Iceland and Norway did not become the countries they are today exclusively, or indeed primarily, because of Hrut Herjolfsson or Bjorn Brynjolfsson, however impressively they rampaged, stormed, and brained their legendary adversaries from one end of the frozen north to the other in an ultimately futile struggle for dominance. Rather, as these anomalous individuals wreaked their havoc on glacier and fjord, volcanic peak and prodigious snowpack, ordinary Icelanders and Norwegians went about their daily lives, knitting the dense weave of their surprisingly complex societies while such brutish and insensible militarists such as Schnorrer the Sheepshearer, Skallagrim the Defiler of Livestock, and Thorir the Grim made merry with their arsenal of crude iron weaponry, laying seige to long-established settlements where civility had long characterized daily life: Hrhelenarubenstein, Cocochanelmarik, Backlessbalenciagaheim, and countless other outposts which survive in our day as nothing more than indecipherable runes.
For generations, readers have been enthralled by the exploits of Kveldulf the Fartless, Brutal Midget Oleif, Gunnlaug the Cannibal, and Hrafn Goatlover. But what of the average, working-class Icelander whose daily lot consisted of the harvesting of guano, the production of mineral-enriched snow cakes, and the search for arable patches of land between the copious lava flows which, at one time or another, threatened the very existence of most human settlements on this remote and, some claim, mysterious land mass in the North Atlantic?
The lot of these unsung Olafs and Olafsdotters was one of crushing hardship and unceasing labor, most often for the benefit, not of themselves or their families, but the warlords and seafaring conquerors, many of them physically deformed and mentally unbalanced, who had no fixed abode, and availed themselves of any settlement they stumbled upon in the course of their wayward peregrinations. Their lack of navigational skills and ignorance of celestial movements caused the early Norsemen to march and sail in circles, periodically returning to the same half-reconstructed villages and towns they had already pillaged only a few months before. Their habits of rapine, murder, braining, arson, and poor grooming caused unending hardship and terror for the commoner, who was neither citizen nor subject, as the territory in question was neither a country nor a province, possessed no sovereign or regent, but lay for centuries at the mercy of foul-smelling marauders in clanking armor and horned headgear, their beards often grown to a knee-length thicket of lice-ridden tangles and smeared with the viscera of uncooked reindeer or, in fallow times, the bloody fur of chipmunks.
How True are the Sagas?
"There was a man named Ulf, the son of Bjalfi and of Hallbera, the daughter of Ulf the Fearless. She was the sister of Hallbjorn Half-troll from Hrafnista, the father of Ketil Haeng. Ulf was so big and strong that no man was a match for him; and he was still only a youth when he became a Viking and went raiding. His companion was Kari from Berle, a man of high birth who had the strength and courage to perform great deeds. Kari was a beserk. He and Ulf shared all they owned and were good friends."
Thus begins Egil's Saga, among the best-known of the so-called Icelandic Sagas. A misnomer in this instance, as Iceland had not yet been discovered in the time of Ulf, nor yet during Ulf the Fearless's lifetime, nor in that of Kari the Beserk. Iceland was, in fact, terra incognita to both Ulfs and the Half-trolls of Hrafnista, who could not have had contact with Kari or with anyone else from Berle, as Berle was not a settlement but a person: Milton Berle the Well-hung, whose name appears in early runes in connection with Karil (not Kari!) the Laemmle of Bell Hair. Karil later acquired the nick name Karil the Incontinent, an affectionate diminutive bestowed by Harald Tangle-hair. While Karil lived to a ripened age, even a perfunctory examination of the pertinent runes place Harald's years of pillage and rapine a full century later than the death of Ketil Haeng in the Viking seige of Margohemingwae, making it impossible for Ulf and Kari(l) to have gone beserk together.
Similar discrepancies, half-truths, half-lies, and prevarications comprise a sort of pseudohistorical acne on what have come to be called the Icelandic Sagas, but would more properly be termed the Norwegian Narratives, bearing in mind that Iceland was unknown before the time of Harald's unification of Norway, at which time he became known as Harald Fair-haired, having vowed never to wash his beard or his person until he ruled over all of Norway.
That the Norwegian Conquest itself was not quite the earth-shattering accomplishment the Sagas represent it as need not trouble us here; I shall merely note in passing that the approximate population of Norway at the time of Harald's ascendancy was less than two thousand people, most of them settled in Urslaandressberg, later known as Oslo. Moreover, forensic archaeologists have demonstrated than fully one-third of this decidedly small population was comprised of trolls, half-trolls, pinheads, dwarves, and hydrocephalic individuals, none of whom could have engaged in a clash of arms with the depraved but normally proportioned Harald.
Runes can fool us. For over sixty years, the lexical ciphers used by runic interpreters reversed the vowel-to-consonant proportion of runic inscriptions; Flao became Olaf, Flu, a disease, was rendered as Ulf, "father of Ulf the Fearless," when a corrected transcription would read, "Hrafnista the Flu-less, home of Flao the Beserker." Such errors have been compounded by generations of belle-lettrist comparison of the Sagas with authentic epics such as Gilgamesh and the achievements of brilliant individuals like Shakespeare.
It's time we let the air out of this
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