Real phenomenon or just a literary trope?

On house-burning, murder, conjoined twins, and multiple personality disorder

Hello friendly people! Last night I finished the first draft of my fantasy novel, which means that, perhaps to your relief, I will stop exclusively reading Icelandic literature.

I have gone pretty far down the corpus at this point. I’ve read about fifteen of the best-known family sagas, the two best-known legendary sagas, the best-known romance, and now I am reading The History of the Earls of Orkney, which is pretty niche, even for me. Note, I was very prepared to keep going, though! I have a copy of Sturlung Saga, which is a later Icelandic family saga, and there are a number of Viking romances I haven’t read, and I could probably reread The Elder Edda and The Prose Edda, which are our main sources for pagan Norse belief and mythology. And, after all that, I still have the epic Heimskringla, the history of the kings of Norway, which is probably as long as all the rest combined.

When you’ve read a lot of the literature of a given time and place, you start to wonder how much of what you’re reading accorded to reality, and how much is mere literary convention. An example is house-burning. The climax of the saga of Burnt Njal is a house-burning—the eponymous hero is trapped in his house, and it’s lit on fire. The implication is that this is horrific and dishonorable. But house-burnings are actually quite common in Icelandic literature, and they’re not always regarded as particularly dishonorable. I think it’s mostly just a relatively easy way to kill someone: in Iceland, houses were made of sod, with wooden crossbeams and thatch for the roof. In those circumstances, if someone lit your roof on fire and guarded the doors, it would be very hard to escape: there are no windows, and you can’t really bust through a wall of sod. You couldn’t build walls either, since wood and stone were both hard to come by, so it was impossible to effectively defend your house. Quite frequently people are murdered when someone just walks into their house while they are sleeping and kills them. Another popular way of killing people was to climb onto the top of their door-frame and kill them when they stepped out to go to the bathroom.

Now how much of this was real versus mere literary convention? It’s hard to say! Take the example of our current literature: we have so many murders in our fiction. Look at Law and Order, there is one homicide squad in Manhattan handling twenty-four murders a year! In reality, there are hardly twenty-four murders in all of Manhattan in a single year, much less twenty-four handled by one pair of detectives, and most of those murders are not open cases: it’s pretty obvious who killed who. Like, in Law and Order, an awful lot of murders are, like, one business partner killing another, or a professor killing their student—not a lot of drunken rage or gang revenge.

Take Siamese Twins—they’re a real phenomenon, but John Green once joked that when he was a book reviewer he’d reviewed more novels about conjoined twins than the number of real, currently-living cases of conjoined twins. The same is true for multiple personality disorder—extremely rare in real life, much less rare in fiction. Someone reading our fiction 100 years in the future would very well conclude that life was extremely violent and there were a lot of disturbed people everywhere.

To be fair, that is what a lot of people assume about the contemporary world! Half the world seems to think San Francisco is an urban dystopia—odd because it’s the opposite of the truth, it is a literal paradise of flowers and parks and walkable neighborhoods.

My impression is that 10th century Iceland was uniquely peaceful by Scandinavian standards, and that the Icelanders felt a bit inadequate about it. Iceland had no external enemies: nobody came from outside to pillage iceland. It had no army or navy. And it had no real soldiers—the hero of every saga is just a farmer with a sword.

This stands in contrast to the rest of Scandinavia, during the Viking Age, where warfare seemed omnipresent. I think Iceland is a bit like contemporary America: we are the heirs to a violent society, and violence is part of our mythology, and lots of us carry weapons, but it’s not actually that violent here. Which is to say, our literature reveals something true about our psyche, but does it give the flavor of day-to-day life in America?

10th-century Iceland reminds me very strongly of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, about an author from a communist moon-society who goes to visit the rich, war-torn home planet. Iceland was democratic and relatively equal, but very poor. To the extent that people needed to work, everyone had to work—even the chieftain’s kid might need to go round up lost sheep, and even a chieftain’s home might run low on food. But because Iceland was so cold and barren, there wasn’t much work to do, so people spent all winter just chilling and telling stories. Indeed, what’s astonishing is the degree to which Icelanders retained information from throughout the Scandinavian world.

One of the legendary sagas I read, The Volsung Saga, is about the legendary kings of Denmark in the 4th and 5th centuries—Attila the Hun makes an appearance! And you can argue that the tale is a relatively recent invention, but it bears striking resemblances to Beowulf, which was written three hundred years earlier, and in England, by the Anglo-Saxons, who left the Denmark(ish) region in the 5th and 6th century. So although the tale is not historically accurate, it does at least feel authentically ancient! And the Icelanders just aggregated all kinds of tidbits, like the history of the earls of Orkney, or Norse pagan lore, or the history of the Kings of Norway. It feels very…bourgeois, to be honest. Very industrious!

Reading these books, and reading them in concert with Anglo-Saxon literature (I went through an AS phase a few years ago), you get the sense that there truly was a broader Germanic culture that shared certain commonalities, most notably in governance structure. In Germanic area, without that pesky Roman and Christian influence, they might call a person a king, but really he was just a guy who ruled through personal charisma. His influence extended no further than his sword. And, to a large extent, if his followers lost faith in him, they could follow someone else. And that’s why, when the Anglo-Saxons first come to Britannia, you can’t really tell if they’re taking over. There’s no King you’re negotiating with: just some guys who show up on a boat. And, later on, when the Vikings do the same, they don’t establish a Kingdom in the North, instead their region is just called the Danelaw: it’s the area where the Kings of England don’t rule. But who does? Ehh, we’re not sure, but they do things the Danish way up there.

And all of these democratic institutions that we see: the Althing, or elective monarchy—they have their roots in that Germanic culture. Like, in Sweden in particular, in the 15th century, there are a series of shockingly effective peasant revolts. Unlike the similar wave of revolts in France (the Jacquerie) and England (Wat Tyler) and Italy (the Ciompi)—all of which are ultimately a result of the Black Death—in Sweden, a portion of the nobility allies with the peasantry against the King (who is Danish anyway, so screw him). And this leads, ultimately, to the peasantry getting a (very very very small) bit of what we want.

I think this is the part in the post where I am supposed to say that Scandinavia is of world-historical importance, and that without this Germanic culture we wouldn’t have freedom and democracy. I don’t really think that’s true. Democracy is just a natural form of government, as old as kingship or personal rule. People have always come together and decided some things electively. And that democracy takes a lot of different forms. For instance, there’s a great book called The Byzantine Republic, about how the Emperors of the Eastern Roman Empire would periodically get unseated by the people of Constantinople, and how this process developed into its own form, with its own set of traditions (which were upset in 1206 by the Fourth Crusade, who didn’t obey the rules and sacked the city instead when the Emperor proved slow to give them what they wanted).

The world is complicated. A lot of things exist. But it’s not infinitely complicated, infinitely diverse—the same things crop up again and again—the same impulses lead to similar results. Or, rather, it is infinitely complicated, but it’s not an infinite infinity, it’s a smaller, somewhat-bounded infinity.

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Addenda:

Now that I have written a fantasy novel, I am dipping my toe back in to my first love, the SFF (sci-fi / fantasy) genre. I haven’t paid much attention to it lately, but for the first ten years of my career I was pretty active in it. I booted up my old submissions spreadsheet and was shocked at my number of publications: six in Nature, four in Lightspeed, three in Clarkesworld (the last ten years ago!), three in Asimov’s, two in F&SF, and, of course, one in Analog and one in Apex. The only two I never got were Strange Horizons and Tor.com.

Anyway I was reading Clarkesworld, to see what they were publishing, and most of it was bad, just like most everything is bad. There is a particular way that a sci-fi story can be bad, I call it “fluxing-gently” badness. It’s when the writing is just very overtly science-fictioney and nonsensical. So the first paragraph is like, “On the third moon of Jupiter, beneath the frozen carbon slurry, the six-armed crabs scuttled over the vents, as Miriam Blood-eyes attached the Hellebore canons on her neural nets.”¹

Cmon girl, you don’t need to do this. Just say she was pointing a gun at some crabs underwater. But I would venture to say most sci-fi stories are written that way.

Some of the stories were good though!

• “Waffles Are Only Goodbye For Now” is a boy and his dog story. Extremely sentimental, but who doesn’t enjoy that?

• “The World’s Wife” examines what it means to be a planet

My sci-fi stories lately, at least the unpublished ones, have tended to be far too complex. The problem with sci-fi and fantasy is that it can be hard for the reader to understand what, on a literal level, is actually happening. Sometimes you’re writing a story about a microbe traveling up a nose, and they’re like, oh it’s about monkeys achieving sentience, so now I am trying to be a lot simpler with my premises. Ideally I want something I can describe in one sentence, like I wrote a story yesterday about a woman who finds that a private equity company has bought up her husband’s stake in their marriage.

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Other Links:

If you’re into history podcasts, you should check out the Scandinavian History podcast. It’s a pretty good one, as these things go (and I have listened to a lot of them, believe me).

I found myself somewhat persuaded by the manifesto that S Peter Davis wrote, and yet I am still not really in favor of heavier moderation. I just kind of don’t believe that Nazis are a problem? Yeah, if Substack became Kiwifarms or 4chan, I would be upset, and I wouldn’t want to hang out here anymore. But…it’s not.

This did make me think about how, with capitalism, we outsource distasteful decisions. The truth is, nobody wants to be on a social network that is rife with Nazis, but we also don’t want to advocate censoring them, so instead we vote with our feet, and we just go to social networks that make content-moderation decisions that suit us.

On the other hand, I do wonder if the anti-nazi substackers realize that the community we have here is due, in part, to the lax moderation. I mean, there is no other social network that has an audience for a newsletter on the Great Books. There is also no other social network that embraces as wide a range of ‘heterodox’ viewpoints. I think there is a connection. It is kind of sappy to say it, but left and right really does come together peacefully on Substack. I am probably to the left of like 70 percent of my subscribers, but that’s fine! We can talk peacefully. And I wouldn’t want there to be a heavier-handed moderation that pushed away all of those people.

I am willing to be proven wrong here, but until I see an actual Nazi, I am going to call this just another moral panic, of the sort that The Atlantic is so good at conjuring.

1. Literal first line from one of the stories in CW: “She lay there, her still form pricked with dew. The metal casing of her cybernetics caught the dim glow of the sun’s easeful rise, but all too quickly the light shifted from a pink-on-bronze sheen to a mere glimmer to a light-that-once-had-been.”