I’ve now read ten or twelve Icelandic sagas, and what’s fascinating is, despite being translated by different people, they don’t vary much stylistically. This is something that literary critics have commented upon as well—the style truly is anonymous. They vary from each other less than the Odyssey does from the Iliad, or Sophocles does from Aeschylus. They are lacking precisely that quality of voiceyness that we crave in modern authors.
In fact when you come across a saga that takes a few stylistic liberties (e.g. this passage in the Saga of the Sworn Brothers), it immediately stands out as very different from other sagas, even though perhaps 95 percent of the saga is written in the plain style.
News of Havar’s death spread quickly, yet when Thorgeir learned that his father had been slain he showed no reaction. His face did not redden because no anger ran through his skin. Nor did he grow pale because his breast stored no rage. Nor did he become blue because no anger flowed through his bones. In fact, he showed no response whatsoever to the news – for his heart was not like the crop of a bird, nor was it so full of blood that it shook with fear. It had been hardened in the Almighty Maker’s forge to dare anything.
Reading the sagas has made me extremely annoying—a tendency that I have recognized and chosen to embrace. Over Thanksgiving I kept trying out my bits of saga storytelling. For instance, when my mom was trying to goad my dad into fighting with our AirBnB host, I said, “The icelanders have a saying, women’s counsel is cold counsel. Like in the story of Thorstein Staff-Struck, his neighbor Bjorn is goaded into attacking him, and when he picks up his axe to do it, she gets scared and advises him not to go, but he says, “Isn’t this what you wanted me to do?’
Another time, discussing my mom and dad’s plans to spend their retirement on the high seas, I said, “Are you concerned about sea worms? The explorer Bjarni Herjolfson, who discovered America, lost his life when he sailed into the Sea of Worms and his ship got eaten up—they coated the lifeboat in fat to ward off the worms, and drew lots to see who could escape (bc the life boat could only hold half the ship’s crew) and Bjarni won, but then someone who was left behind said, “Bjarni are you going to leave me, after promising you would keep me safe?” And Bjarni said, “Fine, take your life, if you value it so much” and he swapped places with the man and died when the ship sank.
Anyway, as I was boring my wife and family, I realized that these stories are very sticky. They’re easy to remember. It’s not difficult to retain the events and the other they came in. For instance, I could probably recite much of Laxdaeling saga back to you (it begins when Thorstein’s father criticizes him, calling him weak and a woman…). Obviously a good storyteller fleshes it out, but it’s not hard to repeat these tales. There is something in the incidents themselves that is just very well-crafted, even though, ostensibly, they’re rather ordinary occurrences!
Things become even easier to remember once you get a better handle on the geography and the clans. Because then you’re like, oh okay, this happened on the Western Fjords, and that means Snorri the Godi must’ve been involved, oh yeah, this is a story involving the Thorbrandssons, who Snorri was fostered with growing up, so he felt indebted to them even after they grew up and started causing him trouble.
The sagas form a more or less continuous ‘cinematic universe’ in other words, where each tale uses a relatively similar stock of elements and characters, but remixes them and creates new wrinkles and crossovers. The way you put together the incidents in each saga, and the way you expand them out is what creates the tale. For instance, the Saga of Grettir the Strong is likely a late addition to the corpus: the author took all the mentions of Grettir in various sagas and built them up into a narrative, so like the time when he was rescued by a woman is taken from one saga, and the time he fought with another outlaw is taken from another, etc. Everyone already knew the tale of Grettir—he was the Icelander who survived the longest as an outlaw (nineteen years!), which was impressive since if you were an outlaw you could be killed with no legal repercussions, and there was a huge reward on his head. The tale is told as a tragedy, a story of hubris. But his tale also could’ve been paired, for instance, with that of his nephew, Ospak, who quarreled with Odd Osveigson, or with his ancestors, Thorstein, Ingimund, Bard and Jokul, who were all known for being wise and thoughtful. Then the story becomes something else entirely, maybe a more comic interlude, or a counterpoint about how what is heroic in one man is despicable in another.
The point is, there is room here for the storyteller to innovate in terms of events and structure, but not really in terms of style, because your ‘spin’ on the tale has to be sticky enough that it will survive multiple retellings. And that means when you change a tale, it needs to be anchored in specific incidents and places—recognizable things your audience will know and will remember “Oh I had never heard that story of Snorri the Godi advising his brother on how to kill the two berserkers before! Isn’t that just like Snorri? He’s always finding clever ways out of problems.” Similarly, only certain sorts of tales will ‘stick’ to certain people. A tale about being clever will stick to Snurri, but it’s also mentioned in the sagas that he was a ‘difficult’ child—his real name is Arngrim and his nickname, Snurri, just means ‘difficult’—but we don’t know much about what he did as a kid, even though his parents were quite famous (he was the child of the brother-in-law that Gisli Sursson killed in his saga). We just can’t imagine Snurri making trouble gratuitously, so those stories don’t stick. Whereas, in contrast, the story of Egil sneaking into a party and getting drunk at age three is easy to remember, because Egil is a scamp!
I could go on.
For the first time I think that I understand why people like the Marvel Cinematic Universe: not every movie is good, but your appreciation grows with the more of them you watch. Even though the movies themselves are visually boring, they can still be fun, can still add new wrinkles to this world—to the point where you can be excited because you’re like “Oh here’s the story of Snorri’s kid, Halldor, who I had only heard about in passing before!” (Halldor is famous for getting the better of Harald Harddrada, the famously stern king of Norway who was killed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, eight days before the Battle of Hastings).
Of course reading the sagas isn’t nearly as dull as watching a movie from the MCU. But the lived-in quality of this world is just so fascinating. The sense that this world really existed, and that it persists outside the tales and even between tales. It has precisely that quality of mimesis that realist fiction sometimes attempts and never achieves—it’s like an entire culture has entered into a collective delusion, where they state This is how it was! This is the voice in which history will be recorded! This is the voice in which God speaks!
I am genuinely sad for the day I have no more sagas to read (which is approaching fast, unless my shipment, from Iceland, of a translation of all 49 sagas comes in soon), because it’s the kind of world you just don’t want to leave.
I’ve been writing a fantasy novel, and the connection between my novel and the sagas is hard for me to explain. I think in fantasy, there’s much of what M. John Harrison called “the clomping foot of nerdism”—the attempt to create so much extraneous detail that the world feels real. I loved this sort of world-building as a kid, and as a young writer I aspired to practice it. My first-ever novel was a very strange sci-fi world where the same day was repeated for everyone: Groundhog’s Day, but everyone is in on it. I thought about the structures they would develop to preserve some continuity across the resets.
But as time went on I grew dismissive of this effect. Nothing could ever match the verisimilitude of realist fiction, so why bother? And yet, without that worldbuilding, my fantasy novels felt quite lifeless and dull. Something about the sagas has convinced me that you can have a world-building that is rooted in human things—institutions, people, stories, families, etc—and that occurs on a very human scale, so it’s not all about grand kings and wizards and overlords.
What inevitably happens when I try to write a long sci-fi or fantasy story (I am of the camp that believes sci-fi and fantasy are essentially the same thing) is that I get tired of writing the boring bits: the action, the world-building, the evil wizards and the horrific battles, etc. Growing up, I was fond of these bits! But nowadays I simply don’t have the patience for them.
And yet even growing up I don’t think the boring bits were my favorite parts. For instance, one of my favorite books growing up was Mercedes Lackey’s Arrows of the Queen, which is the very first in her Valdemar Herald chronicles about special kids who ride magical horses and solve crimes in a fantasy world. Anyway, in this book Talia and Kris get together and ride circuit for the first time, running around solving crimes and judging criminals in the countryside of Valdemar (it’s a very episodic book). And even at age 12 I liked the bits where the two of them are just chilling! Or just talking to people!
I also used to sometimes get bored, even as a kid, of the fighty bits. For instance, I have a vivid memory of being bored the first time I read Game of Thrones, which is the first book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. I read the book when I was about 14, long before there was a TV series. And it’s very thick and at times it’s just sort of dull. You keep reading because there’s a lot of intrigue, but it can be a slog.
Nowadays I tend to think it’s the relationships that keep a book going, and it’s precisely in the relationships that Game of Thrones is weakest. There is too much movement, too much death—nobody stays with each other for very long. That’s why people are so into, say, Arya and the Hound or Tyrion and what’s-his-face, the sellsword sidekick. It’s because those are some of the few times people stay together for a whole book. Ultimately, Game of Thrones is a very lonely world: it’s about a family that splits up in the first chapter and essentially never reunites (a friend of mine is still furious that when Jon and Sansa get together in the 8th season over the corpse of Rickon, they don’t even have a conversation about their dead brother!).
But if relationships are the point, then why even write a fantasy novel? I dunno. For once thing the stakes are heightened: in real life, there are rarely life or death stakes. But it is precisely those heightened stakes that necessitate a lot of boring writing about battles and wizards and stuff.
It is a conundrum!
With this fantasy novel I’ve been careful to maintain focus on my own interests. Multiple times I’ve had to cut short some typical fantasy shit just so I can get back to my hero and heroine chilling out in some ruins, trying not to kiss. I think it’s going okay. I have learned a lot these last five years in particular about balancing my own interests and those of the reader.
Addendum:
Two things
I have a book coming out in under a month! Just Happy To Be Here is my YA novel about a trans girl who joins a secret society at her prestigious all-girl’s school in DC. It’s a really nuanced take on growing up trans and having to navigate the fact that, you know, especially for adults, this is a bit of a new phenomenon. It’s gotten great initial reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, and from BCCB, which stands for the Bulletin for the Society Children’s Book Center Children Society Books Place. It also has a raft of great blurbs. Fun for both kids and adults. I haven’t pushed it too hard because I imagine that the overlap between Great Books readers and YA readers is pretty small, but it’s not nothing!
Secondly, this Substack is approaching 400 subscribers! That means it’s picked up something on the order of 250 subscribers in the four months I’ve been running it. That is far beyond what I could’ve expected. Thank you very much for reading! It is such a privilege to show up in your inboxes at 5 AM PST (8 AM EST) every Tuesday and Thursday, and I try not to abuse it.
Side note but there is a pretty good novel that does Groundhog Day at a larger scale (if not everybody being in on it)--Ken Grimwood's Replay, which I really enjoyed.
I think you're definitely on to something about why sprawling franchise universes and "clomping foot" world-building have their pleasures for readers and viewers. When world-building as a conscious strategy for writing works, I think it's because it enables the writer or creator to tell a story where lived-in detail is present and *different* from the world we inhabit. Where it fails is when a world-builder feels obliged to info-dump all the details they've imagined or sketched out or where the world-builder's imagination of the lived-in details either doesn't make sense or is just a dull copy-paste of another world (or our world with names that have funny apostrophes and so on).
But in some ways it's even better when world-building happens as an emergent accident of a lot of stories being told within the same setting, and there I think the second pleasure of it is that it lets any dedicated reader achieve the feeling of critical mastery--essentially emergent world-building that grows from a set of incidentally connected stories converts a reader into an expert. When you read all the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys stories, you start to intuitively understand how they were written (and even spot where there were slight variations in the corporate style). You start to see the patterns and intentions in the writing and marketing. You start to think about the unspoken stories of minor characters, and appreciate the difference between an adventure where the protagonists really did something clever and where they merely went through the motions. You start to understand a larger fictive universe that included a bunch of other series--Tom Swift or the Three Investigators or Famous Five--and all their cousins and descendants and ancestors. It's a function of coherent predicate--the stories all coming from the same place, with a similar style--but also that the stories all connect and intermesh, both deliberately and serendipitously.
And I think that experience of being expert is enticing, exciting, interesting. To me this is a better way towards Felski's "limits of critique"--not that we have to "love literature", but that academic literary critics can relate to "emergent expertise" in an appreciative way, rather than rivalrously. It's the same way that I think scholarly historians should relate to "amateur" or everyday historical knowledge.
There is a reason why Iceland has produce a wealth of sagas.