Review : Norse Myths and Tales (I)

And now back to the mythology.

Last year I covered a few of Flame Tree Publishing's Epic Tales series, most recently their Viking Folk and Fairy Tales (VT). Though plenty of the fairy tales are indeed fascinating, I'm more interested in mythology proper. The folk stories certainly draw on elements of genuine belief, but the stories themselves feel for the most part like works that were meant to be understood as fundamentally fictitious. I want the things that people actually believed in, to get at the world view of the Vikings themselves*.

* Yes, Vikings. According to distinguished professor Neil Price this is a perfectly fine term to use, so that's what I'll do.

Step forth Flame Tree's Norse Myths and Tales, unavailable in my local bookshops but easily obtained by having someone else buy it for me putting it on my Christmas list. This is altogether a much better collection as far as mythology goes. Oh, I enjoyed Thames & Hudson's The Norse Myths That Shape The Way We Think (TNM) very much indeed, but sometimes there's just no substitute for reading the original material.

This being Flame Tree, the content is a mixture of the pre-Christian myths and a few later sagas. As usual, to my continuing displeasure, they don't really state the origin of the texts with anywhere near enough clarity. Sometimes things are oddly corrupted, with sentences just ending unfinished for

Yes, you can see how annoying that can be. Don't worry, I wo

It's also problematic because again it's not entirely clear what's a direct translation and what's a retelling; Sigurd feels like a blend of both, which might explain why some parts make absolutely no sense. And the translations are highly unequal. Thankfully, in this case all the mythology stuff is perfect – everything I could ask for, indeed adding a lot of details that TNM missed completely, sometimes radically changing the understanding of the tales. 

But the sagas... not so much. Frithiof the Bold is rather better than the translation in VT, the Laxdaela is okay, but Grettir the Strong is borderline unintelligible. Vocabulary is more often than not unconventional for no good reason whatsoever, doing nothing but making it more difficult to read. Sentence construction is even worse, often being just plain bad. I persisted as long as I could, but I seriously considered skipping it. The opening prologue is totally and utterly uninteresting, and only reading the Wikipedia summary – which assured me there were monsters and such – gave me any desire to persevere. In the end I found an online translation which was at least readable, and I got through it eventually*, but this part alone took me several weeks.

* Sheer bloody-mindedness saw me through, mostly for the humblebragging rights so I can tell y'all from a qualified position about how bad it is.

On, then, to my usual analysis-cum-summary.

1) The Sagas

They're boring.

Yes, they are. Not as bad as the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, but still bad.

To clarify, they're not all boring all the time and they're certainly not all equally boring, but the overall quality is one of extreme, finely-honed dullness. They're written as long, rambling, pseudo-histories, in which every single time – without fail – a new character is introduced, the reader is subject to a genealogical deluge like a bizarre precursor to Who Do You Think You Are ? Worse, so many of the characters have names which are so ridiculously similar to each other, and often make such fleeting appearances, that following along with the story becomes all but impossible. Even with the Sigurd saga - the only one I did actually enjoy, and don't really count it as a saga – I had to rename half the characters in my notes to make any sense of what the hell was going on.

With the others here (Frithiof, Gunnlaug, Gettir, and Laxdaela) I made no such effort. They're just weird and weirdly uninteresting, a sort of strange proto-literature. Every once in a while, they rise to the standards of something decently readable, with the dialogue sounding quite a lot like it was written for TV's Vikings, with many a thing left powerfully unsaid. But most of the time they're terse in the extreme, lacking any sort of emotive description whatever, with dialogue so laconic it borders on the farcical. Not a real example, but it easily could be :

"I suppose I had better fight you now, then."

"Yes, that seems the way of it".

Absolutely everything is delivered in the same extremely matter-of-fact way, even on the sporadic occasions of magic and monsters. One character is nicknamed "the chatterbox" because she has the audacity to utter two sentences in succession ! Many characters (especially in Frithiof) slip into verse at random, although I assume it just doesn't translate well because every single entry is without exception utterly crap.

Not to say that reading the sagas is totally without value. It's interesting to compare with Tolkien's thoughts on Beowulf, that he could see the point of asking for no monsters in the story but not in asking for less. These particular stories are an excellent demonstration of why that approach doesn't work. When the characters have to deal with a mixture of the mostly mundane but occasionally magical, the significance of the magic is utterly lost. It'd be like if Harry Potter was mostly a story about a boy who had to fill in his tax reports* or something, but was just occasionally but inconsequentially assisted by a magical owl. True, it does help to reinforce that people really believed in these magical elements, treating ghosts and draugr as being every bit as plausible as run-of-the-mill warriors, but narratively, they're nothing special. The magic is robbed of all its force.

* No, I don't know why a minor would have to fill in taxes, but meh.

In short, if you make the mundane become magical, stories can become far more interesting. Doing it the other way around, stripping the magical of its mystique, simply doesn't work.

A couple of examples will suffice. Grettir descends into a barrow and finds "horse bones, and then he stumbled against the arm of a high chair, and in that chair he found a man sitting, great treasures of gold and silver were heaped together there... as he went out through the barrow he was gripped at right strongly." So is the barrow-wight the man in the chair ? It isn't said, so the opportunity to build up any real horror is squandered. 

Likewise the only good bit in Frithiof is when the eponymous hero and his crew encounter a storm  raised by witches sitting in a magical tower. But they also see two witches at sea riding a whale, which they fight by hitting them with oars. The witches in the tower "tumbled down and brake both their backs". Presumably there's a connection (which is definitely interesting), but if you can fight magic using a wooden plank, it hardly seems like anything especially fearful. Cool imagery, but wasted through dire narrative.

What's particularly strange is the contrast with the mythologies. In the sagas, everyone is concerned with petty vengeance and lawsuits the whole god damn time; they're essentially soap operas with swords, but nowhere near the level of writing talent of, say, Coronation Street (yes, really, they're that bad*). In the mythologies the storytelling is worlds apart : they're fun, entertaining, clear and straightforward. What went wrong ? How did they go from stories about Thor fighting a giant snake and Loki bound in the entrails of his children to... stories about boring people having endless petty squabbles and legal disputes about matters of no importance ? Certainly there's enough similarity between the myths and the folk tales to see the evolution from one to the other, but the sagas leave me coldly baffled. On the other hand, people today enjoy boring stories of no importance, so I suppose there's that.

* Especially Njal's Saga, which I read some years ago and outright hated. The ones in this volume I'm merely, shall we say, actively uninterested in. I don't hate them. There's not really enough there to hate.

One final general observation : these stories are definitely a lot more feminist than the later folk tales. There are, to be fair, strong female characters aplenty, seldom warriors but definitely in control of the situation, and sometimes violent. They're not always very nice too, though the standards of the day differ wildly. This is true of the male characters as well. Grettir is to modern eyes surely at the very least an antihero, a precursor to the unbearable "cinderlads" of the folk tales : the lazy and forgotten who are insufferably arrogant because they turn out to have hidden talents that put everyone else to shame. At worse he's a murderous villain. Yet in the saga he's clearly depicted in a favourable light, but as to why we're supposed to ally ourselves with the stupid and unbearable git is anyone's guess. Thus with Gudrun, a woman whose love interests are prolonged and confused, it's hardly clear what we're supposed to make of her actions. And quite unlike in VT, there are plenty of women who justifiably snap at their husbands here.

Not that this means any real sort of equality. In one case, Gudrun persuades a man to divorce his wife for the irredeemable act of wearing trousers.

Okay, rant over. As you'll have guessed, there's only one saga I think I need to cover in any detail.

Sigurd

I have to give the Sigurd saga at least a little airtime because it's very, very different to the others. It feels somehow more Germanic and less Norse, though I've no right to that opinion whatever. It's a lot more grounded in the human world with the gods having important but ultimately walk-on parts – it's much more a story than a myth. The powers of the gods are far diminished compared to the truly mythological tales, with the gods being capricious to the point of incoherency (though this might be a result of the translation/summary). At various times they act like fundamental, all-controlling powers in the world yet at others they're helplessly impotent against, say, rope. And there's an awful lot of relationship-based melodrama and little or no humour.

Unlike the versions given in both VT and TNM, this one does at least describe the whole saga, rather than focusing solely on Sigurd himself. And the backstory is fascinating. Of course, there are more than a few elements that compare directly with the tale of Túrin Turambar in The Silmarilion, especially the fight with the dragon. But one key difference that exemplifies the differences emerges early on. The central tragedy of Túrin is his accidental incest with his sister, but for one of Sigurd's ancestors it's another matter entirely. Sigmund's sister Signy sends him her sons so he can raise them to wreak vengeance on her husband, who murdered their family. Finding them wanting, Sigmund either sends them away... or kills them. Signy figures that only a child of pure blood will do, so she willingly swaps forms with a sexy witch, shags her brother, and their offspring is sufficiently to Sigmund's liking that he raises him in the arts of vengeance.

Not that Sinfiotli has it easy, mind you. Oh my no. His hardships start at age 10, with Singy sewing his clothes to his skin and ripping them off to see if he flinches. He doesn't. Later, he and Sigmund turn into werewolves and Sigmund goes berserk and kills him – but not to worry, he's restored with the help of a magical immortal weasel.

Go on, look me in the eye and tell me that's not ten thousand times more interesting than all those petty legal disputes and stupid blood feuds of the other sagas. I dare you.

Interesting, undoubtedly... but pretty soon it began to remind me of those "Am I The Asshole ?" threads on reddit. The answers to those tend to be either a) yes, obviously, b) no of course not, or, more common by far, c) WTAF how are you like this you can't possibly be like this or know people like this you seriously, outrageously WEIRD person. The latter describes pretty much everyone in the Sigurd saga, with their motivations basically comprehensible yet also absolute and total bullshit. And they're racist to the nth degree, or perhaps more accurately tribalistic : everyone in the wrong tribe "clearly" deserves death, not because of anything they've done but just because of who they are, and it seems the reader is meant to support this.

Signy, for instance, confesses her incest for no apparent reason and then burns herself alive. Her son Sigurd falls in with Regin, bother of the dragon Fafnir, who initially helps him to kill Fafnir* to steal his treasure, but then immediately blames Sigurd for killing his brother. "Not to worry", he says, "it'll be okay if you roast his heart". Errr, mind explaining HOW THE ACTUALY LIVING FUCK does that help anyone, Regin ?**

* Tolkien described Fafnir as one of only two dragons of any real significance. I'm not sure – Fafnir is hardly a primal, elemental force like Nidhug who gnaws at the roots of Yggdrasil, the world tree. Fafnir is ultimately just a corrupt man. Certainly he's interesting, but he's not a matter of of cosmic importance.

** Much as Celtic heroes gain knowledge from salmon so too does Sigurd gain knowledge from the heart. But this isn't made clear in advance, which makes Regin sound more than slightly mad, and Sigurd more than slightly stupid for believing him.

So it's tough to like anyone at all in the Saga of the Völsungs. When Sigurd meets Brunhild in her castle surrounded by fire, he fucks her brains out and then gives her... a cursed ring. SIGURD NO DUDE WTF DID YOU DO THAT FOR  ? It gets worse : he buggers off and for some reason Brunhild decides, no, I've been waiting here my whole life, I love you but I'm staying here for a few days FOR NO DAMN REASON. Which of course results in Sigmund having his memory wiped and marrying some other random babe somewhere else. 

Basically, it's a great but utterly stupid story. In the end everyone dies pointlessly and tragically. Odin and the other gods flit in and out, capriciously favouring this and that mortal and rescinding their favours for no fucking reason whatever. There's monsters, cannibalism, incest, child murder, genocide, sex aplenty. It is, in short, a veritable hot mess of a saga, bizarre in the extreme – and, of course, eminently suited for opera.

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That's quite enough for part one. Next time I'll look at the considerably more interesting world of the mythology itself, with not a legal dispute in sight. The northern peoples of Europe may have had the literary talents of a basket of dead hamsters but they redeemed themselves tremendously when it came to explaining the world around them.