Icelandic sagas bring to life an astonishing array of human nature: stories of individual families and lovers, of loyalty, jealousy, betrayal, forgiveness, greed, lust, faithfulness, competition, pursuit, hatred, fear, feuds, admiration, courage and determination.
For hundreds of years, valued storytellers repeated these sagas to brighten the long winters of their far-north island—and when writing became available, these stories, already ancient, were penned onto vellum.
A thousand years after they were first spoken aloud, the sagas still fascinate. One should only hope one’s own writing could have such staying power!
In writing my Norse Adventure series about Icelanders during the Viking era, I wanted to take elements of those sagas and work them into a broader story of what was happening in the country as a whole.
Bear with me, please, as I first describe the astonishing setting for Viking: The Plains of Althing
The world’s first democracy was quite literally formed in a valley created by the drifting-apart of the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates. You can stand there today; it’s entrancing.
From that volatile, volcanic island came a man with one foot in Europe and one in North America: Erik the Red, credited with the discovery and settlement of Greenland. Erik’s son Leif followed in his father’s sea adventures, establishing a trading settlement in Newfoundland (New Found Land!)
In the midst of all this, Iceland became perhaps the only country in Europe to change from pagan to Christian as the result of a calm, rule-of-law process—and it happened as Europe approached the year 1000 A.D., the turn of the first millennium—a notable event we share with them, as we, too, celebrated entering 2000 A.D. just a score of years ago.
Nothing at all dramatic about that, one might say, quite tongue in cheek! But even given that setting and events, it’s still no easy task to reach back through time and forge a story of people in that astonishing era.
We need protagonists: an imperfect, reluctant hero and heroine who must struggle to each find their way in an era of change and strife. Let me introduce you to Kel and Aldís, former lovers, torn apart.
We need a person who is making their lives impossible, someone they can’t escape; someone we love to loathe, so that we can experience how decency stands against selfishness. We can fume as Kel is trapped by a boss who holds all the cards, so to speak. We root for the slave Tor as he defies his brutal owner by Tor’s sheer force of not-giving-a-damn. We hope for Aldís as she wrestles with tragedy, clawing her way forward. We can believe in them even as they doubt themselves, stumbling and unsure and trying to figure out how to just take the next step as they try find their way.
Fortunately, both the sagas and Iceland’s rich history have given us plenty to draw from.
But we need more. We need substance.
While we can glean small details of dress, food, housing, trade and customs from the sagas, a far greater amount of day to day life must be surmised through educated guessing, and then brought to life.
How were the turning of the seasons measured and celebrated? What pressures marked the days of people of the valleys: farmers, bondsmen and women, chieftains, slaves, children? What did they eat, and how much of it? How did they clean their clothing? Were did they trade, and when, and for what? When did small children start doing chores, and what chores would they have been? How did their teenagers behave? So many questions.
Yet, as the saga-tellers knew well, an accurate compiling of daily-life details and strong characters would matter not one whit without a good story to carry them forward.
So the task became to find the issues with which people then might have personally struggled. One of them must have been the dwindling amounts of farmland. Valley farms had amply fed the settlers of Iceland, but a hundred years later, they now had to support three or four generations on each farm, plus bondworkers and slaves.
Or what about the also-dwindling forests which had once (according to their Landnámabók) sprawled from mountain to shore? For a people who needed wood for fishing boats and trade ships, for building homes, for smelting iron ore from bogs, for charcoal to fuel every farm’s blacksmithy, and to heat their homes and cook and preserve food, the loss of forest resources would have been crippling.
Add to that the threat of foreign powers nervously watching Iceland’s Althing, where no ruler was considered necessary and leaders were elected. They must have wanted desperately to meddle with that dazzling, democratic experiment in self-rule.
And finally, Icelanders must have been only too aware of the painful processes in nearby countries, where belief in Christ had been mandated by the sword. Iceland’s pagans, whose chief god Odin was venerated for his love of wisdom, would soon approach civil war with a growing Christian faction over their choice of how to worship.
Sound familiar? The more things change, the more…well, the more they sound exactly the same as now.
This book shocked me, as I researched it, in how often human society repeats the same ebb and flow of issues. Authoritarianism threatens rule of law. People view those who worship differently from them as somehow dangerous. Energy resources are plundered and used with abandon, even as disaster looms.
Perhaps you will find a bit of escape here from current stresses, perhaps some quiet, as you immerse yourself in a life when the only timekeepers were the sun and the moon, where the long-fire crackled in the hearth and smoked meats hung fragrant from the roof, where clean wind blew across landscapes utterly devoid of signage, plastic, lettering, lights, shops, traffic signals—and all you can see are fields, hills, waterfalls, streams, birch trees and the wide, beckoning sea.
Or perhaps you will feel a bit of consolation at knowing that other men and women bore the same burdens we share: fear for the future, hope for our children, and the need for love and human connection.
We are all part of the great chain of human life. These people, these Icelanders whose art and democracy and exploration have influenced others across a thousand years, still have stories to tell. Let us listen to them.
Katie Aiken Ritter, May 25, 2020
The Norse Adventure Series currently has three novels available, with two sequels planned. They are best read in sequence:
Book I—VIKING: The Plains of Althing
Book III—VIKING: The Green Land
Your books sound very interesting already. I’ll look for them on line. A lot more reading these days of quarantine.
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