One of the important traditions of the Nordic peoples and / or Scandinavians were the sagas, the main means of learning and entertainment of the people. In ancient Norse saga called small creatures heroic legends, mythology, etc., As indeed they appear in the Eddas. However, in the thirteenth century in Iceland appeared a literary genre to which it applied the same designation and has virtually no direct relationship to those ancient legends: the saga itself.
Icelandic saga The word means "I said, what counted." In general, we could translate it by "telling" and thus can also be applied to narrative stories written in Iceland and Norway over the kings of that country. However, the fundamental meaning of the term has come to refer primarily to a particular type of literary work which occurred in Iceland between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, although there are followers later.
Scholars sagas classified into several types, the main one is that of the Icelandic Sagas. Others are historical sagas, the knights, the bishops, those of saints ... We shall only consider here the Icelanders.
define what are the sagas is both simple and extremely complex. Because there is considerable diversity: we have within the same group of Icelandic sagas, some of which are mainly historical, while others bind equally historical reality and fiction, is also dominated the fictitious and some even clear that they are simple works of fiction without historical basis. However, in general we can say that the saga is a narrative, which takes place around the time of the colonization of Iceland to the country's conversion to Christianity around the year 1000 and which chronicles the life of Icelandic character.
could compare with historical novels and fictionalized biographies. In some and in others, the author sets the action in a past time and advice through books history, biographies, etc.., makes a story that can be completely fabricated, but there are always some elements of historic character. The characters, or the main character, also can be invented or real, in which case the historical element may be more or less important, even to dominate clearly. So did the sagas, both for the way he works the author or by his own literary character.
Characters can be very diverse, predominantly poets, as Gunnlaug Language of the Viper, or the Viking warriors, though often a Viking was both important poet, as Egil Skallagrimsson, important character, core of the saga of the same name, and a poet warrior feats never disdained, as the same Gunnlaug. But they could also be simple farmers, land managers, etc., As in the Saga of Hrafnkel. What we demanded was that the character was important, in either direction in his life and major events have happened since then, it was Iceland. So the saga narrative is a peculiar genre of medieval Iceland, and that just has counterparts in other European medieval literature. It should be noted, finally, that on this sense of the word saga has come to create a kind of contemporary special genre within the novel. The term used, especially in the Anglo-Saxon, for novels that tell the story of a family. From here, the term has begun to be used much in Castilian in the sense of "story of a family." What, if not fully coincide with the meaning of the term as we have defined above, it is closer to it than the dictionary definition of academic, who defines it as "every one of the legends collected in two books called Eddas referring to the ancient Scandinavians. " Other
short story from the same period Iceland's called "thaettir (þáttr singular). Are not properly sagas, because life does not usually tell Full of character, but merely on an adventure of special significance, may sometimes be devoting an þáttr a character who had not earned a full series, but had done some fact especially remarkable. It is more or less also the difference that now we can do between novel and short story or short story.
Tradition and its origin sagas written
Icelanders have always been fond of stories and remain so. Since the beginning of the country, colonized from the year 874, the Icelanders liked to write stories in verse and, possibly, also in prose about characters in the history of his country, especially the time colonization. These stories were written, but had a purely oral. His role was manifold: on one side serving of entertainment, but also kept the historical memories, genealogies of families, the most important events that had happened in the country, in every region and every one of its leading families, served well somehow, to maintain the relationship between families of the same origin established in different places of the island. For supporters of the study "Romantic" sagas, dominant in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and still has some defenders, although few here lies the origin of these literary works. The process of creating them would, they say, more or less as follows.
Some characters and some families of special importance, as the poet Egil Viking Skallagrimsson, you would have many stories that were transmitted orally. Instead of being simple free accounts that varied each time it is recited, reached coded so that the narrator learned them by heart, to the letter. This will help with some characteristics of its own literary style of oral transmission, such as repetition, fixed formulas, etc. As was bound to happen, despite attempts to be faithful to the version initial memory errors or the likes of the narrator could produce variations, so the story change depending on who count, but always within fairly narrow margins. These oral histories will be retained then over several centuries, as we assume that would arise shortly after the death of the characters, if not their life. In summary, similar to the origin which is still considered valid for epic poems such as the English Cid, The Song of Roland French, etc.
This would explain, apparently at least several things. First, certain stylistic features of the sagas, typical of spoken language and not the letter, plus the existence of more or less large variations between different manuscripts of the sagas. Finally, explain the historical character, apparently very large, we can assign to the sagas, this historical character reaches the point where, for example, in one of the greatest sagas, Njala University College, tells the burning home of one of the main characters, Gunnar of Hlidarendi, indicating how was the fight and exactly where it occurred. And indeed, in the 20's of this century, archaeologists discovered in the right place the remains of a burned house that matched the description of the saga or narration Saga of Erik the Red on the Icelandic settlements in Greenland, which was confirmed by archaeological finds, just where they had to find things that were expected. The extreme case in some way, or the more striking, is the narrative of the trip to Vinland (North America), in the same Saga of Erik the Red: the geographic descriptions have been attempted to identify in the field of northeast coast of North America and some observations in the series are made on the Indians seems to coincide exactly with that provided by European travelers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, strange foods, even stranger weapons, habits like sleeping in a canoe overturned and many other things appear in the series and appears to have subsequently been confirmed. And today seems to be no doubt about the ephemeral nature of the Greenlanders and Icelanders in North America and some archaeological remains found in the area is likely to be of Scandinavian origin. This seems to point to a considerable historical reliability in the sagas. Which, of course, would not be surprising if the sagas were but stories told orally without modification, even almost literally, from the time the incident occurred.
The saga is, for scholars in favor of this theory, an oral genre since written several centuries after the events occurred, the did nothing but write on parchment to the stories they were told. Which would explain, incidentally, why the sagas are anonymous.
So much for conventional wisdom, romantic. But things do not seem to agree as they should. Today, the vast majority of scholars of the sagas are of another opinion: it is an oral genre, but written, the work of individual authors who created them in a similar way as a modern novelist creates a novel.
This theory, prevalent today, has its variants. Thus, some took this idea of creating personal written to its extreme consequences. We take care of these views as discredited Today as we saw in the first place, but we will consider only what today seems the most plausible explanation of the origin of these stories Icelandic.
We can explain the appearance of the sagas written as a result of a complex set of factors. There were undoubtedly oral narratives to which we have referred, but these were brief and possibly lacked the coding stated above. Be treated in simple stories which gathered information from several centuries ago, but without substantial literary work. Before there was only the runic alphabet, which was never used, to our knowledge, to write long texts, but only for registrations, messages, etc. (Maybe to write poems blanching and then discuss those.) With Christianity came the Roman alphabet, which was quickly adopted and adapted to the needs of Icelandic phonetics. But they got more. Among others, a relationship with the centers of medieval science, such as Paris. Iceland was the first Scandinavian priest who studied in the French city. Came the knowledge of medieval Latin literature (and some literature in the vernacular) and some classic Latin literature. So, Icelanders knew stories of the world, stories of saints, the Virgin, war stories, etc., including some works of fiction in addition to purely theological. Icelanders already had a considerable interest in literature, as reflected in poetry, especially the blanching and ninth to twelfth centuries, gender skaldic went on to become a monopoly Icelandic literary specialty: Icelanders were traveling by skaldic Scandinavian courts and in the British Isles. It was also in Iceland where they were kept longer literary traditions (and others like the mythological) Scandinavian, which explains why, for example, in Christian era continue composing poems pagan religious theme. With Christianity, the new alphabet and new knowledge of other literatures pushed further Icelandic taste for literature. It began, as elsewhere in medieval Christian Europe, to write stories of sacred characters, first in Latin, but then in Icelandic. This step, faster than in other European countries, into the vernacular was aided by the aforementioned oral literary tradition and two Icelandic peculiarities: the maintenance of language without change and about the same dialect as a result of social equality on but more than any other European country, nationalistic pride, so well represented in the same sagas and, above all, in many thaettir. Icelanders have their ways of life, among them a perfect fit always speak in their language, even for things that were done elsewhere in Latin.
Thus began a considerable literary activity in Icelandic, in the usual genres of the time. Sometimes translations, but above all their own creations, and in all fields. There were stories in the world and stories of the countries (eg Britain's history of the Venerable Bede, well known in Iceland) and Icelanders wanted to also write their own history. As this was very recent, there were two possibilities: to tell the brief history of Iceland, especially the events surrounding their discovery and colonization, or tell the story of Norway, country from which most of the colonists as a country's history was the story of their rulers, their kings, the history of Norway, the first chapter of Iceland , became the stories of the kings of Norway. And Icelanders
worked for all these ways: wrote stories of the Virgin, saints foreigners, but also their own bishops, popularly sanctified, wrote histories of Norwegian kings, taken together or individually, and also narrated the colonization of their own country. These books were written in the manner of how it was done in other parts, using to sources in Iceland were almost exclusively oral at first, when there was already an important literary and historical corpus, what happened next, these oral sources joined the writing, not only in Iceland, but also foreign. Thus arose, first a brief "Book of Icelanders", Sage Thorgilsson Ari, XII century, after successive "Colonization Books, some anonymous, others known author, stories were written as the so-called" Sagas of Bishops ", abstracts Norway's history as the "Agrippa" ("Summary"), stories of the Norwegian king Olav Haraldsson is holy, and so on. We can say that this tradition ended with a magnificent work historigráfica: the "History of the Kings of Norway" or "Heimskringla" of Snorri Sturluson, Icelandic writer important political and XII-XIII century.
The Heimskringla is named after the first words of the text: "The circle of the world ...", Heims Kringla in Icelandic. It is, for many, the best work of its kind in the European Middle Ages, is a large book, which deals with the lives of Norwegian kings from its mythical origins, its historical value is coupled with its exceptional literary interest. A striking element in this whole Icelandic literature, including the work of Snorri, is the absence, compared with the traditions of the rest of Europe fabulous ingredients. Icelanders, realistic and pragmatic realism brought to his historical works, subjecting their sources to a critical sifting and rejecting everything that seemed incredible or improbable.
The most plausible seems to be in all this the origin of the saga: as they wrote the lives of the great foreign characters, eg the Norwegian kings, could write biographies of great people in Iceland. As in Iceland there was nothing that could be compared directly with the European aristocracies, also Scandinavian, had to give the character his greatness under its facts. Everything was, therefore, to write lives of Icelanders Just as remarkable is the foreigners Featured wrote. Thus, besides the lives of saints, bishops and kings, like the ones in Iceland.
This served to highlight the importance of the Icelandic nation, a people then measured by the greatness of their individuality. Moreover, at the time the sagas were written, there were considerable tensions with Norwegian kings who wanted to turn the island into mere vassal state, depriving it of its secular and independence. The struggle against the expansionist desires Norwegians continued until the final absorption in the fourteenth century literature and also served as a political tool here. In many thaettir by example, and also some important sagas, are clearly reflected the antagonism Norwegian-Icelandic.
The sagas of Icelanders take place in the heroic age of the island, but there were also contemporary sagas, which dealt with the events in the same time or shortly before drafting. This was not chronic simple but fictionalized stories which do not always know what is true and what invented. That is, despite the time difference of their action with the sagas of Icelanders in the proper sense, keep a close relationship with them.
We assume that the sagas of Icelanders and other learned works composed at the time, no Only in Iceland: an author, often a monk, sometimes someone related in some way to a monastery, sometimes a major political figure, wrote "ex ovo" the story of a previous character, which normally had been ancestor or simply had lived in your area or one in which the author lived. To do this using all possible sources. Undoubtedly, oral sources, not just stories but also memories, anecdotes, etc.., Transmitted from generation to generation. But written sources, genealogical charts, books of colonization, other sagas and other stories: Do not forget that the action is set distant in time and for the author, and that she had good advice on historical events. With all this and after a process of critical sources which rejected everything amazing for its time, almost everything wonderful and much of the fabulous, the work of writing following an author's prior plan. It is not, therefore, oral histories passed to the parchment, but of literary works. This forces us to consider the issues that seemed to explain the oral theory: the historical, variants, why the anonymity of their authors, and so on.
regard to the historic character of the sagas, we can distinguish two issues: first place the new theory explains how the undoubted historicity of many of the sagas, secondly, how far that historical really.
course, say that the sagas are not simply written Reflection secular oral tradition unchanged does not mean lack of any historical value. Because ultimately, some of the sources used to write if you have the secular character unchanged to which we have referred. A very numerous part of the historical information provided to us certainly seems reliable, precisely because it is based on earlier sources. But, as works created by a particular author purpose especially literary, much more than historical, too many things appear devoid of historical reality.
Thus, in many sagas, including the Viper Gunnlaug language, we find themes, motifs and repeated suspicious characters: the young who must travel abroad in order to look good to marry his beloved, and is deceived by a friend who will become husband of that, the fight with a berserk singular threatening, there are two motifs that appear in sagas apparently unrelated. The first of them, to take just that example, reappears in several lives of poets and seems to have become a literary theme for this subtype must special sagas.
Under these conditions, it appears that at least part of the events described in the sagas are not historically true. The author would invent adventures, adventures, characters, but could also borrow from other franchises or other literary or simply literary conventions of the time. A clear example of this is the appearance of scald in the sagas poems. In the preface to his Heimskringla, Snorri explained that one of the most important sources and more reliable to get fair and accurate historical information were the compositions of the blanching or court poets. Snorri said that, as the poems were recited publicly before the king and his court, it was unthinkable that they narrate exploits exist or is pushed too far, because that would be considered fun, not praise.
skaldic
These poems were born into the eighth and ninth century and, as we have said, eventually became a virtual monopoly in Iceland. Were transmitted orally, which seemed greatly facilitated by its strict metrical structure and alliteration, internal rhyme and sometimes external, use of paraphrases complex, a kind of metaphor called "kenning" and syntax and, in general, diction peculiar poetic. In Iceland, this type of poetry long resisted the influence of the poetry of continental European origin and inspiration, and came to be used even for the composition of works of Christian character. Almost without change of any kind, these poems are preserved until, at the time of creation of the sagas, began to set in writing. Its historical value is, therefore, high and Snorri's comments today seem largely still valid.
practically any sagas include poems escálidicos to gloss situations, deeds, etc.. It is a remnant of its origin and derivation of the works of historiographical nature. In general, it is considered that the appearance of such compositions are a kind of guarantee of at least a good part of the content of the sagas.
However, the question is not so simple. Because it has been shown that some of the compositions that appear are true: in some cases it is false attributions, eg Viper Gunnlaug Language poems attributed to him other previous climbing, which also gave him a series, written before of Gunnlaug: Kormak. In other cases it is possibly of poems composed for the occasion by the same author of the saga, is her case, among others, of some poems that are said in Skallagrimsson Egil's Saga, which were composed by the author to the three years of age. As the contemporary writer of historical novels can make up documents, books and more, the medieval author of the series could be invented, if deemed useful or desirable to give some skaldic stanza and a more historical narrative.
Moreover, although the chronology of the saga is not entirely clear, it seems that the former contained a much larger number of stanzas scalded and that, as time passed, they would be less numerous, up to the composition sagas, such as Hrafnkel, or had no other sagas like Njal, who had very few. That is, it seems that as it was happening time more and more clearly predominant element was less important fiction and the historical aspect. This would be a logical evolution from the origin of the works of a historiographical sagas and stories start to finish almost fictionalized novels
historic atmosphere.
So the sagas are partly true but another, even more importantly, pure fiction. Can still be used as historical sources, but not consider them as true stories hundred per cent, as claimed by the romantic interpretation.
Our second problem is to explain the variations between different versions of the sagas. This is a very complex issue that can not go into detail. Only point out that the manuscripts of sagas that have are also very numerous, very different character and age. In general, there are none at the time of writing, ie it is not the original manuscripts are autographs of the authors. In addition, the manuscripts are sometimes full and sometimes fragmented, sometimes complete sagas are collected and in other cases only parts of them. Given that the sagas were copied and recopied, were bought, sold, lent, and even robbed, and that since the time of writing almost to the nineteenth century, can not variants appear strange that even considerable.
The third problem is the anonymity of the authors. It was perfectly understandable in the case of oral origin. Actually anonymity is something peculiar to medieval literature, but probably less than what is traditionally thought, that anonymity was lower in the scientific literature, but common in the purely literary. In Iceland known authors of the first class: Snorri Sturluson and Ari the Wise, to name just two. Moreover, taking into account what was said about the manuscripts, it seems logical not to collect a manuscript to another, details really secondary as the author's name, said he does not practically Icelandic peasant anything centuries after the saga had been written.
As for style, arguably more typical of what the conversational oral or written colloquial what seems even more reason to support this theory: it would be difficult to memorize, for example, long passages dialogued of sagas such as Hrafnkel or Njala. On the other hand, we see a contrast with the style, much more baroque, sometimes traced from the Latin, other stories and the lives of bishops. The Sagas of Icelanders, who tried to popular characters, kept the popular style, was written as he spoke, possibly, although we can not know whether it is something sought or the result of a lack of sufficient in the production tradition of literary writing. In addition, however, in the style of the sagas are far from conventional, taken from different models, including non-Icelanders.
0 comments:
Post a Comment