Ljósvetninga saga: Mighty fists and political wheeling and dealing in Eyjafjörður

While I was up north on bovine business over the Easter period, free time between milking sessions were spent pondering and perambulating Ljósvetninga saga, 'The saga of the people of Ljósavatn'. The title of the saga would lead one to expect the action to be located around Ljósavatn which is east of Eyjafjörður, in Þingeyjarsveit, but in fact the central character, the chieftain Guðmundr ríki ('the powerful'), lived at Möðruvellir, which is some 25 kms south of Akureyri, in the Eyjafjörður valley on the eastern side of the Eyjafjarðará river. Ljósvetninga saga has a very different flavour to the sagas I've written about more recently (Egils saga, Laxdæla saga, Harðar saga) and those which are to come in the next few weeks (Eyrbyggja saga, Gísla saga, Fóstbræðra saga...) being much more political in its focus -- and Guðmundr is not a saga 'hero' in the mould of Egill, Kjartan, or Hörðr. In fact, he is not painted in a positive light at all -- the saga narrates his social/political/legal wheeling and dealing with other local or northern chieftains, farmers, and slaves and while he often achieves the ends he wants from conflicts, he does not necessarily come out of these episodes with his honour and local standing enhanced.  

Möðruvellir, with dog

Reading Ljósvetninga saga 'in the landscape' proved to be an experience akin to that of Flóamanna saga (see post from February) in some ways. Other than brief notes detailing where characters live and the occasional outline of a journey from one place to another, there is very little in the saga that links the action to the physical landscape, or sets it tangibly in it. As far as I could establish by talking to a number of local people, the majority of those who live in Eyjafjarðarsveit are not particularly familiar with the saga or with the details of Guðmundr ríki's life and career; nor are the farmsteads/sites in the saga marked with information boards or monuments in the way that those in Mýrar and Dalir are.     

The turf-roofed church at Saurbær today
(Möðruvallafjall behind, the other side of the valley)

There are some highly entertaining scenes in the saga nonetheless. The description of how a certain Þorbjörn Rindill (a somewhat dubious character whom Guðmundr hires to carry out a vengeance mission on his behalf) meets his death is visual in an almost comic-book-like fashion: after eating a quick bowl of rather runny skyr (a kind of yoghurt that was a staple food)...var þar kominn Eilífr ok maðr með honum, -- þar varð fátt af kveðjum --, ok setti þegar kesjuna á Rindil miðjan, en skyrit sprændi ór honum ok upp á Eilíf (Ljósvetninga saga, ed. Björn Sigfússon, Íslenzk fornrit 10 (Reykjavík, 1940), p. 55; 'Eilífr had arrived and there was a man with him -- there weren't many greetings -- and at once he stabbed Rindill in his middle with the spear, and the skyr spurted out of him and onto Eilífr'). Guðmundr is told the news and, furious, he rides to nearby Saurbær where Eilífr and his companion have sought shelter from the old and blind Hlenni inn skakki ('the wry'). 'Are they here, those men of dire deeds, with you Hlenni? Eilífr and his companion?' 'They are here', he says, 'and it doesn´t seem a tragedy to me that Rindill is dead' ('Eru þeir hér, ódáðamennirnir, hjá þér, Hlenni, Eilífr ok förunautr hans?' 'Hér eru þeir,' segir hann, 'ok þykki mér engi harmsaga, þótt Rindill sé dauðr', Ljósvetninga saga, p. 55).

In a later scene, Guðmundr is staying at one of his follower's farmsteads: he takes the highseat, the most prestigious place; another chieftain called Ófeigr Járngerðarson is in the place inside of Guðmundr. When the table is laid for a meal, Ófeigr puts his fist on the table and a perfectly-paced passage of dialogue follows:

     'Hversu mikill þykki þér hnefi sjá, Guðmundr?'

     Hann mælti: 'Víst mikill.' 

     Ófeigr mælti: 'Þat muntu ætla, at afl muni í vera?'

     Guðmundr mælti: 'Ek ætla þat víst.'

     Ófeigr segir: 'Mikit muntu ætla, at högg verði af?'

     Guðmundr segir: 'Stórum mikit.'

     Ófeigr segir: 'Þat muntu ætla, at saka muni?'

     Guðmundr mælti: 'Beinbrot eða bani.'

     Ófeigr svarar: 'Hversu myndi þér sá dauðdagi þykkja?'

     Guðmundr mælti: 'Stórillr, ok eigi mynda ek vilja þann fá.'

     Ófeigr mælti: 'Sittu þá eigi í rúmi mínu.'

     Guðmundr segir: 'Þat skal ok vera,' -- ok settisk öðrum megin

(Ljósvetninga saga, pp. 58-59; 'How big does this fist seem to you, Guðmundr?' He said: 'Certainly large.' Ófeigr said: 'Do you think there is power in it?' Guðmundr said: 'I think that certainly.' Ófeigr says: 'Do you think the blow that might come from it would be strong?' Guðmundr says: 'Very strong.' Ófeigr says: 'What do you think the damage would be?' Guðmundr said: 'Bone-breaking or death.' Ófeigr answers: 'How would a death like that seem to you?' Guðmundr said: 'Very bad, and I would not like to experience it.' Ófeigr said: 'Don´t sit in my seat then.' Guðmundr says: 'It shall be so,' -- and seats himself the on the other side.')

Beyond the challenges of imagining the action of Ljósvetninga saga in the landscape, certain aspects related to its transmission and its modern reception are of interest to me. Firstly, the saga survives in two versions which differ significantly in their length, phrasing, overall organisation or structure, and presentation of events with regard to specific detail. Scholars have debated which version is older/younger, closer to the 'original' etc, but have not reached a consensus. The fact that two such differing versions -- whose textual relationship is not clear -- exist, however, illustrates very well how the concept of an 'original' text is something of an anachronism as far as the medieval Icelandic Íslendingasögur ('sagas of Icelanders') are concerned. The sagas were authored anonymously, and their written composition was a process that involved moulding a great deal of material that must have been passed down orally from generation to generation into a carefully crafted literary whole. When scribes made new copies of individual sagas, they were free to alter the text they were copying from in the manuscript in front of them -- and did so, to varying degrees, in order to improve the style or 'correct' specific details. By examining the variant texts of any one saga, a picture can be built up of how that narrative or story was understood and interpreted by all those who were involved in transmitting it via hand-copied manuscripts, from the medieval period right up until the 19th and even early 20th century. In this way, the sagas are living literature, continuously being adapted and rewritten over time.   

Secondly, Ljósvetninga saga is a nice example of how modern taste or aesthetics have changed over the past 150 years or so of saga scholarship -- and what people have thought makes a 'good' saga. Two 19th-century scholars wrote of Ljósvetninga saga that "owing to the absence of remaniement this work is not disfigured by the monstrous and exaggerated taste for blood, which has quite cumbered some sagas, that may once have been good stories, with aimless ill-told murders ... all [the characters] are finely and firmly limned with a quiet delight and an absence of exaggeration that is admirable indeed. Of all the Sagas, this is the nearest to Njála in style. It is incomparably the best Saga of the North" (Guðbrandur Vigfússon and F. York Powell, Origines Islandicæ vol. II (Oxford, 1905), pp. 349-50). Njála, or Njáls saga, is often described as the 'jewel in the saga crown' -- so this is high praise for Ljósvetninga saga indeed. But since the time of these scholars' verdict, very little has been published on Ljósvetninga saga, and what has been tends to be concerned either with its textual transmission (i.e. the versions and the relationship of surviving manuscript texts to each other), or has used the saga as a source for throwing light on social, political, and legal structures and dynamics in Settlement/Commonwealth times -- at least as far as portrayed by those in the 13th century, when the saga was thought to be written.  

Finally, the more I read the sagas in close succession in situ here in Iceland, and follow up the connections between them physically moving from one place to another and from one region to another, the more I think that the sagas are best understood not as individual, discrete narratives, but as a network of interlinking and overlapping narratives. Characters and individual places in one saga often appear in other sagas; sometimes, specific events described in one saga are reported in one or more other sagas too. It´s interesting to see how the presentation of the same characters and events differs in these cases, according to the objectives of each saga‘s author, or their personal perspective. Ljósvetninga saga is a good example: Guðmundr ríki appears in over 10 other sagas—sometimes in a more positive light than he is portrayed in Ljósvetninga saga. But as William Ian Miller and Thedore Andersson (in the introduction to their 1989 translation of the saga, Law and Literature in Medieval Iceland: Ljósvetninga saga and Valla-Ljóts saga) and Gísli Sigurðsson (in his 2007 article ‘The Immanent Saga of Guðmundr ríki‘, in a volume called Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World: A Festschrift for Margaret Clunies Ross, ed. Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop, and Tarrin Wills) point out, above and beyond the positive/negative attitudes towards Guðmundr in these sagas, there is a great deal of consistency in his portrayal—and moreover, as Gísli Sigurðsson puts it, ‘many of them [i.e. these sagas] seem to assume a level of prior knowledge of his character on the part of their audiences‘, and also ‚a prior knowledge of his external circumstances‘. Gísli writes also that ‚The tradition in fact offers a many-voiced and varied picture of characters, in all probability because it is based on memories of real people that were the subject of stories for several generations before it occurred to anyone to use them as material for written works of narrative‘.

Guðrún's grave at Helgafell

The past few days I´ve been touring around the Snæfellsnes peninsula on the trail of Eyrbyggja saga sites (post to follow shortly): next stop is the West Fjords (I‘m on my way there right now, on the ferry Baldur which runs between Stykkishólmur, Flatey, and Brjánslækur) and Gísla saga...There‘s a strong link between these two sagas that gives my progression from one to the other here a nice coherence. Gísli Súrsson‘s sister Þórdís–whose first husband was murdered by Gísli—later tried to avenge Gísli‘s death (masterminded in turn by her second husband Börkr, brother of the first husband), at Helgafell which is a central location in Eyrbyggja saga, being the home of Snorri goði (Þórdís‘s son from her first husband) by the time of that saga. Looking back to Laxdæla saga (which I read, travelled, and wrote about in April), Helgafell is the place where Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir ended up (having engineered a 'houseswap‘ with Snorri towards the end of her life) and died...her grave is marked today with a stone (see photo above). Amazing to think, looking at this modern memorial, that Guðrún died and was buried over 1000 years ago...

On the Víga-Glúmr trail at Munkaþverá and Espihóll

The modern farm at Munkaþverá,
as seen from the road

In conjunction with exploring the landscapes in which the Íslendingasögur are set over the course of the year, an important part of my project is to meet people currently living in the places that are mentioned in the sagas. One of the things I find most remarkable and compelling about the sagas and Iceland -- something that is rarely found in Britain or elsewhere to the same degree -- is that a great number of the farms in which saga-characters lived, places where events in the sagas were played out, are still inhabited and bear the same names. Of course, the dwellings in which the saga-characters lived are long since vanished: farms now generally comprise a number of modern barns and outhouses and a 20th-century farmhouse. The predecessors to these modern buildings were turf-roofed houses which were often added to over the course of several centuries in some cases; one example of an old turf-house construction can be seen at Laufás, 30 kms north of Akureyri. Archaeological excavations of a large Viking-Age longhouse in the centre of Reykjavík (Reykjavík 871 +/-2) give an idea of what settlement-period and early medieval sagasteads (or at least important ones) might have looked like.      

The modern farmhouse and buildings at Munkaþverá, Víga-Glúmr's farmstead (called Þverá in the saga), stand where old turf-houses were before, as do those at Espihóll across the river from Munkaþverá on the western side of the valley. Much of Víga-Glúms saga tells of the disputes and physical clashes between Víga-Glúmr and his family, and the Esphœlingar, the inhabitants of Espihóll. The current inhabitants of both Munkaþverá and Espihóll are not descended from the saga characters...but generations of each family have lived and farmed the land for a century or so. Guðný Kristjánsdóttir (b. 1941), who lives with her husband at Espihóll, told me how her father passed down stories about Víga-Glúmr and the Esphælingar orally when she was a child growing up at Espihóll: he had read the saga, and Guðný remarked that much of what she knows about the saga comes from him, in addition to her own reading of it. Events from the saga were related in conversation around the kitchen table; Guðný remembers also how, while at school, she was taken on outings to saga-sites in Skagafjörður. 



Espihóll, ('Aspen/poplar hill')

Looking out of the east-facing sitting room window in Espihóll, the bare hill of the same name rises abruptly just to one´s right. Diagonally to the left, across the river, is Munkaþverá. Guðný tells me that the river -- as is to be expected, and as the saga itself notes at one point -- changes its course from year to year ('Þar var þá vað á ánni, er nú er ekki', 'There was a ford then across the river, which does not exist now').* Walking down from the farm, just beyond the foot of the Espihóll hill, one hits a small tributary. This, Guðný states, is where the river ran at the time of the Víga-Glúms saga, and she mentions one of the saga's climactic fights in which Glúmr and his men take up position on their side of the river, and the Esphœlingar on the other, and the two sides throw stones and weapons at each other. Honour and reputation in the district are at stake.

'Þar var nú vað á ánni, er nú er ekki. Þeir sǫfnuðu nú at sér átta tigum vígra manna um nóttina ok bjuggusk við á hólinum framanverðum, þvá at þar var vaðit á ánni við hólinn sjálfan. En frá Arnóri er at segja, at hann finnr Glúm ok segir honum frá fǫrum sínum. Hann svarar: "Ekki kom mér at óvǫrum, at þeir léti eigi kyrrt, ok er nú á vandi nǫkkurr, svívirðing, ef kyrrt er, en allósýn virðing, ef við er leitat at rétta, en þó skal nú safna mǫnnum." Ok er ljóst var um morgininn, þá kom Glúmr at ánni með sex tigu manna ok vildi ríða yfir ána. En þeir grýttu á þá, Esphœlingar, ok gekk eigi fram reiðin, ok hvarf Glúmr aptr, ok bǫrðusk yfir ána með grjóti ok skotum, ok urðu þar margir sárir, en engir eru nefndir. Ok er heraðsmenn urðu varir við, þá drifu þeir til um daginn ok gengu í milli, ok var á komit sættum ok leitat, hvat Esphœlingar vilja bjóða fyrir ósœmðarhlut þann, er þeir hǫfðu gǫrt Arnóri.' (Víga-Glúms saga, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson, Íslenzk fornrit 9 (Reykjavík, 1956), p. 39. My English translation below at *)

Somewhere on the Munkaþverá side of the river, on the diagonal between Munkaþverá and Espihóll, is the site of the field 'Vitazgjafi', the dispute over which initially sparks the feud between Glúmr and the Esphœlingar early on in the saga. The field, whose name means something which gives certain returns (the field seems to have supernaturally fertile properties perhaps through its association with the god Freyr, whose temple is said to be at Þverá), is used by the Esphœlingar and those at Þverá in alternate years. While Glúmr is abroad in Norway, however, the Esphœlingar encroach on Glúmr´s and his mother´s rights to the field; on his return, Glúmr is prompted by his mother into taking action against this unjustness.

 

Looking from the river on the Espihóll side over to
Munkaþverá

After an incident when the Esphœlingar cattle have broken into the Þverá homefield and they are beaten and driven back to Espihóll by Glúmr, we hear how Glúmr laughs and about the extraordinary physical reaction that comes over him when the killing-mentality comes on him. 'Glúmr veik heim, ok setti at honum hlátr, ok brá honum svá við, at hann gerði fǫlvan í andliti, ok hrutu ór augum honum tár þau, er því váru lík sem hagl, þat er stórt er. Ok þann veg brá honum opt við síðan, þá er víghugr var á honum' ('Glúmr turned home, and laughter came upon him, and he was so affected that he became pale in his face, and tears sprang from his eyes which were like hail, they were so big. And he was affected in that manner often afterwards, when the mind for killing was on him'). One morning soon after, Glúmr dresses himself in his fine blue cloak and takes up his gold-inlaid spear in his hand, and he rides down to the field Vitazgjafi where the Esphœlingar Sigmundr Þorkelsson and his wife are working. Sigmundr´s wife expresses regret that the relationship between the Esphœlingar and those at Þverá -- they are kinsmen -- has broken down and she fixes Glúmr´s brooch to his cloak. Glúmr looks over the field and comments that the field appears still to be true to its name; he turns then to Sigmundr and strikes at his head with his spear. 'Þurfti Sigmundr eigi fleiri' ('Sigmundr did not need anything more'): Sigmundr is dead.   

* 'There was then a ford across the river, which does not exist now. They [the Esphœlingar] gathered to them now 80 good men during the night and positioned themselves at the front of the hill, because the ford across the river was there by the hill itself. And about Arnórr there is this to say: that he finds Glúmr and tells him about his journey. He [Glúmr] answers: 'It doesn´t come as a surprise to me that they do not let things be, and there will be some difficulties now: disgrace if things are left as they are, but not guaranteed honour if we try to do something about it; however, we will now gather men." And when it was light in the morning, they Glúmr came to the river with 60 men and wanted to ride over the river. But they, the Esphœlingar, threw stones at them, and it wasn´t possible to advance, and Glúmr turned back and they fought each other across the river with stones and shot, and many were wounded, but none are named. And when men in the district became aware of this, they hurried there during the day and intervened, and the parties came to parley and it was asked what the Esphœlingar would offer for the insult that they had directed at Arnórr.' 

And we're rolling!

So -- happy news from Iceland. First, I'm delighted to announce that the Embulance has come out of surgery (the op. involved replacing the clutch plate...) and she has made a very successful recovery, running sweet as a Land-Rover-shaped nut. Outside, further modifications include the installation of four very smart and very grippy tyres courtesy of one of my sponsors, the Icelandic petrol company N1. Inside the back of the van, I´ve been doing some interior decorating: the fold-down table has been plastered over with a large map of Iceland and I have curtains! It's feeling very homely in there, and thanks to the new tyres I feel much more secure on the road and ready to face whatever terrain I encounter.

Secondly and most importantly, the real saga-steads work has begun too. I'm revisiting Víga-Glúms saga ('The Saga of Killer-Glúmr') which is largely set around the part of Eyjafjarðarsveit (south of Iceland´s second town and the capital of the north, Akureyri, population circa 17,000) that I´m staying and working in for the next couple of weeks, while I plot a route for the next few months and organise myself generally. The subject of Víga-Glúms saga is the life of the titular Glúmr Eyjólfsson, who established himself as a powerful chieftain in the 10th century in the Eyjafjörður valley. The narrative describes various local feuds over land, personal honour, and family reputation in which Glúmr is involved over the course of his long life -- he is thought to have been born around 928 C.E., and to have died around 1003-1004 C.E..

Early on in the saga, we hear how the difficult Glúmr (more on him in the next post) -- fresh from rite-of-passage triumphs in Norway, such as overcoming a dangerous berserkr -- has a remarkable dream, in which he is standing outside his farm at Þverá looking north towards the fjord (passage in Old Norse below). He sees a woman walking in through the district: she turns directly to face Þverá and she is so huge that her shoulders touch the mountains on both sides of the valley. Glúmr goes out of the farmyard to meet her with the intention of inviting her to stay but he wakes from the dream before this is achieved. On waking, Glúmr describes the dream to his household and interprets it as foretelling the death of his powerful Norwegian grandfather, Vigfúss. The woman is his grandfather´s hamingja, or guardian spirit. When ships reach Iceland from Norway later on in the summer, the news of Glúmr´s grandfather´s death is announced, and the dream is proved to have been a prophetic one.



Looking south down the Eyjafjörður valley from Akureyri

 Þverá -- now known as Munkaþverá, on account of the Benedictine monastery founded on the site in 1155 and dissolved with the Reformation in 1550 -- is only a few minutes' drive north from the farm I´m staying on, Fellshlíð, halfway down the Eyjafjörður valley on the eastern side. Fellshlíð used to be called Öxnafellskot and was a hjáleiga (a leased smallholding) of the large (and in the past, very wealthy) neighbouring farm to the north, which is called Öxnafell -- hence the literal translation of Öxnafellskot, 'the Öxnafell farm-cottage'. Öxnafell is named in Víga-Glúms saga, along with numerous other farms in the broad valley that I can see from Fellshlíð: Grund and Espihóll, to name but two examples. It has been suggested that Víga-Glúms saga was put together as a written narrative in the 13th century by someone attached to the monastery at Munkaþverá.

Thermos to hand and back up against a hay bale, wrapped up snug in outdoor kit (thank you 66 Norður, Rab, and Les at the Salvation Army shop in Cambridge) and with Fellshlíð horses peering at me curiously in the mane-whipping wind, there I was: sitting and reading about Glúmr's dream-woman and mapping out her path for myself, glancing across the valley, and north and south up and down it. The passage is a striking one wherever one is reading it; the immensity of the dream vision, and the significance of the event are further highlighted when one is actually in the landscape of the dream. This kind of experience is at the heart of what this project is about and the first glimmerings of the idea came to me while I was working on the farm here for the first time in 2008... reading Víga-Glúms saga then, I realised for the first time how remarkable it is to be able to locate this literature so precisely in the landscape as it is today. In the next instalment, more about Killer-Glúmr...and more about some of the specific places named in the saga and the people who live in these places now.

Víga-Glúms saga, ch. 9, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson in Eyfirðinga sǫgur, Íslenzk fornrit vol 9 (Reykjavík, 1956), pp. 30-31; my translation into English



Eyjafjarðarsveit

Þat er sagt, at Glúm dreymði eina nótt: hann þóttisk vera úti staddr á bœ sínum ok sjá út til fjarðarins. Hann þóttisk sjá konu eina ganga útan eptir heraðinu, ok stefndi þangat til Þverár; en hon var svá mikil, at axlarnar tóku út fjǫllin tveggja vegn. Enn hann þóttisk ganga ór garði á mót henni ok bauð henni til sín; ok síðan vaknaði hann. Ǫllum þótti undarligt, en hann segir svá: "Draumr er mikill ok merkiligr, en svá mun ek hann ráða, at Vigfúss, móðurfaðir minn, mun nú vera andaðr, ok myndi kona sjá hans hamingja vera, er fjǫllum hæra gekk. Ok var hann um aðra menn fram um flesta hluti at virðingu, ok hans hamingja mun leita sér þangat staðfestu, sem ek em." En um sumarit, er skip kómú út, spurðisk andlát Vigfúss.

"It is said that Glúmr dreamed one night: he thought he was standing outside on his farm, looking out to the fjord. He seemed to see a certain woman walking from the sea through the district, and she headed thither, to Þverá; and she was so huge that her shoulders touched the mountains on both sides. And he seemed to walk from the yard out towards her and he invited her to his house; and afterwards, he woke. This seemed extraordinary to everyone, and he says then: 'It is a great dream and a significant one, and I interpret it thus, that Vigfúss, my maternal grandfather, is now dead, and that woman must be his guardian spirit, who walked taller than the mountains. And he [Vigfúss] was superior to other men in most matters of honour, and his guardian spirit must have been searching thither where I am for a resting place.' And during the summer, when ships came out [to Iceland], news of the death of Vigfúss became known."