Wanderer, storyteller, wise, half-blind, with a wonderful horse.
By Nancy Marie Brown
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
"Song of the Vikings" Giveaway
When I started this blog, I promised to explain why I named it "God of Wednesday." If you've followed me over the past year, you can probably guess. Now comes the quiz: Who is the god of Wednesday and what does he have to do with this blog?
Answer me by email (nancymariebrown@gmail.com) or Facebook or in the comment section below, and I'll print the best answers in a future blog.
When I get enough responses, I'll put the names in a hat, and the winner will receive a free, autographed copy of "Song of the Vikings"--or, if you already have it, one of my other books (as available).
Remember, a valid entry has to answer both parts of the question: who? and what?
To make it a fair test, here are some blog posts from 2012 that might help you out:
April 4: "The Lord of the Ring of the the Nibelungs"
May 30: "The Homer of the North"
June 6: "The Most Influential Writer of the Middle Ages"
November 14: "Seven Norse Myths We Wouldn't Have Without Snorri: Part I"
November 21: "Seven Norse Myths We Wouldn't Have Without Snorri: Part II"
December 5: "Seven Norse Myths We Wouldn't Have Without Snorri: Part III"
December 12: "The Tolkien Connection"
Remember, all answers to the quiz are entered into the giveaway. Good luck, and be creative--maybe you can explain me to myself.
Join me again next Wednesday for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
The Spirit of the North
At the end of Song of the Vikings, I traced the effect
of Snorri’s Edda and other medieval
Icelandic literature on fantasy writers William Morris, J.R.R. Tolkien, and
C.S. Lewis. They were smitten, writes Lewis, by “pure ‘Northernness.’”
One writer I did not include,
but should have, was E.R. Eddison.
I read Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, published in 1922,
just after reading The Lord of the Rings
for the first time. I clearly remember talking to my English teacher about Tolkien—I
think I was in seventh or eighth grade—and asking, Are there any more books out
there like his? She suggested The Worm
Ouroboros.
Tolkien once called Eddison
“The greatest and most convincing writer of invented worlds that I have read.”
I wouldn’t go that far. But, looking back, Eddison and Tolkien may be the
writers most responsible for my love, not of fantasy novels, but of
“Northernness.” Rereading The Worm
Ouroboros, my favorite part would have to be the introductory scene on page
2 of my tattered paperback:
…He had her hand in his. This
was their House.
“Should we finish that chapter of Njal?” she said.
She took the heavy volume with its faded green cover and
read: “He went out on the night of the Lord’s day, when nine weeks were still to
winter; he heard a great crash, so that he thought both heaven and earth shook.
Then he looked into the west airt and he thought he saw thereabouts a ring of
fiery hue, and within the ring a man on a gray horse. He passed quickly by him,
and rode hard. He had a flaming firebrand in his hand, and he rode so close to
him that he could see him plainly. He was black as pitch, and he sung this song
with a mighty voice—
Here I ride swift steed,
His flank flecked with rim,
Rain from his mane drips,
Horse mighty for harm;
Flames flare at each end,
Gall glows in the midst,
So fares it with Flosi’s redes
As this flaming brand flies;
And so fares it with Flosi’s redes
As this flaming brand flies.
“Then he thought he hurled
the firebrand east towards the fells before him, and such a blaze of fire leapt
up to meet it that he could not see the fells for the blaze. It seemed as
though that man rode east among the flames and vanished there… So he went and
told Hjallti, but he said he had seen ‘the Wolf’s Ride, and that comes ever
before great tidings.’”
They were silent awhile…
Njal’s Saga
was the first saga I ever read—over Thanksgiving break in my second year of
college, I believe. I don’t now recall if I recognized that passage from The Worm Ouroboros when I saw it in the
original, but I do know that the fire-rider or volcano-spirit has long been one
of my favorite images from medieval Iceland.
The Tolkien quote appears on
the cover of a new edition of Styrbiorn
the Strong, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2011 with an
afterword by Paul Edmund Thomas.
“Styrbiorn’s name has sounded in my memory
like a drum ever since, twenty years ago, I first read the passing reference to
him in the Eyrbyggja Saga,” Eddison
wrote in a letter to his younger brother in 1922. According to Thomas, Eddison bought
the William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson translation of the saga in 1900.
Writing to his typist just
after The Worm Ouroboros came out,
Eddison said, “I am starting on a new book: a historical story this time about
people who really lived in this world, in the Viking age in Sweden a thousand
years ago, the age of the great classic saga literature of the north, which I
have studied these twenty years and which I love more than any other.”
What about the sagas inspired
him? In the “Closing Note” to Styrbiorn
the Strong, Eddison explained: “The spirit of the North, to the inheritance
of which I believe (pace Mr. Hilaire
Belloc) our own country largely owes her greatness, is embodied in its purest
form in its prose epic, the Icelandic Sagas of the classical age, such as (to
name a few) Njal’s Saga, the Laxdale Saga, the Saga of Egil Skallagrimsson, Gisli’s Saga, and the Saga of Hrafnkel the Priest of Frey.”
He continued: “There is no
‘Keltic Twilight’ here, no barbaric exaggerations, no embroidery, no weaving of
words or fancies, no boggling at truth: there is much shrewd insight into
character and the springs of action, a power of direct and vivid narrative
rarely matched in any other literature, much deep-seated humour and philosophy
of hard and manly life.”
And finally: “But this is not
the place to do more than hint at some obvious qualities of that genius which
has shed about the lives of a few great families, dwelling in lonely homesteads
in distant Iceland, an atmosphere of tragic and epic grandeur like the grandeur
that is about windy Ilios; bringing us, in the end, as Homer brings us, not to
take sides with Greeks or Trojans, with Njal’s sons or the Burners, but to
ponder (somewhat perhaps as the Gods may ponder) on the greatness and the
pitifulness of human things.”
It’s interesting to read Styrbiorn the Strong and see how close
Eddison came to his models. And then, of course, to reread a saga. Perhaps Eyrbyggja Saga.
For as Eddison said in his
letter to his brother, “There is no saga of the Swedish prince after whom this
story is named. If there were, I do not think my story would have been written.
For it is not my study to emulate a writer for whose other work I have a
respect, in treating the sagas as Tate & Cibber treated Shakespeare,
tricking out these imperishable prose epics of the north with modern fripperies
of sentimental love interest and psychological disquisition. … I am so simple
as to believe that those grand stories are so elemental, so beautiful, so firm
set in the soil of life, that they are quite able to look after themselves.”
Join me again next Wednesday at
nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another writing adventure in Iceland or the
medieval world.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Snorri the Hobbit?
A year
after completing my biography of Snorri Sturluson, Song of the Vikings, I am rethinking his character. Snorri, I now
see, was a hobbit.
Writing
about Tolkien’s debt to Snorri at the end of my book, I discussed the Icelandic
antecedants of the wizard Gandalf, the dwarves, elves and orcs, the dragon, the
shapeshifter Beorn, warrior women, the riders of Rohan, the giant eagles, the trolls,
the wargs, barrow-wights, magic swords, Mount Doom, and the cursed ring of power.
I may not
have gone far enough.
I should
have included hobbits on my list, argues Gloriana St. Clair in a paper I
recently rediscovered: “Tolkien’s Cauldron: Northern Literature and The Lord of
the Rings,” published online by University
Libraries Research in 2000 (See http://repository.cmu.edu/lib_science/67). (The
rediscovery was thanks to the marvelous website http://www.medievalists.net.)
In her
chapter four, “Creatures,” St. Clair counts “over 35 types of mortals,
immortals, and monsters” in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. “Those that show some
affinity with the Northern myths and folk traditions are 1) Hobbits, 2) Elves
and Orcs, 3) Dwarves, 4) Wizards, 5) Tree-kin, 6) Birds, 7) Dragons, 8) Wargs,
9) The Eye, and 10) Ancients.”
None of the
others surprised me, but hobbits? I think of them more as the quintessential
English country folk. St. Clair has anticipated my objections.
She writes:
“Perhaps one of the most unlikely comparisons possible is between the short,
fat, meek hobbits and the tall, strong, daring Vikings”—a term she applies to
characters from the Icelandic sagas. “Yet the two peoples do share some traits.”
Her list of
traits is convincing—and strangely matches my description of the writer of the Edda, Heimskringla, and (most likely) Egil’s Saga, Tolkien’s muse Snorri
Sturluson.
“One of the
first things that Tolkien mentions about the hobbits is their fondness for
visitors,” writes St. Clair. Snorri also loved visitors—he practically kept
open house at his grand estate of Reykholt for poets and writers.
Among
hobbits, says St. Clair, “Storytelling was held in particular demand. … Bilbo
recollects stories told about Gandalf. … Sam refers sentimentally to the great
stories without ends … [and] mentions Frodo’s probable fame in the storytelling
of the Shire.” Storytelling was one of Snorri’s great loves too. He collected
stories, he memorized stories, he made up stories, and, fortunately for us, he
filled page after page of parchment with stories. Otherwise, as I have argued
here earlier, we would know little or nothing about Norse mythology.
Hobbits
liked to eat six meals a day, if they could get them, and they loved parties. So
did Snorri. According to his nephew, who wrote part of Sturlunga Saga, Snorri gave elaborate feasts and was a cheerful
host. Snorri himself writes often and at length about eating and drinking: In Heimskringla it seems that a nobleman’s
major duty was to organize feasts.
“Hobbits
and Vikings were vain about their dress,” says St. Clair. As was Snorri. In his
history of the kings of Norway, Heimskringla,
Snorri allows King Sigurd the Jerusalem-farer to declare that “a
king must be tall, so as to be conspicuous in a crowd.” Scholars believe Snorri was writing
about himself when he has King Eystein answer his brother, “It
is no less important that a man is well-dressed, so as to be easily known on
that account.”
Hobbits and Icelanders “both loved to reckon their ancestors,” St.
Clair points out. Snorri’s interest in genealogy is clear in everything he
wrote.
Concludes
St. Clair, “Even the fear Bilbo shows when he begins to sense the nature of his
unrequested journey is not unknown in the sagas. The coward who must be
converted to bravery is almost a conventional character.” In the only portrayal
we have of Snorri himself, the one written by his nephew, the saga-writer comes
off as a very Bilbo-esque coward. Unfortunately, he never “converted to bravery,”
though he wrote eloquently about it. He did not live up to his Viking ideals,
to the heroes portrayed in his books. He did not die with a laugh—or a poem—on
his lips. His last words were “Don’t strike!” As the poet Jorge
Luis Borges sums him up in a beautiful poem, the writer who “bequeathed a
mythology / Of ice and fire” and “violent glory” to us was a coward: “On / Your
head, your sickly face, falls the sword, / As it fell so often in your book.”
As I describe him in Song of
the Vikings, Snorri was “one of the richest men in Iceland, holder of seven
chieftaincies, owner of five profitable estates and a harbor, husband of an
heiress, lover of several mistresses, a fat man soon to go gouty, a hard
drinker, a seeker of ease prone to soaking long hours in his hot-tub while
sipping stout ale, not a Viking warrior by any stretch of the imagination, but
clever. Crafty, cunning, and ambitious. A good businessman. So well-versed in
the law that few other Icelanders could out-argue him. A respectable poet and a
lover of books.”
Think of
Bilbo Baggins with a sex life, a lot of lawyerly cunning, and a lack of moral
fiber. Perhaps a Sackville-Baggins?
Join me again next Wednesday at
nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another writing adventure in Iceland or the
medieval world.
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Making Middle Earth
When I wrote earlier about
the Norse creation story, as told by Snorri Sturluson
in his Edda, I described how the god
Odin and his brothers fashioned the world out of the body of the frost giant
Ymir:
His flesh was the soil, his
blood the sea. His bones and teeth became stones and scree. His hair were
trees, his skull was the sky, his brain, clouds. From his eyebrows they made
Middle Earth, which they peopled with men, crafting the first man and woman
from driftwood they found on the seashore.
From his eyebrows? Notice how quickly I skipped over that. Middle Earth is clearly the
place where men and women live. Elsewhere Snorri says the earth (or the world,
depending on the translator) is round. Now whether you think of it as “round”
as a disc (as some scholars still do, in spite of the overwhelming evidence
that medieval people knew the world was a sphere [link to Flat Earth blog]) or “round”
as an apple (as the Norse did in Snorri’s day, according to the 13th-century
encyclopedia called The King’s Mirror),
it’s still hard to imagine the world we live in as being made from eyebrows.
So what is Snorri’s “Middle
Earth”?
Kevin Wanner of the
University of Western Michigan has a brilliant answer. Wanner was one of the
scholars who most influenced my understanding of Snorri Sturluson as a writer.
Somehow I missed his 2009 article, “Off-Center: Considering Directional
Valances in Norse Cosmography,” when I was working on my biography of Snorri, Song of the Vikings.
Admittedly, the part that’s
snagged my interest now is not Wanner’s main argument. It’s the definition of
the Old Norse word Miðgarðr, which I’ve always seen translated into the
Tolkienish Middle Earth.
As Wanner notes, forms of
this word appear in many northern languages. In Old English, for example, middangeard is clearly the Latin mundus, the world as a whole. But Old
Norse writers (Snorri included) usually use the word heimr to refer to the world as a whole. So what really is Miðgarðr?
The first part, mið, isn’t
contested. It means “middle.”
But garðr, Wanner points out, has
two meanings. One is the cognate “yard,” in the sense of an enclosure. The
second is “fence” or “fortification.”
Writes Wanner, “As incredible as it may seem in light of the typical
understanding and use of the term among scholars, there is not one occurrence
of ‘Miðgarðr’ in Snorri’s Edda or
eddic poetry in which the second element of the name unambiguously carries the
sense of yard or enclosure.” There are many cases, on the other hand, of garðr meaning a fortification.
Instead of “Middle Earth,” Wanner concludes, Miðgarðr might just mean “fence down the middle.”
Go back to those giant eyebrows—which Wanner explains could instead be
eyelashes. In either case, think of two arcs of hair. Bushy eyebrows. Spiky
eyelashes. A fence of giant hair.
It makes perfect sense if you add another part that I skipped over when
retelling Snorri’s creation story: the reason why Odin and his brothers made Miðgarðr. The gods had already given
lands on the shore of the sea to the giants, Snorri writes. Then, because of
the “hostility of the giants,” they made Miðgarðr—the
fence down the middle—to protect the people they were about to fashion from
driftwood.
Now whether this fence was an arc, a circle, or a wiggly line I’ll leave it
to Wanner to convince you. His paper was published in Speculum (2009): 36-72.
Join me again next Wednesday at
nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another writing adventure in Iceland or the
medieval world.
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