Hrafnkel's Saga and Other Stories

For much of history Northern Europeans emerged from winter and the hungry gap of early spring with their bodies' stores of most vitamins severely depleted. This put them into vile moods, making them prone to violence and rancour.

Violence and rancour are two notable themes of many of the seven short tales from 13th Century Iceland that make up Hrafnkel's Saga and Other Tales. Written by Christian authors about 300 years after Christianity first came to Iceland, these tales hark back to a time when the pagan warrior ethos of the Vikings had not yet been blunted by Christian love and pity, or by the recent adoption of settled agriculture as a way of life.

In one tale, when the son of an old Viking raider is challenged to one-on-one combat by a man seeking to restore his honour, his father condones the fight, saying: "I'd much rather lose you than have a coward for a son." His is a hard creed, one neither the son nor his foe can fulfil. They patch up their differences and live long lives as farmers.

Yes, swords and murder abound in these tales, but they are not the main point. In fact, action plays a relatively minor role in the narrative process. What primarily interests the authors are the motivations of the characters. Funnily enough, vitamin deficiency is never mentioned once. Rather, we are told of many other motivations, including honour, revenge, humiliation, wanderlust and oath-fulfilment.

However, the dominant theme of this collection of stories is suffering, and the sharing of suffering. This should not be surprising as the authors were most likely Christian clerics. What is surprising is that these authors do not use their stories for propaganda purposes. While suffering is the theme, the non-Christian elements of their stories are presented in a factual and even-handed manner. For example, the eponymous Hrafnkel is a priest of the god Frey. The author of his saga tell us this as a fact and places no moral judgement on it.

The tales are told in a brief (but not overly terse) and straightforward manner. They are short, and some of them can be read in matter of minutes - which just may be what you need if you don't have a long winter's night to kill. Even for all their brevity, the stories do provide an illuminating insight into a world that has long since vanished but whose echoes we may still hear today.

Publishing details: Hrafnkel's Saga and Other Stories translated by Hermann Palsson (Penguin, 1971, 136 pp.)