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K. E. Pokalo 1 Early Crime Novels 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies Early Crime Novels: Icelandic Sagas as Precursors to Scandinavian Crime Fiction Participation in the 2006 NEH Seminar: Isle of Man—Crossroads of Medieval Culture re-ignited my long dormant interest in the family sagas of Iceland. This paper is an outgrowth of that experience. During a subsequent snow-bound winter of reading Scandinavian crime novels I found multiple parallels between the contemporary narratives and millennium old sagas. The popularity of The Girl With. series should be used as an entry point for including Icelandic sagas in high school and college literature survey courses. Scandinavian crime fiction is something of a growth industry in the current marketplace. Before the word of mouth popularity of Stieg Larsson's Millenium series, several Scandinavian writers were carving out critical and popular acclaim--Henning Mankell, Karin Fossum, Arnoldur Indridason, Anne Holt, and Jo Nesbo are a few of the contemporary writers whose novels are eagerly consumed. These writers are continuing in a narrative tradition that reveals itself first in the 13th and 14th century Icelandic family sagas. Milan Kundera, among others, asserts that the sagas are Europe's first novels. At the time, neither the French nor the English had created such a prose work in their national tongue! We should certainly ponder this thoroughly: The first great prose treasure of Europe was created in its smallest nation, which even today numbers fewer than three hundred thousand inhabitants. [. .]Let’s suppose that the Icelandic sagas had been written in English: their heroes’ names would be as familiar to us as Tristan or Don Quixote; their singular aesthetic character, oscillating between chronicle and fiction, would have provoked all sorts of K. E. Pokalo 2 Early Crime Novels 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies theories; people would have argued over whether they should or should not be considered the first European novels. (Kundera 28-29) The family sagas differ greatly from the other European narrative forms. The sagas "offer detailed descriptions of private and public life, including stories of small- scale chieftains, farmers, labourers [sic], and women, types of individuals usually excluded from medieval narrative writings" (Byock 95). A realistic geography and a strong sense of place not only serve as backdrop to the unfolding story, they are key factors in the development of the narrative. The characters--male and female--are fully human, perhaps not as psychologically developed as a 21st century audience expects, but they are driven and constrained by human limits. The family sagas were written down at a time of dramatic and traumatic change in Iceland. Social organization had shifted from independent small farming landholders to consolidation of power and wealth under the control of a few persistently belligerent families. The strife created by these belligerent families led to the loss of independence for the Icelanders. Political control returned to Norway from which the founding families had fled centuries earlier to escape the forceful centralization of power. The stories conveyed in the sagas look back at a time when a people grappled with creating an identity and a livable society. Denton Fox asserts that the sagas' "most general and most important problem is how man should act [. .]--whether it is possible for him to maintain in every sense his honor and his individuality, and at the same time to live a peaceful and prosperous life" (296). Magnusson and Palsson write "what characterized [. .] Iceland above anything else, setting it quite apart from any other medieval European country, was a dynamic veneration for law and order. The early Icelanders owed no K. E. Pokalo 3 Early Crime Novels 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies allegiance to king or earl; their allegiance was primarily to the concept of law [. ]. To be a member of society was at once a privilege and an obligation, and anyone who violated the law of society forfeited his right to remain within that law, within that society" (Magnusson and Palsson 26). The paradox is that despite the devotion to the concept of law, violations of that sought-for peace and prosperity frequently occurred. "The law is ambivalent: on the one hand it is a useful and necessary principle of order," Fox writes, "on the other, it is inadequate, since it can not only be perverted by a clever lawyer but also over-ridden by brute force [. ]" (296). The sagas do not celebrate or glorify killings, vengeance, and feud. Rather, the saga writers, exploring themes of violence and law-breaking, "were more concerned with the motivation and consequences of violence than with the violence itself," according to Magnusson and Palsson (27). Most of the crimes and the resolutions that are explored through the sagas are the result of irregular relationships, relationships that violate the normal order of things. In the Saga of Gisli Sursson, Gisli and his siblings live too close together in a narrow valley. There is adultery, covetousness, and envy. Gisli’s brother-in-law Vestein returns from his foreign travels well-laden with lovely things, which Vestein offers to Gisli and his family. Gisli’s brother, Thorkel, is married to Asgerd, who’s been having an affair with Vestein, whose sister, Aud, is married to Gisli. After learning of his wife’s infidelity, Thorkel decides to leave the farm he shares with his brother Gisli and move in with their sister, Thordis, and her husband, Thorgrim. Thorgrim stirs Thorkel’s animosity and once Vestein returns to Haukadal, Vestein’s death is assured. Just after daybreak, someone entered the house without a sound and walked over to where Vestein was lying. He was already awake but before he knew what was K. E. Pokalo 4 Early Crime Novels 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies happening, a spear was thrust at him and went right through his breast [. .] Then the man left. Vestein tried to stand up, but as he did so he fell down beside the bedpost, dead. (Gisli 515). “Someone” is never identified, but Gisli takes revenge by killing Thorgrim. Thordis, Gisli’s sister and Thorgrim’s widow, informs her second husband, Bork, brother of the slain Thorgrim, of Gisli’s involvement in the killing of Thorgrim. These transgressive relationships drive the crimes, and thus the plot. Transgressive relationships are at the core of many of today’s Scandinavian crime novels. In Anne Holt’s What Is Mine, the killer had had illicit affairs with three women whose children he steals and kills because the women refuse to acknowledge his paternity. The killings at the heart of Jo Nesbo’s novels are driven by irregular relationships; a boy who witnesses his mother’s adulterous liaison grows up to destroy women whose children are not biologically related to the men they call father. Arnaldur Indridason’s Erlendur solves a killing that involves an illicit relationship genetically linked to the death of a child. Proximity, whether in a modern city or narrow valley, fosters these illicit relationships and the proximity is an effect of the landscape. Living at the borders between society and the wilderness is a key narrative construct in the Icelandic family sagas as it is in contemporary Scandinavian crime stories. Encroachment of uncontrolled nature or entrance into the forest presents danger. Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough explores the concept of landscape as a narrative device in the sagas, particularly through outlaw sagas. "[O]utlaws by definition are forced to move beyond the known world, existing on the peripheries of the wilderness outside the K. E. Pokalo 5 Early Crime Novels 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies human communities. Their special relationship to the landscape allows for the construction [. .]that examines how the sagas describe the men in their surroundings, both in the social world and beyond" (Barraclough para. 1). In Njal’s Saga, landscape and identity with place, keep Gunnar in Iceland when to do so is a risk to his life. He has accepted an unjust settlement and agreed to leave Iceland for three years. After taking leave of all his friends he heads toward the river and departure, but [. .]Gunnar’s horse slipped, and he sprang from the saddle. He happened to be facing the hillside and the farm at Hlidarendi, and spoke: ‘Lovely is the hillside—never has it seemed so lovely to me as now, with its pale fields and mown meadows, and I will ride back home and not leave.’ (Njal 123) In Gisli’s Saga, Gisli is also unjustly outlawed. His wife's brother has been murdered in his house despite his attempts to prevent the murder. It is the landscape that had prevented the warning getting to Vestein in time to save him: Now Vestein rode out from home, and it turned out that as he rode below the sandbank at Mosvellir, the two brothers, Hallvard and Havard [who had been given the task of warning Vestein] rode above it. Thus he and they missed each other in passing. [. ] Hallvard and Havard reached Hest and learned where Vestein was actually heading. They rode after him as fast as they could and when they reached K. E. Pokalo 6 Early Crime Novels 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies Mosvellir, they could see men riding down in the valley but there was a hill between them. (Gisli 513) Topographical features get in the way of the message being delivered promptly. Vestein has decided that he’s too far along the way to Haukadal and home to turn back, and so, despite repeated cautions, he heads home to his murder. Topographical features, too, keep Gisli safe for some time in his internal exile.

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