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. Despite his outlaw status, “Gisli is firmly rooted in the struggles of society and his trajectory does not take him far out of the social landscape” (Barraclough 7). Gisli is living in a borderland between the social world and the wilderness.

Features of the landscape are key to the plot of the modern Scandinavian crime novels as well. Arnaldur’s Erlendur investigates crimes that are revealed by a caldera that has drained as a result of geological shifts. Erlendur explores another crime that may not be a crime at Thingvellir, the site of so much negotiation and betrayal in the family sagas. In Arnaldur’s novels, the landscape is as central to the plot as it is in the sagas.

Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s protagonist, Thora, investigates crimes and irregularities that are revealed in the excavation of 1973 volcanic activity and on the west coast of Iceland where the shape of the land lends itself to perceptions of hauntings. In the novels of

Norwegian authors, Holt, Nesbo, and Dahl, the edge of the city meeting the edge of the forest suggests a borderland between the veneer of civilization and the wilderness wherein danger dwells, whether that danger is a psychotic killer or a mythological creature.

In the case of both Gisli and Gunnar an argument can made that their outlaw K. E. Pokalo 7 Early Crime Novels 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies status had nothing to do with justice although it was within the purview of the law.

Corruption of the law leading to outlawry is implied, too, in the novels of Jo Nesbo.

Harry Hole, like Gisli and Gunnar, is a man driven to achieve justice at potentially life- threatening costs to himself, and to those closest to him. Harry is member of the Oslo

Police, but he is marginalized by his refusal to do anything except seek justice. He is tied to the community by family and friendships, but he is not motivated by ambition or prosperity. Harry apparently compromises himself again and again, but it is only so that he can capture the bad guy, whether the bad guy is a renowned theater impresario, an international businessman, or a corrupt police official. A released suspect tells a corrupt detective about Harry: “He’s not like you [. . .]. He couldn’t care less about personal prestige, he only wants to catch the bad boys. All the bad boys” (Nesbo 595).

Although he is a representative of societal authority, Harry Hole, the protagonist in Jo Nesbo’s series lives on the margins, almost as an outlaw. He defies the power structure and the perceptions of his peers by unmasking corruption at the highest levels of the state. His close friends are often in danger because of their association with him.

Despite that danger of association, his friends are loyal and help in whatever capacity they can. Harry’s literary antecedent, Gisli, receives help from several sources during his outlawry, assistance that causes threats and trouble for the giver. Harry, like Gisli, like

Njal, and like Gunnar, carries on regardless of risk, because he, like his forebearers,

knows about destiny. According to Laura Miller in The Wall Street Journal, "the real test of character is not worldly triumph, but the courage with which you respond to life's inevitable hardships" (L. Miller W3).

Whether we’re looking at 13th century Icelandic sagas or 21st century K. E. Pokalo 8 Early Crime Novels 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies Scandinavian crime fiction, we’re looking at normal people, characters with families and homes, not at superheroes or mythological creatures or gods or knights summoned by magical sabers. At first glance, it may appear that the early Icelandic sagas are warrior- heroic and male-dominated, but that is not wholly so. The role of women in these stories differs from the role of women in English and Continental narratives of the same period.

Robert Kellogg writes: “Many of the women in the sagas, like the women in Greek tragedy and in the nineteenth century novel, play large and interesting roles. ‘A woman of strong character’ is bound to be an intelligent, independent and courageous person, although we do not know, from the word skorungur itself, how she will be outstanding, or even whether she will be a force for good or for evil” (Kellogg xxxvi-vii). The saga women give advice, which is heeded. They control their households and their goods.

Halldor and Bergthora exchange insults with the best in the flyting tradition. Bergthora is

“a woman with a mind of her own and a fine person, but a bit harsh-tempered” (Njal 36).

Halldor is beautiful and powerful and nasty. She provokes a series of killings answered one-for-one by Bergthora. Gisli’s wife, Aud, responds to her husband’s persecutor who has offered her a handsome amount of money to reveal his whereabouts:

Aud took the silver and put it in a large purse, then she stood up and struck

Eyjolf on the nose, and blood spurted all over him.

‘Take that for your gullibility,’ she said, ‘and all the harm that ensues from

it. There was never any hope that I would render my husband into your hands,

you evil man. Take this now for your cowardice and your shame, and remember,

you wretch, for as long as you live, that a woman has struck you. And you will

not get what you desire, either.’ (Gisli 548) K. E. Pokalo 9 Early Crime Novels 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies Despite the threats against her life that ensue from this action, she stands her ground and lives to strike Eyjolf again when she stands beside her husband during his final battle.

The women in the sagas may be in danger, but they never appear imperiled just because they are women. We are not likely to see a Halldor or Bergthora or Aud trapped and waiting idly for a rescuer. They engineer their own deliverance. Their literary daughters are found in today’s Scandinavian crime fiction, both as protagonists and as the authors of those tales. The characters might be police officers or lawyers, fully integrated into society’s authority structure, but they are also women embracing their roles as mothers and nurturers. They ably engage in both the external world of work and the interior world of domesticity. Unlike many of their fictional American or British counterparts, they haven’t rejected domestic relationships in exchange for competing in an external world. Andrew Nestigen’s comments about Finnish writer Leena Lehtolainen pertain to all of these women writers and their characters:

Marrying police procedural and autobiography gives her access to the semantics

and syntax of narratives about the police agent of the state, while the rhetoric of

autobiography gives her access to the intimacy and formative relationships of the

home and family. By merging these, she contributes to the formation of a

politicized middle ground (196).

Icelandic sagas, set hundreds of years before they were written down, offered a lens for a people’s self-definition during a time of turbulence and violence. Writing about narratives from small countries, Kundera asserts about the sagas that they “belong to the ‘archeology of letters,’ they do not influence living literature” (29). I would argue K. E. Pokalo 10 Early Crime Novels 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies that they do not belong to the archeology of letters; rather, the sagas do indeed influence the living literature evolving from the languages that produced those sagas. Modern

Scandinavian writers explore the nature of evil and demonstrate how a social welfare state contends with violence and crime. According to Risto Saarinen, “[t]hrough reading novels people can better grasp the uncontrollable surplus of evil still present in their own society and perhaps also in their own lives. Literary theorists have pointed out that murder mysteries are most popular in countries with low crime rate” (134). Like their literary predecessors, the saga tellers, today’s Scandinavian crime writers use the story of a crime, “the conflict between private desires and public conventions and laws, to make powerful critiques of notions of truth, ethnicity, and attitudes towards the environment”(Nestingen 206).

I found great delight during that snow-bound winter extracting similarities between the crime stories of the first millennium and crime stories of the second millennium. That sense of recognition, of understanding allusions and revisiting the older literature is one of the joys we experience when we read and teach. We owe it to our students to give them access to the source material for what might be perceived only as popular culture, rather than the continuation of a narrative tradition. It is my hope that schools will embed the sagas into their literature curricula as western literature’s first novels. And it is my hope that publishers and translators will pick up the pace of making available in English the writers currently unavailable to us mono-linguists. K. E. Pokalo 11 Early Crime Novels 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies Works Cited

Barraclough, Eleanor Rosamund. “Inside outlawry in Grettis saga Asmundarsonar and

Gisla saga Surssonar: landscape in the outlaw sagas.” Scandinavian Studies 82.4

(2010): 365+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 Mar. 2011.

Gisli Sursson’s Saga. The Sagas of the Icelanders. Trans. Ruth C. Ellison. New York:

Penguin, 2001. 500-557. Print.

Kellogg, Robert. “Introduction.” The Sagas of the Icelanders. New York: Penguin, 2001.

xv-liv. Print.

Kundera, Milan. “Die Weltliteratur: How We Read One Another.” The New Yorker 8

Jan. 2007: 28-35. Print.

Magnusson, Magnus, and Hermann Palsson. Introduction. Laxdaela Saga. Illus. Peter

Pendrey. Trans. Mangus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson. 1969. London: Folio

Society, 1975. 9-31. Rpt. in Folio Society. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. Print.

Miller, Laura. “Culture--Mysteries: The Strange Case of the Nordic Detectives.” The

Wall Street Journal [New York] 16 Jan. 2010, Eastern ed.: W3. ProQuest

Multiple Databases. Web. 12 Oct. 2010.

Nestingen, Andrew. Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia: Fiction, Film, and Social

Change. Seattle: U Washington P, 2008. Print.

Njal’s Saga. Trans. Robin Cook. 1997. New York: Penguin, 2001. Print.

Saarinen, Risto. “The Surplus of Evil in Welfare Society: Contemporary Scandinavian

Crime Fiction.” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 42.2 (2003): 131-135. Literary

Reference Center. Web. 17 Sept. 2010. K. E. Pokalo 12 Early Crime Novels 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies Early Crime Novels: Icelandic Sagas as Precursors to Scandinavian Crime Fiction

If you like the sagas, you might also like the books whose contents contributed to the development of this paper (English language titles).

Icelandic

Arnaldur Indriðason: Jar City, Silence of the Graves, Voices, The Draining Lake,

Arctic Chill, Hypothermia

Yrsa Sigurdardóttir: Last Rituals, My Soul to Take, Ashes to Dust

Norwegian

Anne Holt: What Is Mine, What Never Happens, Death in Oslo

K. O. Dahl: The Man in the Window, The Fourth Man

Jo Nesbø: The Redbreast, Nemesis, The Devil’s Star, The Redeemer, The Snowman,

The Leopard

Swedish

Karin Alvtegen: Betrayal, Missing, Shame

Anders Roslund & Borge Hellström: Three Seconds

Karin Fossum: The Water’s Edge (7th in the Inspector Sejer series)