Favorite Authors Series

Favorite Authors Series: Snorri Sturluson

/ Elizabeth Springer / Leave a comment

This series features some of my favorite historical fiction and mystery authors.

The cover of the Norwegian translation of Heimskringla by Gustav Storm, published 1900. The entire book is a work of art.

Snorri Sturluson (1178/9-1241) belongs in my series of favorite authors as a pioneer of what might be called biographical historical fiction, and as a poet and teacher of poets. As such, he serves in this series as my figurehead for a whole ‘school’ of now-anonymous saga writers of medieval Iceland, who took the characters, events, and landscapes of Iceland’s recent past and created remarkable prose narratives that deserve to be considered early historical fiction.

What is a saga?
The word ‘saga’ is bandied about quite a bit. What do I mean by an Icelandic saga? The Oxford English Dictionary defines a saga as “any of the narrative compositions in prose that were written in Iceland or Norway during the middle ages.” The second definition suggests transference of meaning: “a narrative having the (real or supposed) characteristics of the Icelandic sagas; a story of heroic achievement or marvellous adventure.”

The king’s men bring their loot aboard. From Gustav Storm’s Norwegian translation of Heimskringla (1900).

An Icelandic saga is a long-form prose narrative, about the length of a modern novel or novella, that tells a story about a person or group of people. The word ‘saga’ is taken from Old Norse and means, approximately, ‘that which is said,’ suggesting that these narratives were once oral tales; but those days were already passing when the sagas were written down as intentional works of literary art. Although the authors make an attempt to portray historical characters and events in a way that would have been recognized as true and reliable by their audience, the fabric of a saga narrative is also an imaginative product, and that’s why I have called it ‘historical fiction’ here. The sagas are written in an objective style and tend to focus on outward actions with minimal authorial commentary. The interpretation of characters’ inner feelings and motives is usually left to the reader. There are different sub-genres of sagas: the ‘sagas of Icelanders’ or Icelandic family sagas tell the story of several generations of a family, usually centering on one person or key event. Kings’ sagas (of which Snorri wrote many) tell the story of a king; most of these are about kings of Norway. There are bishops’ sagas, saints’ sagas, and mythological and legendary sagas based on Germanic legend and contemporary Arthurian romance.

Tempestuous times in Viken.

About Snorri
As he emerges from historical sources, Snorri Sturluson was a multi-faceted man; but he had two main sides, the political and the literary. He lived during a tempestuous time in Iceland’s history, when internal dissension led to a power vacuum soon filled by Norway (this was Norway’s historical moment of being a colonial power). He was a member of the powerful Sturlung family, the richest man in the country, and consequently was propelled to the top of the Icelandic political ladder, becoming law-speaker (leader of the national assembly) while still in his thirties. He married the richest woman in Iceland and they had several children.
On the literary side, he was brought up among the Oddaverjar, a family of chieftains whose farm Oddi was a center of learning. Surely it was here that he developed the literary talents that later led to composition of his series of sixteen sagas of the Norwegian kings (known collectively as Heimskringla) and his prose Edda. He may have written other sagas as well, but authorship of other surviving works is uncertain.

Heimskringla

The beginning of Heimskringla, “Kringla heimsins,” from the first volume of the Islenzk Fornrit edition. This is the original Old Norse language in which sagas were written.

The title Heimskringla, which means ‘the circle of the world,’ is taken from the first word in the book. This is not one saga but a collection of sagas of varying lengths, each taking as its main character one of the Norwegian kings. It begins in legendary times with the Saga of the Ynglings and ends with the Saga of Magnús Erlingsson in the late twelfth century. The centerpiece and longest saga is the Saga of St Óláf, which takes up the middle third of the collection. As you might expect, Heimskringla is full of battles and adventures, but you also find lots of details about everyday life, courtship and etiquette, travel, folklore, and humor.

Saint Óláf’s Saga (Heimskringla), Chapter 85
There was a certain man called Thórarin Nefjólfsson. He was an Icelander whose kin lived in the northern quarter of the land. He was not of high birth, but he had a keen mind and was ready of speech. He was not afraid to speak frankly to men of princely birth. He had been on long journeys as a merchant and had been abroad for a long time. Thórarin was exceedingly ugly, and particularly his limbs. He had big and misshapen hands, but his feet were uglier even by far. At the time when the occurrence told above took place, Thórarin happened to be in Tunsberg. King Óláf knew him and had spoken to him. He was getting the merchant ships he owned ready for sailing to Iceland in the summer. King Óláf had invited Thórarin to stay with him for a few days and used to converse with him. Thorarin slept in the king’s lodgings.
One morning early the king awoke while other men were still asleep in the lodgings. The sun had just risen, and the room was in broad daylight. The king observed that Thórarin had stuck one of his feet outside of the bed-clothes. He looked at the foot for a while. Just then the other men in the lodging awoke.
The king said to Thórarin, “I have been awake for a while, and I have seen a sight which seems to me worth seeing, and that is, a man’s foot so ugly that I don’t think there is an uglier one here in this town.” And he called on others to look at it and see whether they thought so too. And all who looked at it agreed that this was the case.
Thórarin understood what it was they talked about and said, “There are few things so unusual that their likes cannot be found, and that is most likely true here too.”
The king said, “I rather warrant you that there isn’t an equally ugly foot to be found, and I would even be willing to bet on that.”
Then Thórarin said, “I am ready to wager with you that I can find a foot here in town which is even uglier.”
The king said, “Then let the one of us who is right ask a favor from the other.”
“So let it be,” replied Thórarin. He stuck out his other foot from under the bed-clothes, and that one was in no wise prettier than the other. It lacked the big toe. Then Thórarin said, “Look here, sire, at my other foot. That is so much uglier for lacking a toe. I have won.”
The king replied, “The first foot is uglier because there are five hideous toes on it, whilst this one has only four. So it is I who has the right to ask a favor of you.”
Thórarin said, “Precious are the king’s words. What would you have me do?”

The English translation of Heimskringla by Lee M. Hollander includes many of the Norwegian woodcut illustrations.

Snorri’s Edda
Interspersed in many of the sagas are snatches of poetry of a very special kind that are used by the saga authors as references or historical sources. This poetry was composed by skalds, professional poets who often served in the court of a nobleman or king. The structure of a skaldic poem is very intricate—I won’t try to explain the finer points here. The verses were made up of convoluted metaphors called kennings. When you compose with kennings, nothing is called by its own name: gold might be called ‘the crucible’s load,’ since it is refined in a crucible, and a man’s arm might be ‘the falcon’s perch,’ since in falconry you carry the bird on your arm. Thus, if a skald wanted to praise a ruler for generously handing out golden arm-rings to his retainers, he might say the ruler was a giver of the crucible’s load to adorn the falcon’s perch. Many of these kennings, however, have built-in references to Norse mythology. In the Christianized time and place in which Snorri lived, myth-based kennings were losing their meaning and devolving into nonsense for young poets.

Gylfi with High, Just-As-High, and Third, from the Uppsala manuscript of Snorri’s Edda, Uppsala University Library, DG 11, f. 26v.

Snorri wrote his Edda to explain Norse mythology and how to use it in kennings in skaldic poetry. It falls into four main parts: the Prologue, which explains how Norse mythology joins up with Genesis and Greek learning; Gylfaginning (The tricking of Gylfi), framed as a sort of fairy tale in which a mythical King Gylfi of Sweden goes on a journey and comes to a hall presided over by three mysterious kings called High, Just-As-High, and Third. He questions them and their answers are stories from Norse mythology. The third section, Skáldskaparmál, explains how kennings work and how to use them. It also contains many important myths, provided as explanations for why certain kennings exist. These two sections are our chief sources for knowledge about Norse mythology. All the Norse myths you have ever read in your life come from these sections of Snorri’s Edda and from the Poetic Edda, an anonymous collection of mythological poems. The fourth section of Snorri’s Edda, Hattatál, is a sampler of different verse forms and how they are composed.

Recommended reading
I recommend Anthony Faulkes’ translation of Snorri’s Edda, published by Everyman.
Heimskringla is available in a good translation by Lee M. Hollander (University of Texas Press) with many of the original woodcuts by various artists from the classic Norwegian translation by Gustav Storm published in 1900.
A selection of anonymous Icelandic sagas. There are many more, but these are some of the most famous:

Egils Saga, trans. Christine Fell and John Lucas, Everyman. (The Penguin translation is also good, but Christine Fell was one of my professors at Nottingham, so I have a particular affection for hers.)

Njal’s Saga, trans. Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson, Penguin.
The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America, trans. Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson, Penguin.
Hrafnkel’s Saga and Other Stories, trans. Hermann Pálsson, Penguin.
The Saga of the Volsungs, trans. Jesse Byock, Hisarlik Press.

Read a saga, or risk the King of Sweden’s anger!

Favorite Authors Series: Dorothy L. Sayers

/ Elizabeth Springer / 1 Comment

This series features some of my favorite historical fiction and mystery authors.

Picture this: It’s the late 1980s, and an American teenage girl is reading the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. She and her mother watched the TV series with Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walter on public television, and have found some of the books in the library. But the girl is puzzled. What is the car case in Have His Carcase? The Five Red Herrings doesn’t have any fish in it, just a bunch of artists and train timetables. And who is this bus driver allegedly having a honeymoon at the same time as Lord Peter in Busman’s Honeymoon? Finally, should she get her hair cut in a 1920s bob like Harriet Vane?

So many questions, and no internet back then for easy answers! But the girl was intrigued by these books and kept reading. Slowly, with persistence, the answers came to these questions and more, leading to a lifelong love of the work of Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957).

One of the co-founders in 1930 of the Detection Club, a society of mystery authors that is still in existence today, Sayers was a true original and a fascinating character. She was one of the first female graduates from Oxford University in 1920. She advocated a return to classical education in her 1948 address “The Lost Tools of Learning.” As an advertising copywriter for many years, she understood publicity and led the way in helping her fellow Detection Club authors advertise and sell their books. She abandoned mystery writing during the Second World War and turned to writing plays. She was acquainted with the Inklings, the writing circle of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Her Christian theological work The Mind of the Maker is a fascinating analysis of the source of human creativity. She considered her crowning achievement to be her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy—surely the Mount Everest of translating if there ever was one.

Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers’ detective, is the younger son of a duke, a First World War veteran, a book collector, monocle wearer, and man-about-town. He masks his keen intellect and physical prowess behind a superficial “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” persona like a sort of 1920s Scarlet Pimpernel. Sayers was struggling to make ends meet when she conceived of her wealthy aristocratic detective and found writing about his lifestyle a great distraction from her own circumstances, as she explained in an essay:

[A]t the time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler double-six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it. I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes. It relieves the mind and does no harm to anybody.

Although her books contain a good amount of humor and wit, Dorothy L. Sayers takes her characters seriously. By this I mean she portrays them like real people, not cardboard cut-outs or chess pieces. She allows Lord Peter to suffer from what was then known as shell shock, now referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder. Surely tens of thousands of her readers in the inter-war years, and down to today, can relate to this struggle.

Moreover, she treats death seriously. It is unfortunately all too easy, when you read murder mysteries and watch crime shows on TV, to forget that the story involves the ending of a human life.

Sayers treats human relationships seriously. She is not the only Golden Age author to include romance in her mystery stories, but most other authors limit this to a sub-plot. This is not so with Lord Peter and Harriet Vane. Their relationship is so skillfully portrayed that reading their dialogue is almost like eavesdropping on a couple at the next table in a restaurant. Although my detectives Edwin and Molly are very different from Peter and Harriet, Sayers showed me that you don’t have to choose either a male and female detective for your story—you can have both.

If I had to pinpoint a chink in Sayers’ armor, it would be her plots. To be sure, her plots are elaborate, thoroughly worked-out fair-play detective plots of the Golden Age type, but (perhaps like their contemporaries), they tend to feature very outlandish ways of committing murder. The preposterousness of some of the methods makes a strong contrast with the realism of her characters. The Nine Tailors and Busman’s Honeymoon spring to mind in this regard. I’ve enjoyed all her detective novels, but particular favorites include The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928), Strong Poison (1930), Murder Must Advertise (1933), and Gaudy Night (1935). She also wrote a good number of mystery short stories, which are a great way to get acquainted with Lord Peter if you have never read any of Sayers’ work before.

And, yes, if you have read A Council of Wolves and were wondering—we chose the name of Edwin’s retainer Buntel (a real Anglo-Saxon name) as a tip of the hat to Lord Peter Wimsey’s valet and assistant, Mervyn Bunter.

Favorite Authors Series: Ellis Peters

/ Elizabeth Springer / 1 Comment

This series of blog posts features my favorite mystery and historical fiction authors.

Edith Pargeter (1913-1995) was the author of the Brother Cadfael mystery series. She was born and bred in Shropshire, England. Her long and prolific writing career, beginning in 1936,  included short stories, contemporary crime fiction, historical novels, and historical mysteries under various pseudonyms, including Ellis Peters. She was also a translator. After visiting Czechoslovakia in 1947, she became fluent in Czech and translated Czech literature into English.

I first came in contact with her Brother Cadfael medieval mystery series on a visit to a friend who lived in Shrewsbury. The people there were prodigiously proud of their local mystery author, and I was soon hooked as well.

Three Cadfael books. The book cover on the left has only a few hints of its medieval setting. The other two announce it by referencing the medieval art forms of manuscript illumination and stained glass.

The main character is a Welsh monk at the Benedictine abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul at Shrewsbury during the Anarchy (1138-1153), one of England’s several civil wars. Brother Cadfael is a former crusader, so he has a lot of experience with people, travel, and violent injuries, and he is also an herbalist, so he knows about poison. With these qualifications, he makes a great detective. He becomes friends with the sheriff of Shropshire, and this gives him access to more information and manpower than he would otherwise have. The series addresses many aspects of medieval life and thought, giving the stories great variety. There are twenty books in the series, as well as several short stories. The books progress sequentially with an overall character arc for Cadfael, but they will still make sense if you read them out of sequence.

As a postgrad, I found that all my medieval studies colleagues loved the Cadfael books—almost as a guilty pleasure, because they were so fun to read and had no footnotes or bibliography to get through! Once, one of my friends in the department brought me her box set to read when I was ill.

I was delighted when some of the books were made into a TV series starring Sir Derek Jacobi. Although I love the shows, in my opinion some of the best stories were never filmed. This was probably for budgetary reasons. For instance, the last book, Brother Cadfael’s Penance, involves events in several cities and the siege and capture of a castle.

The first Brother Cadfael book was published in 1977, when historical mysteries were virtually unknown. In fact, this series is credited with popularizing historical mystery as a distinct subgenre. To me, it’s interesting to contrast the early covers of Cadfael books with later versions once the series became popular. At first, it seems, her publisher didn’t know how to market a detective novel set in the Middle Ages, so with these early editions, there is little on the cover that suggests the time period.

Ellis Peters ‘hit the big time,’ as they say, in about 1980, when she had been writing for decades and had finished her third Cadfael book. The catalyst, ironically, was the publication of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. This was a mainstream bestseller, and all of a sudden the reading public was yearning for more medieval mysteries. Now Ellis Peters’ publishers began to lean into the historical aspect of the series, and the book covers reflect the medieval setting. The ‘illuminated manuscript’ covers are the ones I like best. They were the ones I was irresistibly drawn to in a bookshop or library. With a cover like that, you know it’s going to be good.

The Cadfael books are written in a literary style, with fine descriptions of landscape and character. Many readers, including me, love this aspect of Peters’ writing. However, readers accustomed to the more pared-down style of contemporary mystery novels may find her work slow going. Also, Peters writes a little romance sub-plot into each story. Including some star-crossed lovers for Cadfael to help allows Peters to bring out Cadfael’s grandfatherly side and it adds some youthful freshness to the cast of characters.

Ellis Peters will always have a place in my heart. She is an inspiration to me both as a translator (my day job) and as a mystery novelist. In fact, it’s because of Ellis Peters that I am an author today. One day back when we were newlyweds, my husband and I were sitting at the kitchen table talking. One of us said, “The Brother Cadfael books are so good. Too bad there aren’t any mystery novels set in Anglo-Saxon times.” We looked at each other with a wild surmise…and before we knew it, Edwin was born in our imaginations.   Have you read any of the Cadfael books? What did you think?