Now that my lazy "Columbus Day Fortnight" is over, and the days of November are already hard and dark upon us, alas ...Until the 1960s we had only the word of the Norse sagas that any of this Viking exploration and colonization of America took place at all. Our school-kid fantasies of the swashbuckling Viking adventurers who got the jump on Columbus by 500 years had remained the stuff of myth and legend for as many more, for most everybody. Until: Mr. Leif Ericsson's summer home in the Canadian province of "Vinland" (okay: modern Newfoundland--more appropriately named, however, than its later namers could have known) was discovered. And archeologically verified.
More of that later. But lets talk about those Norse sagas for a minute, and about some interesting missed opportunities in the realms of history and literature. My background in Medieval Lit (and especially as Anglo-Saxonist and Beowulf scholar) put me in close touch with Old Norse/Icelandic works of poetry and prose. In fact, I taught an inter-term, special-topics course called "Northern Saga" (with a couple of Old Irish epics thrown in) at my college for several years. Fuggetabout your Quixote or Gulliver or Pamela as candidates for the first modern NOVEL in Western Literature--it was the Icelandic Brennu-Njalssaga, only one, the best, out of a half-dozen more that could be chosen. And written down some 300 years before! (Those ancient Scandians discovered more than just clinker-built long-ships and continents.) But they were entirely ignored and thus completely non-influential until relatively modern times.
First--and I promise not to "re-schedule" a college course here--the sagas were ignored as true belles lettres primarily because nobody read them. Outside of the shared-language audience of Iceland and Norway, that is. (And then by very few; after all, they were first in medieval manuscript, like the page fom Njalssaga above, before the age of print, which in itself helped spur the "modern" novel. The sagas were that much SO far ahead of their time.) Written down in the late-13th and early-14th centuries, they were simply NOT part of the Western Literary Tradition really until the Penguin people got to translating and distributing them in earnest some 50 years ago. Pity, for among the 30 or more sagas extant are three or four that could stand comparison with Hemingway.
The most gifted of the anonymous saga-writers didn't know they were writing novels, of course. They were writing history, preserving notable past events (theretofore passed on orally) by putting them into readable prose. Luckily for us, they took liberties--never with actual events, but with the character of the characters behind them. In short, they added psychology. The true measure of the true novel. There is for example no greater portrait of complex womanhood--the good and the bad--than Hallgerd in Njal, nor of flawed heroism than Gunnar in that same saga. Also, and I don't know quite how they managed it, the real historical events follow a coherent novelistic structure, right along with character exposition. The "story of the burning of Njal" is the epitome and triumph of these unsung novelists, but look for some great "modern romance" in the Laxdaela Saga, some rousing action-adventure in the full-length sagas of Egil and Grettir the Strong, and some tightly-knit short-stories (yes, they seem to have discovered the modern version of that, too) in such as the "Hraefnkels Saga" and several others. If you have the time.
Second--the sagas were ignored as true history until, again, virtually modern times. And again luckily for us, the events described are exactly right. For whatever fortuitous reason, the saga-writers chose events that occurred right around the end of the first millennium: from about 95o to 1050, a period involving political and religious turmoil in Norway, its subsequent colonization of Iceland and Greenland, and the first European settlement in America. Exciting times. What's interesting is that it took another 200 years or more for the Icelanders to write it all down. Even then, as history, not much attention was paid. Nobody in Britain or the Continent was reading Old Norse then, or even 200 more years later when Columbus et alia were contemplating a trip west across the Ocean Sea. The Great Northern Route to the New World never entered their minds. Of course the idea of a "New World" never entered the mind of Columbus even after he "discovered" it--even unto his death. Poor guy. That's why, ironically, the German cartographer Waldeseemuller gave first-name credit to travel-writer and quondam explorer Amerigo Vespucci on his influential 1507 Universalis Cosmographia. The map-maker's toponym stuck. As we all know.
The biggest irony, though, is that for five centuries before all of this, most everybody who could speak the North Germanic dialect of Indo-European already knew where the johnny-come-lately "Amerigoland" was, and who discovered it. (more)
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