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Njal's Saga - Michael Sympson 7/9/2001, 4:15:18
Posted by Michael Sympson on 7/9/2001, 4:15:18
Style opens the most direct access to an artist's temperament. Narrative style is a conveyor - only in essays and poems style should be allowed to be a player. In Icelandic Sagas, style is a bare bone conveyor, a burp between two draughts from the horn. But there is also an intimate relationship between technology and style. In the beginning people scratched on potsherds. The shards were small and the writing was terse. Then people began to impress little wedges on palm-sized clay cakes; the expression was still terse, but aspired to monumental bragging: "I kept captive the people of this city, and their king serves at my table." But after Egypt had had introduced papyrus, reed-pen, ink, and inkwell - even the alphabet before the snobbery of professional scribes turned to hieroglyphics - written expression should have loosened up.
It didn't. In illiterate societies the redundancy of oral formulas had always been a means to assist the narratorO"s memory - but scrolls too could be a cumbersome affair of up to 90 ft. in length. An author would be very reluctant to go through the trouble of repeated unscrolling, if he could help it. So for cross-references he would rather trust his memory and his style still would amplify and work with clauses that encapsulate a summary of his references. Codices would bring further improvements, however forty sheep were needed to provide the parchment for just one handwritten copy of Sturljuson's collection of Icelandic Sagas, an expensive affair, so one better kept it short and sweet.
The ages were still as dark as a monk's worst nightmare when the silent biker type, who can barely put two words together without getting himself into a brawl, entered the scene. The laconic bragging was mainly a monotonous litany of slayings, weddings, and negotiations over blood money. Oh, and genealogies - tons of it. The diction was terse and came in simple sentences. Characterization was limited to curt quips. For a man of genius - like Jorge Luis Borges - such example could open a whole new perspective. But the result is still Borges - not a saga of taciturn biker types in horned helmets.
It took another half millennium before it dawned on Gutenberg to bring together all the good stuff - alphabet, movable letters cast in metal, paper, and the staple of Mediterranean husbandry, the oil-press. In terms of style a new medium opened up to new forms of expression. But it took some time before authors realized the new opportunities. In the process they became self-conscious and changed from stringing together a redundant agglomeration of sub-clauses to an analytic tit for tat. Authors in France drafted their prose in verses - to weed out "poetic" redundancy and clear the phrasing. For the second time after Antiquity, prose became again an art-form. Our electronic age was still a thing of the future, but Voltaire already proliferated the sound bite.
Njals Saga is undoubtedly a station on the way in the development of modern literature. But it is all about slayings and blood money and weddings and blood money and slayings and slayings and blood money and Hallgerd and slayings and blood money - - Heraclit got it right: war is the father of all innovation and we never step into the same river twice. But the SagaO"s violence is getting us nowhere and the never ending cycle of murder and retribution is of the same monotony at the end as at the beginning. And the saga's lack of humor is of almost biblical proportions, except for the unintended kind, when in the middle of the single-handed hacking and stabbing at his fourteen attackers, Gunnar begins to improvise a song. I don't know about you people, I am writing on a computer and I believe in progress. Njals Saga, like all the rest from old Norse, is overrated, a museum piece at best.
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