Iceland's Unique Literary Legacy

From Reykjavik, south along the Ring Road, just across the Holsa River about 4.5 km (3 miles) from Hella, route 266 takes you south and ends where the sharp spire of a white church with a red roof and yellow trim points toward an overcast sky. The church is modern, but it stands upon Oddi, the cultural, intellectual, and literary hub of medieval Iceland —  the home of old Iceland’s greatest scholars and writers. Here is where the majority of Norse history and mythology writers were educated.

Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241 AD) is considered one of Oddi’s finest pupils. Many consider him the father of Icelandic writing, better known as the Icelandic sagas. Snorri wrote the Snorra Edda (or Prose Edda), a saga which is considered a definitive source of Norse mythology and religious ideology. The Edda also explains how poets of the past created their works, and serves as a “writer’s handbook,” with demonstrations of all the various forms used to create the sagas and skaldic poetry. Snorri also wrote the Heimskringla, a saga that brings to life the history of the kings of Norway.

Iceland gave the world sagas, the first European literary works written in a native language, instead of Latin. The sagas, written mostly anonymously in the 10th and early 11th centuries, describe the settlement of Iceland, and the history of  its people—and virtually the entire history and mythology of Scandinavia. The sagas represent a literary achievement which equals Greek poems and epics, and which laid the foundation for J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy, which thus laid the foundation for today’s fantasy literature.

Intimacy sets the sagas apart from the other world literature written before and at the same time. They are set in real places, and describe real people and families who loved, hated, trusted, and fought one another. Each story, whether written by Snorri or anonymously, covers a wide range of geography, because its primary intent was to record the histories of the people and the land.

The sagas, whether written to outline a family genealogy or the lineage of a chieftain or king, often reveal the pagan religion of the Norse — a belief in gods (Odin, Thor, Loki), mythical antagonists (frost giants, trolls, elves), and other worlds (Asgard, Ragnarok, Hel). Whether the first sagas offer true accounts of the first Icelanders is debatable, but without doubt, Oddi holds its place in history as the center of Icelandic education and literary pedagogy. Venturing from surrounding farmland along the southern reaches of Iceland, and then back to the coastlines north of Reykjavik — when one is familiar with a few Norse poems and stories — it is hard not to experience the landscape of Iceland without feeling a sense of mythology and heroic adventure.

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