Saga: A Novel of Medieval Iceland

Written by Jeff Janoda

353 pages

Published by Academy Chicago Publishers 

Review by Stuart W. Mirsky

With Saga: A Novel of Medieval Iceland, Jeff Janoda has given us a masterful work of fiction that is both moving, powerful, and completely true to the feel and spirit of the old sagas from which it takes its lead.

I came to this one with some preconceptions and prejudices as I am something of an aficionado and sympathizer with the old Norse saga literature myself. Indeed, I would not have approached the material as Janoda did, preferring to hew a closer line to the original saga voice. But Janoda won me over with his skillful impersonation of a sagaman who yet tells his tale in the guise of our best modern novelists, offering all the rich psychological insight and human dimensionality that we have come to expect of our strongest contemporary fiction.

In Saga, Janoda gives us the story of two Icelandic chieftains, Arnkel Thorolfsson and Snorri Thorgrimsson, as the former struggles to increase his influence and standing at the expense of the latter. Snorri, known as Snorri the Priest in so many of the great sagas (Njal's Saga, Laxdaela Saga) is especially renowned for his capacity to get his way by the clever, behind-the-scenes manipulation of others while avoiding or postponing the head-on confrontations which are the lifeblood of so many of the major sagas. In this particular tale, which Janoda has teased out of Eyrbyggja Saga, we are given a rich and compelling modern novel of real human beings contending with one another in a harsh and unforgiving land. In the process Janoda has recreated that world in all the detail and grim coloration that is only limned for us in the original material.

As the book opens, three men are wending their way on horseback up a steep, windblown cliff, pursuing a grim mission. We are quickly introduced to one of them, Ulfar Freedman, the former slave of a local farmer. That farmer, as it happens, is also father to Ulfar's two companions who are there with him to offer moral support and help in his grief. Ulfar, who now ekes out his livelihood on a holding which lies precariously between the chieftain Arnkel Thorolfsson's steading and that of Arnkel's father, the brutal and vindictive Thorolf Lamefoot, is distracted and distraught by what he has gone up onto the cliff face to do.

Arnkel, the local strong man, has his chieftainship through a deal in which Thorolf, his father, sold Ulfar his land as a means for buying Arnkel his position (since chieftainships could be bought and sold in old Iceland). But Arnkel we learn, who is not only proud and fierce but a good deal cleverer than his father, thinks this chieftainship has come at too dear a price: the break-up and diminution of his father's land holdings, thus impairing Arnkel's future inheritance.

In fact, Thorolf, Arnkel's father, actually gained his formerly vast landholdings by killing Arnkel's grandfather in an uneven duel, after he had first brutalized and abandoned Arnkel's mother, the old man's proud and arrogant daughter, Gudrid. Because of this, Gudrid shares Arnkel's dismay over the selling of the land to Ulfar and desperately yearns to see it restored, and her father's holdings regained by her son in their entirety. Wishing only ill on Thorolf, her former husband and tormentor, she has raised Arnkel with vengeance in mind. And so the stage is set as the hapless and somewhat timid Ulfar finds himself an unwitting pawn in a struggle that pits Arnkel against his own father, and both father and son, together, against Ulfar's own former master, Thorbrand who, with his six sons, aims to win possession of the strategically located plot of land which Ulfar has the unwitting misfortune to own and farm. Though neighbors of Arnkel godhi, the Thorbrandssons have carefully aligned themselves with the more distant chieftain, Snorri, in hopes of counterbalancing Arnkel's growing strength in their district. Old Thorbrand, as Ulfar's former master, expects to inherit his freedman's farm, under Icelandic law, if the one-time slave dies without an heir. But Ulfar has found himself a wife, in fact the reason for his appearance on the cliff face at the book's opening, and has thus inadvertently set in motion the wheels that will ultimately grind him into dust between these harsh men.

The story unfolds with much greater focus and depth than we find in the original sagas and this is part of its genius. Janoda has found what may very well be the true story of human striving, in its endless complexity, that lies beneath what is merely a brief sub-plot in the original Eyrbyggja Saga. He has, in this novel, fleshed out events with real people including Auln, Ulfar's betrayed wife, and Halla, the arrogant daughter of Arnkel who has inherited the domineering persona of her grandmother Gudrid but who can't help desiring Thorbrand's youngest son, Illugi, nonetheless. And so, the complex game plays itself out as these people strive for primacy over one another in order to possess a small piece of coveted land, destroying lives and hope for those in their path who are either too weak or too naive to resist them.

The sagas are wonderful in the depth and detail of the stories they have to tell and it's Janoda's great strength that he has found the rich vein of human greed, folly and striving that is buried deep within the best of them. Here he has dug out the ore and refined it to purest narrative gold. If you like sagas and the novels that derive from them, this is one of the best.

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Stuart W. Mirsky, a former bureaucrat and municipal official in the northeastern United States, is the author of The King of Vinland's Saga, a novel of the Norse in North America in the eleventh century. A student of philosophy and lover of historical fiction, he has been writing seriously since 1996 and is currently at work on another novel, set in the ancient Near East. He recently edited the holocaust memoir Bitter Freedom by Jafa Wallach (Hermitage Publishers) which recounts the survival of a small group of people in Nazi-occupied Poland.