Social Memory and the Sagas The Case of Egils saga

Abstract

BORN IN ICELAND around the year 910, Egill is the son of Norwegians who immigrated to Iceland, and his saga is a biography of a warrior poet who travels throughout the Viking world of the late tenth century. If Egils saga focuses on one individual and his family, the text is nevertheless wide-ranging and multifaceted. It offers a portrait of his time and tells of the passage of generations and the actions of strong-willed individuals. This saga, like many of the Icelandic family sagas, offers a broad portrayal of social and historical issues yet scholars for the past half century have tended to study Egils saga principally for its literary inventiveness. A good example is the introduction to the influential modern Icelandic edition of Egils saga in which the saga is said to be Heilsteypt bokmenntaverk fra 13. old (viii) [a completely literary invention from the thirteenth century]. But is such a portrayal of the saga as invention correct? In this article, I explore this issue concentrating on matters other than the saga's literary qualities. I turn to the socio-historical roots of the tale and treat Egils saga as part of an anonymous tradition of social memory. This tradition reveals deep concerns among medieval Icelanders with their cultural self-identity. My hypothesis is that the social and historical nature of the family sagas has been rather misunderstood. The sagas are far more than creative invention. With their deep social, historical, and oral roots, the sagas employ rather than invent a remembered past. They capture social memory, and Egils saga is a fine illustration of how this is done. Written down in the thirteenth century, a time when Icelandic autonomy was jeopardized by the growing power of the Norwegian crown, (1) Egils saga makes a point of establishing categories of loyalty that separate Icelanders from Norwegians. Such distinctions, a crucial part of the tale, are also a decisive part of social memory, (2) a process of socialization that works to a large degree through story. But what is social memory and why is it important in saga studies? Social memory is the process by which a society uses its past in giving its present form and meaning. If we are to understand the sagas within the context of the medieval society that produced these texts, then distinguishing the role of social memory is crucial. An active process, social memory allows history to be shaped in the image and interests of a community's needs. (3) It is a process that abhors fixed texts. Through the operation of social memory, stories are altered again and again to meet the needs and expectations of a changing contemporary audience. (4) Not an especially difficult process to understand, social memory, nevertheless, underlies saga-telling. In part, the centrality of social memory in the Icelandic context is due to cultural developments. The absence in Iceland of overlordship and hierarchical government--social institutions that generate their own self-serving memories--the identity and conceptual integrity of Icelandic society rested on the memory vouchsafed in the sagas. Recounts of the past did not have to be factual to be acceptable since creative story-telling is part and parcel of the process of on-going social memory. Pools of remembrances were always open to invention, interpretation, and exaggeration. But if the narrative past could be creatively embroidered and changed, there were also self-defining limits to inventiveness. The saga audiences were usually aware of an individual's genealogy. They knew the location of farms and the districts in whose political and judicial arena the individuals participated. Personality traits became famous, at times exaggerated, and tend to be rather steady from saga to saga. Material culture was realistically portrayed, a factor that allowed the narrative artistry of sagamen (a term that can include women) to dwell on actions set in easily recognizable and often repetitive social contexts. …

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