Memories of England in the Sagas of Icelanders

From the late-eighth to the late-eleventh century, English history was punctuated by periods of intense cultural contact with Scandinavian peoples. Vikings raided England’s coastlines and rivers, armies of Danes and Norwegians overthrew English kingdoms, Scandinavians settled throughout England’s north and east. All of this is made clear from the English historical record. Here, Anglo-Scandinavian interaction over the so-called ‘Viking Age’ is depicted as being characterised primarily by conflict and violence. But this is a one-sided perspective. The societies from which the vikings came left little record of how they self-identified or perceived their actions. This short essay considers the idea that some sense of a Scandinavian perception of Viking Age cultural contact with England can be gleaned from cultural memory codified in later texts, namely the Íslendingasögur (Sagas of Icelanders). Starting with an overview of cultural memory theory, the essay surveys the more than thirty saga depictions of Anglo-Scandinavian interaction, taking especial interest in the depiction of the English court in Gunnlaugs saga Ormstungu.

The Íslendingasögur comprise a literary corpus of some forty-odd narratives that purport to relate the lives of Iceland’s leading Viking Age figures and families. They are written in a vernacular—Old Norse-Icelandic—with most having been put to text between 1220 and 1320. The setting of the Íslendingasögur covers what is known as the Settlement period and also the early Commonwealth period. The former encompasses the years between c.870 and 930 when Norse migrants established farming communities on the largely unpopulated island, the latter the years 930 to c.1060, which are defined by the introduction of a system of governance founded on shared laws but with no institutional kingship.

The Íslendingasögur look upon this earlier period with nostalgia. By the time the sagas were put to text, Iceland was a much different place. Through the early decades of the thirteenth century, power had increasingly gathered in the hands of few oligarchic families and, in 1262, Iceland had come under the hegemony of the Norwegian King. This context is important to understanding the sagas, as their narratives respond to the thirteenth-century political climate (Vésteinn Ólason 2007). As such, they present the early centuries of Iceland’s Norse history as a time of unprecedented autonomy. A time when the foundations of the law were set, the law functioned as it should, and as a place where heroes wandered the landscape as embodiments of Icelandic free-agency and exceptionalism. In short, these narratives are intimately tied to medieval Icelandic identity.

Given this ideological background to their textual recording, alongside the long gap between their setting and writing, it is of little surprise that the Íslendingasögur cannot be taken at face value as sources of history. These are literary texts, and they do have fictionalised elements—everything from improbably remembered first-hand dialogue and dubious legal victories, through to battles with trolls and dragon slayings. But the terms ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ are in themselves problematic for analysing the Íslendingasögur. Such fictive elements are integrated within narratives that were intentionally structured with a historical function in mind, designed to impart meaning to an intended audience of thirteenth-century Icelanders. These are codifications of cultural memory; recollections of Iceland’s past drawn from a shared ‘storehouse of experience’ (Hermann 2009, 287–90).

The Sagas and Cultural Memory Theory

Much of the foundational theorising of cultural memory was undertaken by the Egyptologists, Aleida and Jan Assmann. In their theories of communal memory, there are two interlinked concepts: communicative memory and cultural memory (Aleida Assmann 2011, 123–32; Jan Assmann 2011a). Communicative memory rests on everyday interaction and the sharing of experience; it exists so long as those who experienced it are still living, but when a generation dies out, so too does its experiential memory (Jan Assmann 2011, 16). This is the idea that, when a society’s memories are drawn from lived experience, they are more numerous and have greater claim to authenticity, with number and authenticity then dissipating over time as memories are transmitted. Ann Rigney illustrates this concept with a metaphor: ‘like water transported in a leaky bucket which slowly runs dry, [memories] are continuously being lost along the way’ (2005, 12). Communicative memory may be a ‘storehouse of experience’ as Pernille Hermann describes it (2009, 287–90), but it is a storehouse affected by forgetting, and societies develop mnemonic tools to limit such loss. One of these is literature.

As Jan Assmann observes (2011b, 36), as a witnessing generation ages, they seek to preserve their experience through the creation of mnemonic media that coexist with communicative memory. If a generation’s memories are to be preserved beyond their own lifespan, it must be via ritual, art, or literary media—whether oral or written. These externalised memorialisations of experience are where cultural memory begins. In its basic characteristics, cultural memory is communal, trans-generational, retrospective, and tangible. Or in other words, it is a group’s memory of a distant past, evolving alongside their value system, creatively interpreted in the remembering, and shaped via a medium. Cultural memory is rewritten with every retelling. Nonetheless, literary sources serve as accessible and tangible repositories of past experience. In observing the importance of literature to the creation and preservation of cultural memory, Jan Assmann states that ‘only with the emergence of writing does cultural memory “take off”’ (2006, 21). Renate Lachmann makes a rather simpler observation: ‘literature is culture’s memory’ (2008, 301). Certainly, the Íslendingasögur preserve narratives, perspectives and memories that would otherwise have been lost, which is true of much of medieval literature more widely.

Written texts codify and preserve cultural memory at various points in time. The Íslendingasögur preserve their narratives at a particular phase of development some two centuries after the events they purport to narrate. These are narratives shaped not just by the cultural context of their author/compiler, or even through the very act of writing, but by two centuries of transmission, by generations of Icelanders retelling and reshaping their society’s memory of its past. Yet, even in these hypothesised phases of oral development, mnemonic tools and prompts did exist to carry the memory of people, places and events. Coins are one of the most obvious and mobile of these, recalling distant places and long dead kings. Saga authors had clear knowledge of pre-Norman English kings, but often knew little differentiating detail about them: the sort of knowledge that might be gleaned from a coin. Of course, other mnemonic objects such as rune and picture stones can be found in the Anglo-Scandinavian world. However, the most important mnemonic media for the Íslendingasögur is skaldic verse: poetry given mnemonic formulas, poetic or narrative schemas and archetypes, and accompanied in their transmission by contextualising knowledge.

Naturally, this raises questions of how effective such artefacts and techniques were as mnemonic tools, as guardians of the storehouse of experience. What knowledge passed into the Íslendingasögur, what experience was preserved, and what layers of interpretation underlie their composition? The best place to start answering these questions is through comparative analysis of Íslendingasögur narratives against an external corpus of literature written more contemporaneously with the sagas’ narrative setting. It is for this reason that the intersections between the Íslendingasögur and English historical record promise to be such fruitful testing ground for theories of cultural memory and narrative transmission.

Anglo-Scandinavian Cultural Contact

According to the Íslendingasögur, Icelanders and Norwegians were common visitors to England. A survey of the corpus identifies around thirty episodes set in England, or where England is mentioned by name.* These can be categorised by the sort of cultural contact they imply, though with the caveat that any single episode may fit into more than one category. First is trading activity. An example of this is seen in the following statement made by one of Laxdæla saga’s protagonists: ‘I would prefer we sail to England, where there are good markets for Christian men’ (63). In this episode, Kjartan, an Icelander based in Norway, is seeking permission to travel from the proselytising Norwegian Óláfr I Tryggvason (r. 995–1000). This is why Kjartan emphasises his Christianity, but his statement reflects a broader point: England was understood as a destination for Norwegian and Icelandic trade. Overall, there are ten such instances of Icelanders and/or Norwegians undertaking trade missions to England.

There are also ten instances of travel and settlement. One of these can be observed in the following statement from Egils saga, which identifies that Egill’s ally Arinbjǫrn lived for a time in England: ‘Gyða went to talk to Egill that night. She asked after her brother Arinbjǫrn and her kinsmen and friends who had gone with him to England’ (127). Notably, Arinbjǫrn is not in English territory per se, but is living in York under the reign of the exiled Norwegian King Erik Bloodaxe. Arinbjǫrn later emigrates back to Norway. This episode demonstrates an awareness, particularly evident in Egils saga but also observable throughout the corpus, of the links between Scandinavia and Scandinavian-settled regions of England in the tenth century.

The most common type of interaction, however, is royal service. There are twelve instances of this which comprise some of the most interesting and detailed examples of Anglo-Scandinavian interaction in the Íslendingasögur. This sort of service could either be as a mercenary or as a skáld—a court poet—and quite often as both. Egill fulfils this function in his saga, as does Gunnlaugr in Gunnlaugs saga Ormstungu, discussed below. Another pertinent example is the Icelander Bjǫrn Hítdœlakappi; Bjarnar saga states that ‘Bjǫrn went west to England and won much honour there, staying two years in the company of King Knútr the Great’ (262). The heroes of the three sagas, Egill, Gunnlaugr, and Bjǫrn (though the latter to a lesser extent) are all characterised as skáld, but each also fights for an English king: Egill for Æthelstan (r.924–39), Gunnlaugr for Æthelred (r. 978–1016), Bjǫrn for Knútr (r. 1016–35). Egils saga and Gunnlaugs saga show reasonable historical knowledge on behalf of their authors/compilers. Bjǫrn’s service in Knútr’s court, in contrast, though it can work within the saga’s historical chronology, mainly takes the form of the Icelander defending the king’s travelling retinue from a dragon attack. So here a more fictionalised element of saga narrative can be observed, but this does not mean the episode is without any historical value. Episodes of this sort give insight into how later Icelanders perceived the world beyond their shores. The further Icelanders travelled–geographically or culturally–from the idealised Icelandic civilisation of the sagas, the more foreign their experiences could become (Norman 2022, 22). The island is the stable centre of the Íslendingasögur world and, in their pursuit of fame and adventure, the skáld exchanged that stability for an at-times exotic periphery of kings and dragons.

Finally, there are only three mentions of viking or raiding activity in England. These are quite generic in some ways, as can be seen from this statement found in Kormáks saga: ‘the brothers went raiding in Ireland, Wales, England and Scotland and were thought to be excellent men’ (222). Seemingly such activity was normalised enough that it did not require great explanation. For the same token, however, the paucity of references to viking activity in England in the Íslendingasögur is an interesting phenomenon. It highlights different perceptions of Anglo-Scandinavian interaction in English and Icelandic cultural memory. Taken from the English perspective, viking raids and military activity appear to be the primary forms of Anglo-Scandinavian interaction in the Viking Age. However, thirteenth-century Icelanders recalled England as a part of the Scandinavian world. Here, Scandinavians and Icelanders were free to trade and settle and work. In the reckoning of the Íslendingasögur, Anglo-Scandinavian cultural contact during the Viking Age largely took the form of peaceful and normalised interaction.

Gunnlaugr in Æthelred’s Court

This is the England of Gunnlaugs saga, and the wider ‘sub-genre’ of the skáld sagas. In broad sweeps, the passages of Gunnlaugs saga, Bjarnar saga and Egils saga that concentrate on their heroes as young adventurers have significant similarities. These are intertextual motifs, with one of the defining tropes being a Bildungsroman narrative in which the Icelander leaves the island in his youth and journeys to foreign courts to prove his worth as a poet and a warrior. It is during this period of journeying that Gunnlaugr finds himself in Æthelred’s court. The episode that follows is detailed and nuanced, and offers a vision of the English king’s court that is, in many ways, at odds with the received narrative of it from English sources.

King Æthelred, the son of Edgar, was ruling England at that time. He was a good ruler, and was spending that winter in London. In those days, the language in England was the same as that spoken in Norway and Denmark, but there was a change of language when William the Bastard conquered England. Since William was of French descent, the French language was used in England from then on.

As soon as he arrived in London, Gunnlaugr went before the king and greeted him politely and respectfully. The King asked what country he was from. Gunnlaugr told him, and then said, “and I have come to you, my lord, because I have composed a poem about you and I should like you to hear it.” (315)

There is quite a lot of interest here, but three assertions draw our attention. Firstly, that Æthelred was a good king. Secondly, that Old English and Old Norse were the same language. Thirdly, that the Icelander was able to gain audience with the king. Each of these speaks to different factors influencing cultural memory of Æthelred’s reign as presented in Gunnlaugs saga.

On the first matter. Æthelred’s negative reputation, as popularly conceived, comes from English sources composed after his death in full knowledge of the military failures of his reign, and they particularly decry his policy of paying the vikings tribute (for example, William of Malmesbury 1998, 270–3). There is little evidence of this reputation in Scandinavian and Icelandic sources and, in fact, there is something of a tradition of Æthelred being a good king. The Icelandic historian, Snorri Sturluson (2014, 8–11), and his Danish contemporary, Saxo Grammaticus (2015, 676–7), both laud Æthelred as brave and wise. Who knows what stories filtered back to Scandinavia with vikings and mercenaries and their troves of English coins? It’s not difficult to imagine that, within that context, Æthelred may have come to be understood as a generous and wealthy king, a good lord. Indeed, the kind of man that a young skáld would do well to seek out in order to offer his services as a poet and warrior. Such a story would then have been preserved within the knowledge that accompanied the skaldic verse that follows the above-quoted, further proved and reinforced by Æthelredian coins, which it is known made their way back to Scandinavia in quite some quantities (Naismith 2016, 123–4).

On the second matter, the topic of English-Norse mutual intelligibility is still one of some debate. The saga’s assertion that these were the same language is obviously incorrect. But it is also clear that the saga author perceived this to be true. As noted, Gunnlaugr goes on to recite his verse for Æthelred. There is no hint that there were any barriers to the king understanding the composition and, indeed, he values it to the extent that he provides the skáld substantial rewards (Firth 2019, 7). This is, perhaps, a cultural memory of English-Norse mutual intelligibility. Certainly, the coexistence of both language communities within England in the tenth century would have necessitated developing means of communication. As Matthew Townend argues, based at least in part on this passage from Gunnlaugs saga, interaction and proximity would have led to both language communities being ‘adequately intelligible to one another’ (2000, 90; 2006, 70). In which case, Gunnlaugs saga would seem to preserve some cultural memory of the idiosyncrasies of Viking Age Anglo-Norse communication.

The Norse settlement of Northumbria was certainly remembered in Icelandic and Scandinavian literature. Arinbjǫrn’s emigration to and from Northumbria in the mid-tenth century in Egils saga has already been noted. Writing in the thirteenth century, Snorri Sturluson records the Norse settlement in his Heimskringla, and also indicates Norse was the language of northern England, that place names there followed Norse conventions (2011, 89). He also identifies that the Norse settlers eventually lost their autonomy to the English, indicating that thirteenth-century Icelandic cultural memory retained some connection to what would be considered a correct historical narrative. However, it was augmented. Cultural memory is not a static thing, even if it can be codified at moments in time. This can be seen quite clearly in the third element of the above passage: Gunnlaugr’s welcome to Æthelred’s court.

Gunnlaugr’s approach in offering the king a verse, and then being welcomed into his company, is quite common in the skáld sagas. But this is the only instance of it occurring at an English court, and here we see a taint of thirteenth-century Icelandic political sentiment. The episode’s framing is deliberate (Firth 2020). Æthelred is a good king. He is familiar with the language, the form and the function of skaldic verse. This may be authentic to cultural memory that pre-existed the textual recording of Gunnlaugs saga, but it also makes for an ideal setting for a famed Icelandic poet to demonstrate his exceptionalism. Thus, he is welcomed into the court as, if not as an equal of the king, a respected representative, perhaps even an emissary, of the Icelanders. In essence, his reception at Æthelred’s court speaks to that thirteenth-century nostalgia for the independent Icelander of the past, for an imagined past of heroes and self-determination. Gunnlaugr embodies that element of Icelandic identity.

Ultimately, while the Íslendingasögur present themselves as histories, while concern to preserve a storehouse of experience underlies their composition, while some remnant historicity can be posited of their portrayals of England, they are layered with interpretation and reinterpretation. Not just through their final textual redaction, but through the evolving cultural memory of generations of Icelanders leading up to that point. The extant Íslendingasögur texts both codified that cultural memory and participated in its continued adaptation, both memorialised and constructed a meaningful past for Icelandic audiences. Through careful contextualising and historicising analysis of setting, transmission and authorship it is, perhaps, possible to recover that meaning and, through this, create a more complete and complex picture of Anglo-Scandinavian cultural contact in the Viking Age.

* This research will be published in full, including tabulated results of the noted survey of the Íslendingasögur, in a forthcoming edition of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Bjarnar saga. 1997. Translated by Alison Finlay. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, edited by

Viðar Hreinsson et al. Vol. 1, 225–304. Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríkson Publishing.

Egils saga. 1997. Translated by Bernard Scutter. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, edited by Viðar

Hreinsson et al. Vol. 1, 33–178. Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríkson Publishing.

Gunnlaugs saga. 1997. Translated by Katrina C. Attwood. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders,

edited by Viðar Hreinsson et al. Vol. 1, 305–33. Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríkson Publishing.

Kormáks saga. 1997. Translated by Rory McTurk. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, edited by

Viðar Hreinsson et al. Vol. 1, 179–224. Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríkson Publishing.

Laxdæla saga. 1997. Translated by Keneva Kunz. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, edited by

Viðar Hreinsson et al. Vol. 5, 1–120. Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríkson Publishing.

Saxo Grammaticus. 2015. Gesta Danorum. Edited by Karsten Friis-Jensen, translated by Peter Fisher.

Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Snorri Sturluson. 2011. Hemskringla, Translated by Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes. Vol. 1.

London: Viking Society for Northern Research.

Snorri Sturluson. 2014. Hemskringla, Translated by Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes. Vol. 2.

London: Viking Society for Northern Research.

William of Malmesbury. 1998. Gesta Regum Anglorum, edited and translated by R.A.B. Mynors, with

R.M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Secondary Sources

Assmann, Aleida. 2011. Cultural Memory and Western Civilisation. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Assman, Jan. 2006. Religion and Cultural Memory, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Stanford:

Stanford University Press.

Assmann, Jan. 2011a. ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory.’ In Cultural Memories, edited by Peter

Meusburger, Michael Heffernan and Edgar Wunder, 15–27. Dordrecht: Springer.

Assmann, Jan. 2011b. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political

Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Firth, Matthew. 2020. “Æthelred II ‘the Unready’ and the Role of Kingship in Gunnlaugs saga

Ormstungu.” The Court Historian 25 (1): 1–14.

Hermann, Pernille. 2009. ‘Concepts of Memory and Approaches to the Past in Medieval Icelandic

Literature’, Scandinavian Studies, 81 (3): 287–308.

Lachmann, Renate. 2008. “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature.” In Cultural Memory

Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 301–10. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Naismith, Rory. 2016. “The Coinage of Æthelred II: A New Evaluation.” English Studies 97 (2): 117–

39.

Norman, William H. Barbarians in the Sagas of Icelanders. New York: Routledge, 2022.

Townend, Matthew. 2000. “Viking Age England as a Bilingual Society.” In Cultures in Contact:

Scandinavian Settlement in England in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries, edited by Dawn M. Hadley and Julian D. Richards, 89–105. Turnhout: Brepols.

Townend, Matthew. 2006. “Contacts and Conflicts: Latin, Norse, and French.” In The Oxford History

of English, edited by Lynda Mugglestone, 61–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vésteinn Ólason. 2007. “The Icelandic Saga as a Kind of Literature with Special Reference to Its

Representation of Reality.” In Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World: Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross, edited by Judy Quinn, Kate Heslop and Tarrin Wills, 27–47. Turnhout: Brepols.

---

Matthew Firth is a PhD candidate at Flinders University, South Australia. His primary research interest is in the reception of England’s tenth-century history in the histories and literature of societies separated from it by time and space, and has published on this topic in such venues as The Court Historian, Royal Studies Journal, English Studies, and Notes & Queries. His doctoral dissertation focused on the Íslendingasögur and their intersections with England’s pre-Norman history.

Email: matthew.firth@flinders.edu.au

Twitter: @_MattFirth_