[Earlier this
month, I traveled to Iceland for the first time, a nation with recently
discovered historical connections to the Americas. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy
the culture at the heart of those ties, leading up to a special post on a few
takeaways from the trip itself!]
On two AmericanStudies
contexts for the literary epics that recount the Vikings’ voyages.
Although there
are apparently very minor references to it in a couple of historical chronicles
from the period (including Ari the
Wise’s Book of Icelanders), by
far the most overt and extensive contemporary (relatively speaking; within a
couple of centuries, at least) documentation of Leif Erikson’s voyage to the Americas
is found in two 13th century Icelandic sagas: the Saga of Erik the Red and
the Saga
of the Greenlanders. Like all the Icelandic
sagas, these prose texts comprise a complex combination of family histories
and genealogies, exaggerated epic prose-poems, and detailed historical accounts,
and demand the kind of extensive contextualization and nuanced close readings
that I’m in no way able to provide in this brief post (as well as specialized
literary and cultural knowledge that I don’t have in any case!). But if we
view these sagas of exploration through the lens of American literature and
culture, a subject about which I have a great deal more to say, they can be
provocatively and productively linked to two very distinct texts and contexts.
For one thing, I
think the Icelandic sagas have more in common with William
Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation than we might initially think (and I
can feel my late professor
Alan Heimert cursing me eternally for this comparison, but we
AmericanStudiers must go where the trail takes us). Because Bradford writes his
history of the Mayflower Pilgrims and
their Plymouth colony in a detached
third-person narrative voice, it’s easy at times to forget that he was both
an integral part and a leader of the community, and that the book is thus a
personal and family history as well as a communal chronicle. Moreover, he is
just as subjective in that perspective as is any epic poet, and his treatment
of his book’s focal subjects (such
as Thomas Morton and his splinter community) just as potentially
exaggerated or slanted. None of that means that his history of the Pilgrims’
community, voyage, and settlement is necessarily inaccurate, of course, no more
than are the Icelandic sagas—just that his text combines genres and
perspectives as fully as do those sagas, a comparison that could help us see
all of them as helping create a new form of New World chronicle. (To reiterate,
the sagas were written some centuries after the voyages, a key difference from
Bradford’s contemporaneous book to be sure.)
It would also be
interesting to compare the Icelandic sagas to a 20th century epic
poem such as Robert
Hayden’s “Middle Passage.” To be clear, Hayden’s poem focuses on the
horrific and brutal forced voyages of African slaves (and the slave traders and
sailors who shared those voyages with them) to the New World, a far different
form of Atlantic travel than was Leif Erikson’s journey of exploration. Yet to
portray those voyages centuries after they took place, to create out of those
histories a literary representation of their experiences and essences, Hayden
creates a multi-vocal and multi-genre poem, a work that combines personal and
historical accounts with imagined poetic descriptions and images. The result is
both something new and something old, a text that feels experimental and innovative
and yet one that gets closer (I would argue, and
have argued) to the Middle Passage than have many historical analyses. Different
as they are in so many ways, it would still be possible to see Hayden’s poem
and the Icelandic sagas as two parts of a longstanding and still evolving
literary tradition of New World epics.
Next
VikingStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other ways you’d analyze the Vikings or Iceland?
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