Why Icelandic sagas are like Richard Stark's Parker

The Icelandic sagas remind me a bit of Richard Stark's Parker. Their characters talk no more than they need to (except when reciting poetry),  they engage in minimal introspection, and their heroes know how to get the job done.  And Egil's Saga has its title character wreaking single-handed havoc on an opponent's stronghold in way that may remind readers of what Parker, Grofield, and company do to the island casino in The Handle.

I read Egil's Saga in a translation by the late Bernard Scudder, the much respected translator of Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and Arnaldur Indriðason, and the bracing informality of his version makes it lot more readable than one might suspect from the witty aura of airbrushed sword-and-sorcery fantasy balderdash that surrounds the idea of Vikings. Two favorite examples:

"As he grew up, it soon became clear he would turn out very ugly and resemble his father ... " (and that's the hero of the story.)

and

"Helga replied, ‘Even though you are so stupid that you cannot look after yourself, I will bring it about that this duel never takes place.’"

That's another thing about the sagas: the protagonists are men, but the women could inherit property, talk tough, and kick ass in a way I'm not sure was common in other 13th-century European literature.  Maybe that brisk directness is a feature of the original Old Norse, but if that's the case, Scudder wisely highlights it. No wifty swords and sorcery here.

And you want stories that cross borders? Egil's Saga is set in Iceland, Norway, England, Scotland, Lapland, Finland, around the Baltic Sea, and Eastern Europe, with additional mentions of journeys to France and Ireland (the Vikings founded Dublin and other Irish cities, after all.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Hanging out with Olvir Hump and Eyvind the Plagiarist

Just call me Kveldulf. Like that wise, stolid, capable patriarch of Egil's Saga (that's Egil himself, at right), I want to be capable of pissing a king off by my inscrutability and refusal to act.

I want to have a friend named Olvir Hump. And I want to live in a world populated by Audun the Uninspired, Finn the Squinter, Thorvald the Overbearing, Bjorn the Landowner, and Eyvind the Plagiarist. And it would be cool to have a son who, after being robbed by the hired guns of a grasping monarch, has the bluff good humor to remark that "It’s good to have a king to share your money with."

Click here for more Detectives Beyond Borders posts about the Icelandic sagas, the rootin'-tootinest collection of proto-crime, proto-Western stories in all the European canon.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Dashiell Hammett: Secret Viking?

On this, the fifty-third anniversary of Dashiell Hammett's death, I'll resurrect a post about my favorite reference to Hammett in a work by another writer. Did the Icelandic sagas really influence Hammett?  I have never read such a suggestion anywhere else, but I call this an apt and imaginative tribute to a great author and to a great body of writing from the Middle Ages.

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. Oh, boy, was this an exciting discovery. A bit less than halfway into Josef Škvorecký's Two Murders in My Double Life, I found this exchange between the narrator/protagonist and a student at the Toronto college where he teaches:

"I asked his permission and sat down beside him. Then I looked into his book and was able to read the page heading: NORDIC SAGAS. ... Beside Freddie, on the bench, I saw a paperback with a loudly coloured jacket: Dashiell Hammett, The Continental Op. ...

"`Any connection?'

"`I think there is,' said Freddie with some enthusiasm. `I think that the Old Nordic sagas were the source for Dashiell Hammett's style, and his inspiration in general.'

"`Really? Usually it's assumed that he was influenced by the harsh realities of American big cities, and by Hemingway.'

"`I'm not saying he wasn't,' said Freddie, as if he were already defending his M.A. thesis. But his main inspiration came from the Nordic sagas.' ... 

"I spent the next half hour on that bench, and Freddie, quoting from Song of Eric the Red and from the Hammett stories featuring a detective called Continental Op, demonstrated how identical were the respective poker-faced killers of those works, and how the authors presented their bloody brutalities with equal lack of comment or show of emotion."

Why do I enjoy that so much? Because Arnaldur Indriðason also cited the sagas as an influence on his own laconic prose style, and because I've posted about crime-fiction-like features in Njal's Saga, commonly considered the greatest of the genre. It seems that Škvorecký was on to something.

(Link to free online versions of some of the sagas here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009, 2014

“Finn the Squinter, who was the father of Eyvind the Plagiarist,” or Who would you be in an Icelandic saga?

King Eirik Blood-axe should have the most delicious name in any story in which he appears, but that tenth-century Scandinavian king barely makes the top five in Egil’s Saga, and I still have a good bit of the saga left to read.

The rest of the top five? Thorvald the Overbearing is pretty good, but nowhere near Audun the Uninspired. But the two characters with the best names come from the same family: “Finn the Squinter, who was the father of Eyvind the Plagiarist.”

Epithets are more important in Egil’s Saga than in other Icelandic sagas I’d read previously. The title character, for example, is Egil Skallagrimsson. Egil is his given name, and the –son indicates that the surname is a patronymic. Egil’s father, that is, was Skallagrim. But skalla is yet another epithet; it means bald. The character’s name, then, means Bald Grim. (Skallagrim’s father, by the way, is Kveldulf, which means night wolf.)

The fun with names extends beyond what the author and translator could have intended. This bit:

“Harald Gormsson has ascended to the throne of Denmark on the death of his father, Gorm.”

allows readers to conclude that with Harald’s elevation, the Danish throne was now Gormless.

What would your name be if you were a character in an Icelandic saga?

***

My version of the saga was translated by the late Bernard Scudder, who also translated crime novels by Arnaldur Indriðason and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. I can’t judge how accurate Scudder’s renderings are, but the poems sprinkled throughout the saga, usually improvised by Egil, are a good deal more readable than similar interludes in other sagas I’ve read.

Scudder was much missed in the crime-writing community when he died. I can see why. Like Don Bartlett, who translates Jo Nesbø’s novels from Norwegian in to English, Scudder knew how to produce, fluent, readable versions in English.

***

Read Egil's Saga in English (in an older translation) and Icelandic at the Icelandic Sagas Database.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

No-nonsense openings then and now

My Nordic kinsman Thjostolf the Thinker is no great shakes as a farmer and too given to moody self-analysis to be a great warrior in the business world. An executive must feign passion where none exists, what most people call lying, and Thjostolf couldn't do it (though when a colleague, in the course of lighthearted office persiflage, called Thjostolf weak rather than morally upright, Thjostolf cleft him in twain, from collarbone to hip, with his great sword.)

One day Thjostolf suggested that similarities existed between the Icelandic sagas and the pulp and paperback-original crime fiction I sometimes read.

"Behold," he said, indicating the opening of Egil's Saga:

"There was a man named Ulf, the son of Bjalfi and of Hallbera, the daughter of Ulf the Fearless."

and "Dig this," pulling out his tattered reprint of Charles Runyon's The Anatomy of Violence:

"Each evening a twilight wind blows through Cutright City."

"And this," voice hushed, as he read from a text we both regard with near-scriptural reverence:

"Kells walked north on Spring.” * 

Thjostolf was right. In each case the author plunges right into the story, wasting no words. Arnaldur Indriðason, the best of the current Nordic crime writers, claims inspiration from the Icelandic sagas, though I edged toward the door as I reminded Thjostolf that Arnaldur attributed their concision to economic necessity rather than love of laconic prose. Ruminations, false starts, lengthy description, useless adverbs, and seventy pages of the hero dipping his madeleine in a cup of tea would have made a prodigious waste of calfskin, the expensive material on which the Icelanders set down their stories.

But Thjostolf just nodded and reminded me, in turn, that Josef Škvorecký once had a character suggest the Nordic sagas had inspired Dashiell Hammett. Škvorecký may have been taking the piss, but Hammett, the sagas, and punchy openings of the kind offered above will appeal to readers who like their stories brisk, their prose clean, and their humor deadpan.

Speaking of clean prose that wastes no words, I reminded Thjostolf, I have to get back to work on the copy desk. Thjostolf, who hates a bad sentence as much as I do, tightened his hand on the grip of his sword but said nothing. Maybe he'll make an executive after all.

======================

* Fast One, by Paul Cain

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

A good name is better than precious ointment *

Unn the deep-minded. Thorun the Horned. Men's Wit-Breaker. And those are just the women.  The Laxdale Saga proves that if Old Norse sagas have nothing on hard-boiled crime novels when it comes to male characters' nicknames, they take the prize when it comes to distaff monikers.

Not that their male character were slouches either. Those three women are the daughters of Ketill Flatnose and the granddaughters of Bjorn the Ungartered in the  great Icelandic saga, which also mentions in passing one Ulf the Squinter. Those are right up there with Itchy Maker and the Whosis Kid.

Here's a list of Viking names and nicknames (and here's one that concentrates on the sagas). You'd probably want to cross the street if you saw Horse gelder or Blood axe coming your way, but you have to feel sorry for the Scandinavian schlemiel nicknamed Awkward poet.

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Translator's note: Bernard Scudder, who translated crime novels by Arnaldur Indriðason and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir from Icelandic into English before he died in 2007, also translated Egil's Saga from Old Norse for the selection available in Penguin's The Saga of Icelanders. Arnaldur has said that the sagas influences his terse prose style, so if you like his work, why not grab yourself some sagas?

***

* Ecclesiastes 7:1

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

The trouble with Harald

I've posted from time to time about elements of the Icelandic sagas and other world literature that would be at home in crime fiction.  Few, if any, are as noir as a short section from the middle of King Harald's Saga. Here are a few chapter titles from that section: "Murder." "The Mission." "Death in Denmark."

King Harald Hardrada of Norway lures a political enemy into a dark room, where he has him stabbed and hacked to death. Hated after the murder, he enlists a strong warrior to help him win back the people's favor, promising to allow the warrior's brother back from exile as the price of the warrior's cooperation. He sends the warrior on a diplomatic mission, where he wins a truce from the dead man's friends.

The exiled brother then returns to Norway but Harald, having in the meantime achieved his aim of a truce, sends the man out to his death at the hands of an enemy army. It may be the most treacherous act since King David said: "Uriah, would you mind dropping this note off for me?"

Moralists who want the good guy to win in the end will be happy to know that before the story ends, Harald gets his from King Harold Godwinson of England at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, bringing the curtain down on the Viking era, by traditional reckoning. Of course, Harold's forces lose the Battle of Hastings three weeks later.

History. It's a tough game.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

What would your name be in an old Scandinavian saga?

Chapter 30 in my edition of King Harald's Saga introduces us to Einar Paunch-Shaker, and a footnote to Chapter 37 tells us that Jon the Powerful was the father of Erlend the Flabby. What would your name have been in an Old Norse or Icelandic saga?

***

Medieval Norsemen didn't have family names, just patronymics and epithets, so their authors didn't have to go far for colorfully significant monikers. But even contemporary writers, burdened with the necessity of conventional first and family names, can sneak attributes into character names, too.

Walter Mosley has created protagonists named Ezekiel (Rawlins) and Socrates (Fortlow).  Michael Dibdin gave us Aurelio Zen. And Declan Hughes' series character, Ed Loy, is surnamed for an implement made for digging deep into hard, stony land — a kind of spade, in other words, and that's auspicious for a fictional private eye.

What are your favorite significant crime-fiction names?

(This old post and its comments offer more examples of significant names.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Fantômas follow-up and a saga's story-telling

Mike White posts a link to "How to watch Fantômas and why."

And, in the department of proto-crime stories, comes this transition between sections of Kormak's Saga, an Icelandic saga set in the tenth century and likely composed during the thirteenth:

"Kormak hesitated.

***

"There was a woman of evil character named Thordis ..."

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Here's an English translation of Kormak's Saga, though its rendering of the excerpt above is less suggestive of suspense and femmes fatales. And here's the saga in its original language, if your Icelandic is up to par.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Indoors and out in Arnaldur's Iceland

I've been reading more of Arnaldur Indriðason, one book that I think is his weakest, and another that seems likely to be up there with his best.

The weaker book is Voices, and I believe its weakness stems from its reliance to a greater extent than Arnaldur's other books on melodrama. More than usual as well for Arnaldur, the action, the pivotal events especially, happens indoors.

The site is a Reykjavik hotel where an employee has been found murdered and where Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson stays for the course of the investigation because he does not feel like going home. The employee is an ex-hotel doorman and holiday Santa and a former child star with a number of financial, personal and family entanglements.

In The Draining Lake, Silence of the Grave and Arctic Chill, bodies are found outdoors. In the first two, especially, this reinforces the intimate connection with Iceland and its soil that is the most distinctive feature of the Erlendur books. In Voices, everything happens inside, and the melodrama has to carry the book. This melodrama is sharper, sadder and more affecting than most, but I miss the connection with the land.

The connection promises to be present in Silence of the Grave, second of the five Erlendur novels and winner of the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger in 2005. As in the superb Draining Lake, Iceland's soil yields up the body that sets the story in motion. Here, its discovery is odder and funnier:

"He knew at once it was a human bone, when he took it from the baby who was sitting on the floor chewing it."

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At least two of Arnaldur's characters share their names with characters from the Icelandic classic Njal's Saga. Arnaldur has said the sagas influenced his prose style. Perhaps they influenced him in other ways as well.

On the other hand, Iceland is a small, historically homogeneous society. Perhaps it's no surprise that traditional names are especially prevalent. The names Arnaldur gives his characters may be no more significant than those of fictional characters such as Hieronymus Bosch or Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Sagas and crime fiction: A witness for the prosecution

Fired by my recent discovery that Josef Škvorecký also found affinities between Icelandic sagas and crime fiction, I dug out my copy of The Sagas of Icelanders, published in 2000 by, suitably enough, Viking.

Imagine the tingle of recognition when I read this, from the introduction:

"Saga heroes occupy a social space on the edges of society. The heroes of three of the sagas, The Saga of Grettir the Strong, Gisli Sursson's Saga and The Saga of Hord and the People of Holm, are in fact outlaws. Gunnar Hamundarson of Hlidarendi in Njal's Saga is also technically a criminal when he is killed. Most of the saga heroes are just barely on one side of the other of the law, but it also seems to be true that the law itself is being tested along with the finest men."

Substitute shorter American names for the long Nordic ones, and Raymond Chandler could have written that.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon I: Drinks with ice

Arnaldur Indriðason had just made the intriguing statement that “I am heavily influenced by the Icelandic sagas.” This blog having several times cited the greatest of those sagas, I thought I'd ask him about this.

Arnaldur's presence just a short walk from the main convention hotel here in Baltimore at Bouchercon 2008 made the inquiry painless, and its answer was disarmingly practical. Those medieval sagas, he said, were set down on calfskin, an exceedingly dear commodity at the time, which dictated terse prose style, a style he says he strives to imitate.

His first novel to be translated into English, Jar City (Tainted Blood in the U.K.) took advantage of the peculiar qualities of its setting like no other crime novel that I can think of has (to reveal the details would be a spoiler). It was nice to hear that he uses his country's brilliant literary tradition as well as its geographic isolation in his fiction. It was nice, too, that his publicist or publisher paid for the drinks.

Some other highlights of Day One:

Martin Edwards' account of his introduction to crime fiction at age 9, when was around for the premiere of Murder Most Foul: "Margaret Rutherford arrived by helicopter," Edwards said. Between the clues and the red herrings, he said, he fell in love with the idea of a detective. "That night" -- and he was 9 years old, remember -- "I decided I would one day like to write an Agatha Christie-style mystery." The man is now a Dagger-winning author of two crime series. Would that the rest of us held as true to our ambitions as 9-year-olds.

Ken Bruen's citation of Luke Kelly when asked who he admired among writers who had been bedeviled by alcohol and alcoholism. That superlative, scary talented, demon-possessed, late and much-lamented Irish singer was a superb poet who could have made a career of that pursuit had he chosen to do so, Bruen said.

Beyond that, the event has been a rush of old friends encountered anew as well as face-to-face meetings with a long list of accomplished individuals whom I'd known previously online: Janet Rudolph of Mystery Readers Journal, J. Kingston Pierce and Ali Karim of the Rap Sheet, Gerald So, plus a number of others I will likely remember once I've got some sleep.

The Baltimore Sun has been offering a blogging forum to select guest Bouchercon authors. Click here.

Tomorrow: How in God's name will anyone manage to get up in time for the panels?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Cold-weather crime

I'm back in Scandinavia and in the countries that Scandinavians settled for this post. First, another brief passage from Iceland's great Njal's Saga, composed around 1280, set about three hundred years before then, and full of more killings in any number of its short chapters than contemporary Iceland probable sees in a year.

Here, I bring back Hallgerd, headstrong and vengeful instigator of the killing that occasioned Thjostolf's laconic account of a killing, cited here. This time, two of the saga's doomed heroes discuss her in terms that might remind readers of many a femme fatale:

"Skarp-Hedin said, `Hallgerd does not let our servants die of old age.'

`Your mother,' said Gunnar, `will no doubt see to it that this game is played by two.'"

Back in the present, to the the Fall 2007 issue Mystery Readers Journal. Editor Janet Rudolph made a decision that makes the issue an especially interesting experience for readers of international crime fiction: She does not restrict herself to fiction that has been translated into English.

Thus, for example, Paula Arvas offers insights that may help readers develop a sense of Finland and its fiction even if they can't read the language. "Finnish crime fiction," she writes, "differs from Swedish crime fiction typically in that Finnish writers often use criminals, like small time crooks, as their central characters." That might make sense to anyone who remembers my comment about Tapani Bagge. Some of his short fiction is available online; Arvas discusses his novels, not yet published in English.

Elsewhere in the issue, you can read about a very early crime novel set in the very far north, and the amusing lament of an author who bemoans "A Depressing Lack of Crime" in her native Iceland. Perhaps the biggest treat for the many fans of translated Swedish crime fiction are two bibliographies, one of Swedish crime fiction translated into English, another of reference sources about Nordic crime fiction. Lots of people in lots of places, it's nice to see, take Nordic crime fiction seriously.

P.S. One of the issue's articles is called "Have You Driven a Fjord Lately?" If you can resist that, you are made of stronger stuff than I.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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(Non)crime classics

Back in September, I posted some comments about elements of Hamlet and Macbeth that would be right at home in crime fiction. And why not? Revenge, guilt, violence, murder. It amazes me that no one in Kansas or Pennsylvania has agitated to get moral degeneracy like that out of our good American schools.

But the parallels with classic literature don’t stop there. Goneril and Regan flatter their father in order to gain his inheritance in King Lear, then plot to get the old man out of the way, just as any number of ambitions gangsters have made their way to the top. And, just so you don’t think Shakespeare is the only crime writer out there, try the Icelandic sagas, unparalleled for matter-of-fact violence, legal maneuvering, and deadpan gems like this, from Njal’s Saga:

Hallgerd was outside. "There is blood on your axe," she said. "What have you done?"

“I have now arranged that you can be married a second time," replied Thjostolf.

And now, readers, let's hear from you. What classics of world literature belong on a crime lover’s bookshelf?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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