The Iliad of Eirik

The Saga of Eirik. There was a man called Eirik. He was born of this man and this woman who lived in the middle of no where. He had adventures. He married a wife. He had children. He named everything after himself. The narrator sounds like this. There is no point to the saga. The saga continues without a point. Sometimes someone might speak and say ‘A-aah!” Sometimes there is random description like this: ‘she was dressed like this’; ‘this is what the prophetess had for her meal:’.

Enough of that. This story is absolutely ridiculous. The literary style used to write it brings to mind The Iliad that’s been crossed with the "Old Testament" of the Bible. From the first, come the mirror of “this man who came from here, born of so-and-so and so, and owned so many sheep, speared this warrior who had five daughters who married five kings and they owned this many sheep and lived in this land” and so on and so forth. From the latter, the tale has the long list of begets and begots of son, daughter, mother, father. The saga has the high paced, rapid succession of event after event after event, with names thrown out willy-nilly. The untrained ear, that is not familiar with the sounds, will find it hard to remember who is who trough the leaps of the story. And, with no familiar background the names are merely superfluous to the meat of the story. There also appears no sequential logic of one sub-story to the other. In some cases it is a partial background that doesn’t truly add to the overall importance of the fragile story, which I assume to be the population of the new world, Vinland.

Furthermore, due to the almost clinical and to-the-point writing of the author, the insertion of description and speech appears random and almost ridiculous. For example the aforementioned ‘A-aah!’ which seemed completely unnecessary in its text (pg. 87). There are also the odd attempts at adding description. Usually the saga merely state that they sailed there they found stuff, they named places, and they went home to winter with their friends. The End. What about the voyage? Was it nice? Did the crew kill each other? Who knows. The narrator isn’t going to tell us. And so, odd attempts are made such as the description of the prophetess where the narrator lists of what she’s wearing and what she eats as if they were symptoms of an illness. Overall, this is rather a bizarre effect.

Magnusson, Magnus and Herman Palsson. The Vinland Sagas; The Norse Discovery of America. “Eirik’s Saga.” Penguin Books.