Backwards Characters

Some characters are seen from end-to-start

Icelandic Tales

In medieval Iceland, sagamen organized and wrote down the tales of the first Icelandic settlers and their families. The sagas span generations, showing how events in the past bear fruit a hundred or two hundred years later. We follow the characters through there whole lives, as children, as youths, and as adults. And in all their lives characters don’t change. A brave man was brave as a youth and a boy. A lying, fear-ridden man was much the same when he was a sniveling 8-year-old.

I have always fancied that what accounts for this consistency is the nature of the great sagas, the ‘true’ sagas that evolved from actual history. Every man in history has his one hour and his one deed. Few men are known for more. And in this deed, he shows us, we suppose, his inner heart, the truth of him.

So when a man was known for a brave a noble defense of his home, though it ended in death, the talesmen bore this fact in mind when they wrote of his birth and boyhood. They could not get rid of the thought of him at his brave end, and so when they told of his playing ball as a boy, they could only see him as brave and noble then.

This made a wonderful consistency in character building in these great tales.

Add to this backward glance a couple of other notions the old Norse believed in:

1. Blood will tell
2. Fate will run its course.

Blood

The Icelanders believed in class. There was, to them, a link between kin and character. There were thralls, and those men were low and base and fear-ridden. There were noble men, and they were brave, handsome, open-handed. This was only a loose link for the old Norse, though: they told of men born of the highest stock who were mean, cringing, thieves and cowards, and the told of poor farmer’s sons who were strong, tall, brave men. But on the whole good men have good sons, weak men have weak sons.

From this we could say that the old Norse thought a man’s nature was fixed from his birth. It came of his blood, and it told in his every deed. The one famous deed in a man’s life proves and shows his nature, and so we can look for that same nature in every deed in his life.

Fate

The old Norse surely dwelled on Fate. What came about, for good or ill, came about because it had to come about. Just as a tree from its seed will grow into branch and leaf from the kind of seed that sprouted it, so the present has grown out of the past, and the nature of a family, community, or nation is told in advance in its first founding.

But Fate told its tale through the nature of things. An evil fate did not force a good man to fall prey to unheard-of fear and craving at his life’s end, but rather the evil fate drew men of constant hearts together into a weave that pitted the best against the best in such a way that there was no way out but baseness, and these great men could not act basely, not even to save themselves.

Building Character

Out of all these joined thoughts, the sagaman built his characters for us not in abstract telling of desires, fears, or inner fancies. They built their characters for us when the told us of concrete deeds the characters did. One, two, three — in several short scenes, usually telling of the man’s boyhood, the sagamen show us how the boy acted, and in each scene the boy acts in much the same way. Out of these scenes we come to know him, and because we know his heart cannot change its nature, we also know what kind of man he’ll be.

True Tales not False

These sagas told of deeds based on historical truths. And these truths were well known by all. The heroes of the great sagas were the famous men in Iceland’s history.

This adds to the joy in hearing of them as boys and youths. We in the audience also know each famous man’s one great, defining deed, and so we take pleasure in seeing him act much the same when he’s a boy out fishing. And we could not trust in a tale that would have us believe that a man who died bravely, meeting his end head-on, could ever have been a base and sniveling child.

And Now?

What then of today’s tales, that are wholly made up, whose basis lies not in any tales we already know? I wonder if any tale is wholly made up, and has no basis in any other tale. But be it so: what can we learn from the way the sagamen build their characters?

I can tell from my own reading of the tales, that though I (no Icelander) did not know the events of the tale when I read it for the first time, and had never heard of these men, even so: I enjoyed seeing the way the characters were built up in small concrete scenes in their boyhood, and the consistency in with they were maintained. There is a frisson of pleasure in foreshadowing, no less, when in the early scenes in Njal’s Saga a man asks his brother about his little girl and how pretty she is. ‘She is fair enough, and many a man will smart for it,’ the brother answers. ‘Still, I wonder how thief’s-eyes came into our family.’ From these few words I know what to anticipate in future scenes of Swanhild’s fatal career and marriages. Or the scenes of quarrelsome Grettir as a boy, bloodying some other lad’s nose in ball-play, because he has to have his way: from this I know he will ever have trouble in his dealings with others, and so long as his strength holds out, he will hold the upper hand. But no man’s strength lasts forever.

(Composed with pen on paper Sunday, 27 January 2008)