Iceland, Finland and the myths dear to Tolkien

Thingvellir: behind the black basalt buttress, in front the immense lawn covered with lichen where the Althing, the open-air parliament of Icelanders, was held. In the cold, sulfur-smelling air, in this land of asphalt-colored lava, between pumice dunes and puffs of geysers, it is necessary to classify memories and mental associations that pile up confusedly in our heads.

Let’s start with the Edda.

The term Edda, in the plural Eddur, refers to two Old Norse texts both written in Iceland during the 13th century. The poetic Edda, or ancient Edda, and the prose Edda, that of Snorri.

The ancient Edda originates from the Codex Regius, a manuscript composed in the thirteenth century, of which traces have been lost until 1643. The initial part is the note Völuspa, the prophecy of the seer, a precious source of knowledge of Norse mythology and cosmogony . The seer talks to Odin and tells him about the creation of the world and about Ragnarök, its catastrophic destiny. Inside the Völuspa six stanzas are dedicated to a list of names of dwarves, from which Tolkien drew heavily for his trilogy. In 2009 Harper and Collins published Tolkien’s posthumous work on the poetic Edda, entitled “The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun”, in an English that tries to re-propose the alliterative meter of Old Norse.

The Edda in prose, written around 1220 by Snorri Sturluson, poet and politician belonging to the Icelandic parliament, begins with a re-enactment of the myths and legends already present in the ancient Edda but then evolves into a poetic manual, aimed at understanding the mechanisms of scaldic poetry.

Derived from the Icelandic voice skald, meaning poet, scaldic poetry is complex, intricate, alliterative, often composed in praise of a particular lord. It abounds in Kenningar, that is, hermetic metaphors, poetic and imaginative periphrases that replace the name of a thing. The use of Kenning is common in Norse, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon literature, examples of it are also found in Beowulf, and Scaldic poetry is close to troubadour and Provençal.

Snorri is also known for having claimed that the gods were nothing more than military leaders then revered (in this re-proposing the theory of the philosopher Evemero).

Let us now deal with the Sagas of the Icelanders.

The literary form closest to the modern novel that took place in the Middle Ages, capable even of coining a new term, is, in fact, the “saga”, which has in its root the verb “to say”.

The Islendigasögur are family stories — written on sheep’s fleece in a period from the twelfth to the fourteenth century — which speak of people who really existed, of events that happened to the first generations of settlers who moved from Norway to Iceland, of adventurous travels in Greenland and North America (before Christopher Columbus), intolerance towards the Norwegian and Danish kings, the raids carried out to conquer land, booty and independence.

The society described is similar to the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie in which the novel genre will take hold.

“The society imagined by the Islanding sour is as precisely observed as those of Daniel Defoe and Jane Austen”. (Robert Kellog)

From the sagas we learn the history, geography but also minute details of the daily life of the time, the complicated family relationships, the concept of honor, the power of gods, halfway between priests and political leaders.

Both the two books of the Edda and the Icelandic Sagas are attempts to preserve the tradition of the pagan past made during an already Christian Middle Ages.

Contemporaries of Chrétien de Troyes, Chaucer and Dante, they are not written for an aristocratic audience but for ordinary people, just like the novel. The sagas are the product of the people, of farmers and fishermen who sat around the fire in the evening and recalled the deeds of ancestors and famous people. The protagonists are not semi-divine heroes but peasants and landowners, a male universe of rude fighters and outlaws, although some stories also give space to female heroines.

If in spirit they recall the epic, they are not in verse but in a prose that mixes irony, humor and nostalgia. They differ from medieval romance due to the little attention given to fantasy and courteous love and the lack of a happy ending.

However, they host many magical and fantastic elements, some of which were taken from Tolkien: the trolls, the ghosts, the berserkers, or ferocious Scandinavian warriors who had sworn an oath to Odin.

The most famous is the Egils saga, considered by many to be the work of Snorri. Egil Skallagrimsson was the greatest Icelandic skald. Many of the heroes mentioned in the sagas were also poets, capable of reciting celebratory verses, but not falsely flattering, in honor of their rulers. Yet words were also used as weapons to hurt and humiliate.

The authors of the sagas are unknown and the stories were first passed down orally and then, only later, collected in written form, after the introduction of writing on the island in the twelfth century but, even on this, there is no certainty. The concept of the author himself is very different from the current one, indicating only the “initiator” of a story, who does not imprint the subject matter on himself and his personal style.

A prose like that of the sagas was rare in the literature of the period, with the exception of the Decameron and the French vulgate of the Arthurian cycle.

“The development of a prose fiction in medieval Iceland that was fluent, nuanced and seriously occupied with the legal, moral and political life of a whole society of ordinary people was an achievement unparalleled elsewhere in Europe.” (Robert Kellog)

The stories never start in medias res but try to tell the events in chronological order. The language is direct and simple, great space is given to dialogue. The characters are introduced by a complicated genealogy and patronymic, which Tolkien will take up and develop in the appendices. One of the functions of the sagas was also the transmission of these genealogies, and they had a didactic intent as well as entertainment.

Usually the saga opens abruptly, with a banal introduction: “There was a man named etc”. The accuracy in the geographical location of the story and in the identification of the exact historical context is maximum. The story tells of a conflict, born of trivial and common issues, of its bloody development and of subsequent feuds and vendettas. The characters, however, retain something mythical, magical abilities in their singing, divinatory power.

Although, as we have said, they are mainly in prose, they also contain verses, initially seen as a source of information and historical authority, which later became a means of expression of the mind and thoughts of the protagonists.

We conclude with the much more recent Kalevala.

In 1835 Elias Lönrot rearranged and published a vast collection of heroic ballads in Karelian in poem form. The later version, from 1849, is more complete. The Karelians are Finns who have had contact — coincidentally — with the Vikings. Their language, belonging to the Finno-Ugric group, is not of Indo-European origin. Kalevala means “Land of Kaleva”, that is, precisely, Finland.

Also in this case it is the recovery of ancient traditions and ancient songs. The poem is still sung by some elderly bards with shamanic values.

It was translated by Igino Cocchi in 1909 and in 1910 by Paolo Emilio Pavolini from Livorno (father of the famous hierarch Alessandro). This latest version, in octtones — the original meter of the Finnish text — is available in an edition edited by Roberto Arduini and Cecilia Barella for the Il Cerchio di Rimini publishing house.

The story of the hero and poet Väinamöinen, the blacksmith Ilmarinen and the warrior Lemminkäinen partly inspired the American poet Longfellow, the composer Sibelius and, finally, Tolkien with “The Silmarillion” and the structure of the elven languages. Everything revolves around the search for a bride for the heroes protagonists, and Sampo, a magical mill that ensures wealth to those who own it.

Many are the adaptations and reductions for children, in particular I like to remember the one published in 1961 for the types of Malipiero, of which we report an excerpt:

“The intrepid old man Vainamonen, immensely strong, was the cantor of Kalevala” (By cantor we mean a skald, a hero poet similar to those present in the Edda and the Icelandic Sagas, who also has magical and thaumaturgical abilities in his singing). “His song was like the sky: he covered the whole great region of Kalevala, and covered it day and night, like a strong wind capable of uttering musical words that everyone heard even when closed inside the huts. His fame reached far away, like water that spreads across the plains. He thus reached the southern lands, in the places of Poiola. “