The Neighborhood: A Retelling of the Laxardalsa Saga

At some time in the thirteenth century a writer transcribed a series of stories about families who first settled Iceland's Laxa River Dales four hundred years earlier. The writer's sources were oral reminiscences, tales told by old folks around long night fires. Some were exciting; some were banal. Other writers were at work on tales from different quarters of Iceland. Perhaps they knew about each other's work, for "back story" material omitted by our author often is provided in other similar collections. The resulting manuscript became known as the Laxardalsa Saga, or Tellings of the Laxa Dales. Like many transcripts, the story line tends to be episodic and frequently disjointed. But the story has been copied many times over the centuries and is one of the favorite Icelandic sagas. Its characters are over-the-top men and women who can be trusted to do outrageous things without bothering to explain or apologize to any of their peers.

That can be a problem for modern readers. The saga author does not elaborate, does not judge, does not comment on actions described. But there must have been commentary at the time of the original happenings. Siblings, parents, housemaids, field hands, lusty ex-Vikings living a settled life as farmers and fishers in an unsettled country - the range of opinions on a compatriot's peccadillos would have been as great then as it is in modern social media. For all we know, such comments were the foundation of those four-hundred-year-old stories.

This re-telling of the Laxardalsa Saga recounts the original story from just such varied points of view, and adds material from contemporary sagas to further clarify the sometimes confusing situations that must have arisen when a relatively closed society is forced to invent its own legislative and judicial systems while dealing with marriage, divorce, inheritance, maimings, murders, the most beautiful woman ever born in Iceland - and her four husbands.