Geirmundar saga heljarskinns

by Bergsveinn Birgisson

«Geirmundr heljarskinn sté nú til slíkra virðinga at svá er sagt at hverr maðr á Vestfjörðum vildi sitja eðr standa svá sem hann fyrir sagði.»

Geirmundur heljarskinn var sagður göfgastur allra landnámsmanna á Íslandi. Þó hefur sögu hans aldrei verið haldið á lofti – fyrr en nú. Enda má segja að hann sé, þegar öllu er á botninn hvolft, 21. aldar maður, þótt hann hafi verið uppi fyrir 1100 árum. Bergsveinn Birgisson vakti mikla athygli í Noregi árið 2013 fyrir fræðirit sitt um Geirmund heljarskinn sem hann ritaði á norsku og nefndi Svarta víkinginn. Hér er hins vegar loks hægt að lesa stórbrotna sögu Geirmundar sjálfs. Og kominn tími til.

Bergsveinn Birgisson hefur rannsakað sögu landnámsmannsins Geirmundar heljarskinns um árabil. Hann hefur leitað fanga víða, í fornum ritum, munnmælum og örnefnum, stuðst við fornleifarannsóknir, málfræði og erfðafræði. Hér er komin Íslendingasagan sem fékk ekki að vera með.

Höfundur: Bergsveinn Birgisson

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Bergsveinn has a PhD in Nordic Studies from the University of Bergen. He has published two volumes of poetry, Íslendingurinn (The Icelander) and Innrás liljanna (The Invasion of the Lilies), and four novels, Landslag er aldrei asnalegt (Landscape is Never Stupid), Handbók um hugarfar kúa (A Handbook on the Attitude of Cows), Svar við bréfi Helgu (Answer to Letters from Helga), and Den Svarte Vikingen (The Black Viking) which is written in Norwegian.
He has also helped with the Norwegian translation of the Icelandic medieval saga Flateyarbók

Bergsveinn lives in Bergen, Norway.

Reviews

[Ólöf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Snilld frá upphafi til enda. Íslandssagan í píkaresku ljósi. Höfundur hafi þökk fyrir að brjóta blað með glæsilegum hætti.

[Magnús · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sannkallað stórvirki og skrifuð af mikilli lipurð og hugrekki. Ég verð að viðurkenna að mér fannst Leitin að svarta víkingnum bæði betri og skemmtilegri, en þessar tvær hljóta þó að haldast í hendur nánast sem heild. Það heildarverk er svo sannarlega upp á tíu, 10/10.
Senan þar sem leikararnir gera grín að Haraldi Lúfu er óborganleg og ég viðurkenni að ég grenjaði úr hlátri yfir myndinni sem var dregin upp þar.
Ég er nokkuð viss um að ég á eftir að spóla í gegn um Svarta víkinginn aftur á næstu vikum eftir að hafa lesið Geirmundarsögu. Þrátt fyrir ýkjur og að fært sé í stílinn með gefnu skáldaleyfi þá koma kaflar þar sem ég gerði mér hreinlega ekki almennilega fyrir hvort væri fótur fyrir, og það tel ég vera merki á snilld höfundar að hnýta saman fantasíu og sönn fræði.
Ég segi nú bara bravó.

[Rúnar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Geirmundar Saga Heljarskinns ("The Story of Geirmund Hellskin") is a work of fiction in four layers, with four major characters.

The innermost layer is a 12th century manuscript that tells the story of Geirmund, a Norwegian king's illegitimate son, born in slavery, who rose to fame and became the head of a vast trading enterprise in Iceland during its age of settlement. The author, Brandur the prior of Flatey abbey, writes with great poetry, humour, and imagery. People who lived more than 1100 years ago come alive in the telling.

The next layer is the story of Brandur the prior. Through his writing of the saga of Geirmund, we get to know a little of his life in Flatey, a remote island off the coast of a remote island. We get to read his lonely thoughts on life, language, God, and sexuality.

The next layer is the story of the manuscript itself, and this is were things get Borgesian. We learn that the original was lost, and a copy made around the year 1400 is supposedly preserved in a private collection known only to a handful of people. The version published in this book has been painstakingly restored from a copy of that copy, made in the 1940s by someone who briefly had access to it (and whom, at the time, nobody believed). The story of this man is no less compelling than the story of Geirmund himself. Was he a madman or a con artist, or did he really find a suppressed history of Iceland?

The outer layer is a fictional account of the author's restoration of the story and reconstruction of the history it hints at. He suggests that the full story of Geirmund Hellskin has been systematically erased or omitted from written histories. Such books generally mention him only in passing, and much about him is shrouded in mystery and contradiction. The canonical narrative of the settlement of Iceland is that it was a community of Norse farmers, fostering justice and equality in the new land, eventually culminating in the establishment of a Christian nation. If the saga of Geirmund Hellskin is true, it challenges this notion in no small way. Geirmundur was a dark-skinned man with Asian features like his Siberian mother, and he was one of the first settlers of Iceland, along with his mother's Siberian kinsmen, his Norse friends, and Irish slaves. They came to Iceland not to farm, but to plunder its shores which at the time were teeming with walrus. Geirmundur established a vast hunting and trading network, and controlled nearly a quarter of Iceland's territory with large roaming armies. He was as close to a "king of Iceland" as there has ever been, and to say that he was not a good king is an understatement.

This is a masterwork of historical fiction, and of fictional history.

[Skuli Saeland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skemmtileg útgáfa af Íslendingasögunum. Bergsveinn þekkir vel til og er með nýjustu fræði á hreinu. Hann skrifar sögu Geirmundar eins og hún kann að hafa verið og bætir inn upplýsingum sem fræðimenn telja nú eiga við um aðstæður sem þá voru.
Fínn húmor og oft er maður í vanda með hvað var satt og hvað uppskáldað. Hins vegar er þetta bæði skrifað með rithætti Íslendingasagna ásamt miklum gerfi-fræðiformála og því er sagan langdregin á köflum en vel trúverðug.

[Arnstein · Rating 2 out of 5]

The fictitious saga/novelisation of Den svarte vikingen/The Black Viking (review here): A peculiar but fascinating mix of hypothesised facts and a crude sense of comedy fit for a Norse mindset, but what is fact and what is pure fiction won't be clear to anyone who hasn't read the non-fiction book it's based on.
This is also a good place to start if one has read the Assassin's Creed book regarding Geirmundr Heljarskinn and want a more likely account of what happened.

Only rarely do I feel the need to discuss the rating I've given to a book, but here a discussion is warranted. Because this is a fictional saga that seeks to promote an interpretation of real facts, it's something of an oxymoron. In a case such as this, where the oxymoron is a willed and essential part of the book, the reader needs to be given either a solution to it or a way to evaluate it for themselves. If the book doesn't give them neither then this can only result in confusion – what is based on real sources and what are figments? Geirmundar saga heljarskinns (Norwegian title: Soga om Geirmund Heljarskinn; English translation: The Saga of Geirmundr Heljarskinn) isn't organised in a way where the reader can tell what is what. It's this that I take issue with, not how accurate the saga is to what really happened (which, of course, is very much up for discussion because of how fragmentary the historical puzzle pieces are), nor how well told it is. This annoys me and that is why I gave it the Goodreads grade of “It's OK”. Others will likely find this less important than I do and should disregard my grading.

The review is based on the Norwegian translation, but the original work is written in Old Icelandic. Fascinatingly, this means that Norsemen/vikings would have been able to read the original, provided that they were among the few who understood the Latin alphabet, even if it's written over six hundred years after the Norse era ended (i.e. around 1350 CE).

The essentials of the saga is as thus: Geirmundr Hjörsson Heljarskinn (ca. 850 – 905 CE) and his twin brother Håmundr, were the sons of the Norse King Hjör and his Bjarmian wife Ljufvina. This was in the early ninth century, before another king, Harald Luva, decided to conquer his neighbours and create the kingdom now known as Norway. King Hjör married the daughter of a Bjarme to ensure that he would be able to buy ropes made from walrus leather and walrus oil from them – the ropes were essential to securing the sails of the Norse longships and the oil protected their hulls from shipworms, and the Bjarmi had the resources and the skill to prepare both. Ljufvina came from a people related to the modern day Vespers, a people with broad faces and a darker skin tone than the Norse were accustomed to. So when Ljufvina gave her king two sons who both had her skin shade, they were given the nicknames Heljarskin – it means Hel's skin, referring to the death goddess' dark skin.

Geirmundr was later sent back to the Bjarmi to serve as a diplomatic bond between the two peoples. While there he learned the secrets of hunting walrus, and to make goods from them. Harald Luva didn't possess the knowledge of where the Bjarmi lived, but decided that if he owned enough of the coastline the merchants would have to travel, then he could levy as much toll on these goods as he wanted and get rich that way instead. Or, as I would add, Luva didn't exactly seem to have any problems taking what wasn't his so it wouldn't be a surprise if he had planned to just extort the knowledge from someone who knew. In any case, this is thought to be why he began his conquest, why Norway was united into one kingdom.

One of the neighbours who lost their kingdom to him was Geirmundr's father. Without kingdom and without his lucrative trade, Hjör was destitute. The only hope for him and his family was to make connections with the Norse kingdoms on Éire. They had just as much need for walrus leather and oil as everyone else, but no way of their own to obtain it. Yet, a story had begun to circulate of an island to the north where there were huge flocks of them, a land that would later be known as Iceland, and a plan began to take shape. Geirmundr would have learned the craft needed from the Bjarmi, so if they could send him up there then these natural resources could be harvested without involving Harald Luva, their sworn enemy.

And this they did. The knowledge and entrepreneurship would end up making Geirmundr Heljarskin the richest and most powerful man on Iceland. This to the degree that a lot of the Icelandic population still carries Bjarmian genes thought to stem from him.

This account might be accurate in some places, probably less so in others, and, since this is a novelisation after all, quite a lot has been added that is just there to fill in the blanks. Most of the time the language is time-period accurate, which is exactly what one could have hoped for when it's written by a scholar who understands that field well. However, now and again, especially in the early parts of the saga, the author's peculiar sense of comedy peeks in, and because its expression doesn't fit the rest of the text it tends to break the immersion. Take this as an example, here the final clause sets itself distinctly apart from the rest of the text:

In old texts it is said that Hjorleiv went warfaring there to fight with the Bjarmi and plunder goods or grave mounds, but it seems more reasonable to us that he had sought walrus, that were still considered quite valuable for ropes, candleware and long, valuable teeth that sticks out of the noggin of these fat animals. (reviewer's own translation; pp. 28-29)

Of course, this way of breaking the immersion keeps the reader aware of the fact that this isn't a factual book, just potentially based on it, and therefore, in a sense, it's actually an element that is just as welcome as it is disruptive. Different readers will clearly feel differently about this.

The book begins with a false introduction which likely is supposed to aid the readers' immersion. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but to return to what I argued at the beginning of this review, there is an oxymoron here which needs to be addressed and I wish the author would have used this opportunity to clear things up instead. Alternatively they could have made use of the afterword for this, and while the afterword clarifies some things, it mixes this with the background story of the fictional author of the saga, which is just convoluting. As I see it, The Saga of Geirmundr Heljarskinn warrants a much more serious treatment of it's origins to be informative in the way it ought to be. It isn't supposed to replace reading The Black Viking, but in absence of any explanations it's just confusing.

If one sets aside my arguments regarding what the readers' need to get a feeling of what is accurate and what is pure fiction, then, as a whole, The Saga of Geirmundr Heljarskinn is a massive accomplishment. The Black Viking was the culmination of a long and thorough study, and to make use of this to create a new work fluently in a dead language while in the process attempting to recreate the life of a very important, but largely forgotten, historical person, is impressive. There was once a proper historical saga dedicated to Geirmundr Heljarskinn, but that one has been lost to time. I can't help but feel that this effort has been made to rectify this. Not because a true recreation could ever be attempted with how much has been lost to time, but because there deserves to exist such a saga, even a flawed one. If so, then I agree.

[bolli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Það er yndislegt að lesa svona nútímalega Íslendingasögu sem er skrifuð út frá áhugasviði nútímalesenda. Fjallað er opinskátt um efnistök sem fræðimenn hafa þurft að lesa á milli línanna í eldri Íslendingasögum.

Við höfum auðvitað mikinn áhuga á því í dag hvað þessum landnámsmönnum gekk eiginlega til, hvaða tilfinningar og þrár bjuggu að baki athafna þeirra o.s.frv. og er þeirri fýsn svalað ágætlega í Geirmundar sögu heljarskinns.

Sagnaritarar 13. aldar höfðu allt aðra lífssýn og annan hvata að baki verka sinna og því er það mikill lúxus að öll djúsi smáatriðin séu matreidd svona ofan í mann.

Það eina sem ég hef út á textann að setja er að hann er óþarflega og jafnvel óþægilega groddaralegur á köflum. Svo er reyndar nokkuð undarlegt að lesa svona fornlegan texta sem tilheyrir þó augljóslega nútímanum og varð mér oft hugsað til „uggsdalsins“ (e. uncanny valley) í því sambandi.

Annars er þetta mögnuð stílæfing sem er tilvalið að lesa í kjölfar Leitinnar að svarta víkingnum.

[Fríða Þorkelsdóttir]

Stórskemmtileg og grótesk Íslendingasaga með áhugaverða forsögu.

[Orsis Mt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Svanur Kerjúlf er ný þjóðhetja. Svansdagurinn haldinn hátíðlegur 15. nóvember. Alþingi hlýtur nú að koma þessu í gegn. Allavega Kerjúlfshátíð þriðju helgina í september. Miðasala á netinu og svona.

[Håkon Remøy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I Den svarte vikingen var det gjort eit poeng ut av at ein sopass mektig landnåmsmann som Geirmund Heljarskinn var utan ei eiga soge. Men det skal endra seg med denne boka.

Boka byrjar med føreordet frå den bergensbaserte forfattaren av Den svarte vikingen, Bergsveinn Birgisson, får ein telefon om at han lyt koma til Island, sidan dei ved Nasjonalbiblioteket på Island har funne eit dokument som gjev seg ut for å vera just denne soga om Geirmund som han hadde etterlyst. Dette dokumentet skal vera eit avskrift frå 1940-talet av eit manuskript, som sjølvsagt er i privat eige einkvan staden. Prior Brand får mellom anna æra for å ha skrive soga.

No skal det seiast at det er Bergsveinn Birgisson som er forfattaren av soga og det heile. Det var eit interessant grep av forfattaren å inkludera seg sjølv i handlinga på denne måten. Eg tykte det var forfriskande å lesa om Geirmund i sagastil, der han i Den svarte vikingen ofte ikkje sa noko heilt sikkert, var det no meir bastant: I denne boka vart det skrive om bjarmane som oppheldt seg på Island, om kvalrossfangsten som gjekk føre seg og om veremåten åt Geirmund. I Den svarte vikingen vart alt dette til dels spekulert på, men det var ikkje nokon freistnad på å skildra veremåten hans, just av di det ikkje finst kjelder (det var vel eitt stutt kapittel i boka om korleis ein typisk dag i livet hans kunne arta seg). Det fine med soga var at ho beint fram var morosam til tider, ho var skriven med ein viss humor, som gjorde henne artig å lesa.

No las eg den nynorske omsetjinga. Det var nokso tydeleg at boka ikkje hadde vorte korrekturlesen, då det til tider var ein del skrivefeil, nokso tilfeldig infinitiv (forsøk på a-infinitiv), ymsande verbbøying, med både tar / tek og tatt / teke, gitt / gjeve om einannan.

Lett oppsummert vil eg seia at det var kjekt å lesa denne boka etter å ha lese Den svarte vikingen – neste gong vil eg nok prøva å lesa henne på originalspråket, som faktisk er gamalislandsk.