Gimlé

This should be a short evaluation of the qualities of the Icelandic Saga Egil’s Saga as a subject of the narrative experiments this research is based on.

Public Domain.

Being free to do whatever I want to the text and distribute as needed is of primary importance. Current practice with copyrighted texts cannot deal with the realities of digital authoring and distribution, especially that of networked meaning and structures.

That is not likely to change anytime soon so the experiments need to be based upon a work which puts no limitations on what can be done with it.

Adaptable.

The text of Egil’s Saga is available both in Icelandic and English (Icelandic, Old Norse, being the piece’s orignal language).

This means that the text of the work can be adapted, rewritten and retranslated into English when necessary to make it more suitable for online and on-screen delivery of the work. Something that is harder to do when the text in question has a canonical English language version.

In effect the English version of the text is more fluid as a result.

Abridged.

Like Shakespeare’s plays, it is rare for somebody to read the whole text of an Icelandic Saga in order. At the very least people skip the frequent family trees and related lengthy passages which describe to whom each and every character and supporting character is related.

There is a tradition for skipping the passages less related to the current reading when these stories are taught in school in Iceland.

This means that there is a strong precedent for abridging the work to make it more suitable for adaption to interactive media.

Multiform.

The work is composed of two different narrative forms. On one hand you have the impartial to the extreme narration which very cooly describes even the most horrific or emotional events. On the other hand you have the intensely emotional poetry which is said to be by the original and historic character Egill son of Skallagrír himself.

Egill uses the poetry to comment upon and directly affect events in his life. We say directly affect because one of the basic beliefs of the old Nordic cultures that language, when bound in form, can directly change reality.

The poetic form used in this Saga is untranslatable without extensive commentary and referencing, making it an ideal candidate for the use of tooltips, links and such in digital media form. Indeed it could be said that the only way to represent these poems properly in English would be using hypertext and interactive media.

Author.

Egill’s Saga, as all the Icelandic Sagas, has no author.

Today, scientific truths tend to be referred to in the public mind as if it were authorless. How often, for example, is the author of the gene-concept or black hole referred to in mass media? Who came up with these ideas in the first place has in most cases little relevance to whether we think of them as truths.

Stories, novels, biographies, on the other hand are almost never referred to without reference to the author-construct. For some reason, new narratives are not taken seriously unless some name is attached to the creation of the text.

At the time of the writing of the Icelandic Sagas the opposite was true. No idea was taken as a scientific truism unless it had an author attached (e.g. Aristotle’s Elements) and no story was considered to be a proper story unless it was treated as authorless.

None of the stories written at that time attributed to an author (although it is likely that the author of Egills Saga was Snorri Sturluson, the writer who wrote the Prose-Edda, without which all our stories of the Norse Gods would be lost, also a coward and gutless traitor who betrayed Icelanders by working with the Norwegian King).

The nonattribution of these texts frees them. A text attributed to an author is a fixed text which has a canonical version as dictated by the author.

An authorless text is more fluid, as can be seen by the many versions of these texts throughout the ages. There is less of a cultural hindrance to the idea of adapting the text to a medium. Often, before printing, when a transcriber found that he did not have enough pages to transcribe the whole text he simply rewrote and abridged the text to fit.

He would have been more hesitant to do so if the text in question had an author-dictated “true” version.

These are texts from a different age where the word “story” meant a different thing.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.