Two ways of keeping a story
A saga, in the strict sense, is an Old Norse prose narrative. The Celtic lands had their own forms, usually called tales or cycles. In both cases, the stories we can read today were written down by Christian scribes, often long after the events they describe and sometimes long after the stories first began to circulate. Before that, they lived in speech, and that fact shapes everything scholars can and cannot say about them.
The Icelandic sagas
Most of the Icelandic sagas were written in the thirteenth century and after. Iceland was settled by Norse people in the later ninth and tenth centuries, and the sagas look back at that early period. The best-known group, the family sagas, follow farm families through feuds, marriages, lawsuits and killings, and they are often told in a spare, matter-of-fact style that avoids explaining what characters feel. Njal’s Saga and Laxdaela Saga are among the most famous. Kings’ sagas, such as the collection by Snorri Sturluson known as Heimskringla, deal with Norwegian rulers. Legendary sagas, such as the Volsunga Saga, draw on older heroic stories and include dragons, curses and magic.
Almost all of the authors are anonymous. Some manuscripts include verse, called skaldic poetry, which is often thought to preserve older wording than the prose around it. How much of the prose goes back to oral tradition is a long-running scholarly debate. Some saga events can be checked against other sources, and others cannot. The fair summary is that the sagas are skilled literature built on memory and tradition, not eyewitness reports, which is why historians treat them with care as evidence for the Viking Age.
Later in the period, Icelandic and Norwegian writers also translated French romances into Old Norse, creating a separate group sometimes called the chivalric sagas. So the form kept changing as tastes did.
Irish and Welsh tales
In Ireland, monks wrote down large numbers of tales in Old and Middle Irish. Scholars group them into cycles. The Ulster Cycle centers on the warrior Cu Chulainn and the epic cattle raid called the Tain Bo Cuailnge. The Mythological Cycle concerns the Tuatha De Danann, supernatural beings. The Fenian Cycle follows the hero Finn and his warriors. The oldest surviving manuscripts containing these tales date from around the twelfth century, though the language of some tales suggests that they existed earlier.
In Wales, the main collection is the Mabinogion, a modern name for a group of prose stories preserved in manuscripts of the fourteenth century, such as the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest. Some of the stories are likely older than their manuscripts. They mix myth, magic, kingship and, in a few cases, Arthurian matter.
The Celtic kingdoms had professional poets, supported by the households of kings and chiefs under what is often called Gaelic lordship in Ireland and Scotland, as well as storytellers. In Wales a traditional storyteller was called a cyfarwydd, and in Irish tradition a trained poet was an ollamh, a rank that carried a legal status. The tales were not casual. Some were told on formal occasions and needed learning.
From mouth to manuscript
Why did scribes write them down at all? Several reasons are possible. Christian monks sometimes took interest in their own nation’s past. Iceland’s leading families had pride in their ancestors. After the island accepted Christianity around the year 1000, writing and law grew side by side, and once Latin letters were used for Icelandic, a lot of writing in the local language followed. In Ireland, learned families supported both Latin and Irish writing for centuries.
Writing was never a neutral record. Scribes chose what to copy, sometimes changed the stories to suit Christian ideas, and sometimes added explanations. When a saga mentions pagan sacrifice or a tale refers to an older god, we are reading the pagan past as filtered by later Christians. Compare the treatment of Norse mythology, discussed in another article on the pre-Christian gods.
Handing stories down
Evidence for oral performance comes from the texts themselves. Saga writers sometimes mention stories told at weddings and feasts. The Icelandic sources describe men entertaining a gathering by reciting a tale, and law assemblies such as the Althing drew people together from across the island. Irish and Welsh sources mention story lists, which suggests repertoires that tellers were expected to know.
Oral transmission tends to preserve plots, names and striking phrases while changing details. This means that two versions of the same story in different manuscripts can differ in surprising ways. It also means that a saga set in the tenth century may reflect the concerns of the thirteenth, such as law, land or royal power.
Reading these stories today
When reading a saga or a Celtic tale, three cautions help. The story is not a news report. The manuscripts are often much later than the events. And what looks like a “pure” native tradition was often shaped by Christian learning and, in some cases, by contact with Latin and French writing.
Even so, these tales matter. They give us rare views of how people in northern and western Europe imagined honor, kinship, fate and the supernatural. They also show the range of medieval literature, which was far wider than the Latin and French court poetry usually taught first.