Snorri Sturluson

Gandalf

Have you read any books or heard any tales where Norse gods and heros appear? Have you met Odin and Thor, frost giants or dwarves, or heard about Ragnarok?  It turns out that there’s really only one source for this impressive and rich mythology — the thirteenth-century Icelandic works of Snorri Sturluson, which are called Eddas or sagas. 

If you’ve read the work of Tolkien, you have encountered a version of Sturluson’s creations, as Tolkien acknowledged — including the names of many of his characters (though he did invent hobbits and promoted Gandalf to a lofter position). Neil Gaiman’s American Gods?  His Norse gods who reappear in America first appeared in Sturluson’s works. In childhood did you read retellings of these myths? The first one to write them down (or maybe to invent them) was Sturluson. In fact:

“Snorri influenced writers as various as Thomas Gray, William Blake, Sir Walter Scott, the Brothers Grimm, Thomas Carlyle, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Richard Wagner, Matthew Arnold, Henrik Ibsen, William Morris, Thomas Hardy, J. R. R. Tolkien, Hugh MacDiarmid, Jorge Luis Borges, W. H. Auden, Poul Anderson, Günther Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, Ursula K. LeGuin, A. S. Byatt, Seamus Heaney, Jane Smiley, Neil Gaiman, and Michael Chabon.” (Song of the Vikings, p. 6)

I was very interested to learn the extent of Sturluson’s responsibility for what one naively would think to be a body of mythology from wider sources. I was also interested to read many details of his creative endeavor, and to picture the characters and landscape backgrounds in my mind’s eye as I read about them.

Heiðrún, the cosmic goat

Egil Skallagrimsson was one of the many characters described in the Icelandic sagas called Eddas.
In the book Song of the Vikings, the author Nancy Marie Brown describes the saga’s Norse heros and gods.

“Egil’s Saga is one of the best, as well as one of the earliest, of the Icelandic sagas. Many scholars believe Snorri wrote it, perhaps while he lived at Borg, more likely toward the end of his life. Not only does it center on his kinsman Egil, ancestor of his mother, Gudny, it depicts the landscape surrounding Borg in a way that only someone who lived there could.” (p. 45)

 

This book is full of very detailed descriptions of the historic figures who lived in medieval Iceland, and who played a role in the life and work of Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241). I find it a bit tedious to read because it overwhelms one with all these details, though in a way it’s fascinating. For example, we learn about Snorri and his wife (or partner) Gudrun;

“When Snorri moved to Reykholt in 1206, Gudrun came with him. Officially she was his housekeeper, in charge of the weaving and clothes making, the laundry and housecleaning, the dairying and cheese making, ale brewing and cooking, and overseeing the multitude of female chores involved in running a large household. She and Snorri had several children but only one lived past childhood: their daughter Ingibjorg, who was born in 1208.

I’m sufficiently overwhelmed that I don’t feel able to write a real review of this book, but I am still enjoying the thought of how amazingly much is known about Snorri. For example:

“Snorri’s family estate of Hvamm (Grassy Slope) was tucked into a lush green bowl at the inward tip of a deep island-studded fjord in the West of Iceland. Sheltered by jagged hills, it was one of the few great estates without a sweeping view. Its first settler was a woman, Aud the Deep-Minded, the only female chieftain Iceland ever had.” (p. 42)

Among other things, reading this book made me think about our visits to Iceland and Greenland, where we saw the landscapes that inspired the background of the Eddas. Here are a few photos — 

A mural in Iceland (2021). Maybe with Vikings.

Review and photos © mae sander.

Iceland

 

The overpowering theme of this book by the only Icelandic Nobelist — Halldor K. Laxness — is hunger. It’s a hunger that modern readers have almost surely never experienced. Especially in spring (a season of hunger for farming people everywhere that’s been forgotten by people like us) the lack of fresh food or perhaps the lack of any food is unimaginable. The food that was put away in the fall (or the money put away to buy food) may not last until the first produce of spring comes in. 

In Independent People, the entire focus is on one sheep-raising family who are trying to make a living from a farm in the wilds of Iceland. Sheep are their livelihood and their obsession. The author describes their spring expectations:

“They would feel reasonably sure of surviving the winter, and of getting enough rye meal, refuse fish, and coffee to rear the kids on, those at least that didn’t die (the others were forgotten), always provided that they restricted themselves to the customary one meal a day in the spring.” (p. 17)

The central character, Bjartur of Summerhouses, lives in this extremely isolated area some time in the early 20th century, beginning before the First World War and continuing until shortly afterwards. Bjartur is a semi-secret poet and his verses are part of the novel. He seems naive in many ways.

His story, in brief: his first wife dies, he remarries, several children are born, and some other people live with the family on the farm. They always seems isolated by the distance from the isolated farm to the small settlement nearby, the incredible distance to Reykjavik (where none of them have ever visited), and the unimaginable distance to the wider world, which hardly seems to them even to exist. Eventually, they are made rich by the war and its need for the local resources, and then made poor by the aftermath when their products were no longer demanded by the wider world.

Bjartur has a number of fixed ideas that vary between comic and tragic. 

“You should beware of believing things you see in books. I never regard books as the truth, and least of all the Bible, because there’s no check on what they can write in them.” (p. 64)

In a recent introduction to the English edition of Independent People, here is a summary of this character: “Bjartur is for me one of the great twentieth-century literary characters—one of the immortals, like Humbert Humbert or Jay Gatz/Gatsby or Gregor Samsa or the four Makioka sisters. He is petty-minded and heroic; brutal and poetic; cynical and childlike.” (p. xvii) I don’t agree with this comparison, but I’m including it because it’s probably more standard than my own views.

Bjartur isn’t the only character in the novel whose desperate poverty and eccentric views define him — here’s a description of one of the others, a Bailiff:

“His trousers were so worn that the original cloth no longer held the patches and was giving way at the stitches. Turned up over the bottoms was a pair of yellowish socks, undyed, and the down-at-heel horsehide shoes on his feet lent support to the theory that he was newly returned from a thoroughgoing inspection of the stables, stronger testimony being provided by the smell. In clothing and general appearance Bjarter of Summerhouses was far superior to this tramp-like Bailiff.” (p. 104) 

Also, a description of Bjartur’s second wife: 

“She would go drooping off home just before nine to boil the fish, but very often she could not get the fire to draw. She brought him his fish, rye bread, and coffee out to the meadow. ‘There’s no need to be stingy with that muck,’ he said of the sugar, for he always spoke slightingly of sweet things.” (p. 38) 

And a description of some of his fellow farmers and craftsmen:

“New men on the croft, famous master builders who turfed the ewe-house walls in such a fashion that the courses took on a herring-bone pattern; a journeyman carpenter with foot-rule, pencil, and saw, mental arithmetic in his eye; the fresh scent of shavings blending with the smell of autumn’s mud and rain; boisterous conversation at meal-times, fragrant snuff, poetry, merchants and co-operative societies, sheep, sheep again, interesting information from irrelevant quarters, unknown phrases, brawls, sweet coffee.“ (p. 239) 

The novel Independent People is one of those sagas of the early 20th century that now seems to develop with painful slowness. Characters die. Children grow up and try to understand the world around them. Life is hard, and from their earliest years they all have to work in terrible conditions, sometimes with their clothing soaked and freezing, sometimes when they are too tired to continue, etc. etc. The character sketches vary between irony (even satire) and sympathy. Their concerns are sometimes taken seriously and sometimes — I think — viewed as primitive or even childish. It’s not a book that satisfies current tastes any more, and I wouldn’t recommend reading it except for historical curiosity, as it’s extremely long, repetitive, and overburdened with descriptions.

Birds and Sheep

A pair of phalaropes we saw in Svalbard, another island in the far North.

Birds are everywhere in the landscape of this novel, and I was fascinated by the author’s descriptions of them. Though I did not see the specific birds on my trip to Iceland, I did see many in Norway. Of the many species named, I especially like hearing of the phalarope:

“On every pool of the river there was a phalarope to make her a bow; no bird in all the marshes is so courtly in its demeanour on Midsummer Eve.” (p. 193)

“Soon the marshes would be green and humming with life the same as they were last year, with the phalarope preening itself in courtesy on the surface of the deep pools. And the little waterfall up in the mountain would be flowing backward in the sunny breeze.“ (p. 246)

Of course there’s also constant mention of the sheep.  

These sheep we saw on Runde, an island in Norway,
 but the landscape is comparable to that in Iceland. 

Some photos of Iceland that I thought about when reading:

From our trip to Iceland in 2021.

Blog post and photos © 2021, 2025 mae sander

TV and Books

Fun movie to watch — I love all the cameos by famous actors from that era.

 

Five Found Dead takes place on the Orient Express, and all the passengers are aware of the 
Agatha Christie plot. It starts well, but there are too many murders and not enough Christie-type characters.

Other Reading Last Month

I’ve been reading (or at times just sampling) several books about people and places well beyond my usual habits in reading or in socializing. I’ve enjoyed some, and I’ve been put off by others. I haven’t finished all of them, but I’m not sure I’ll be going back to them, especially as these are mainly collections of essays  that can be read separately.

NOTE: This book is not related to the TV series of the same name.

Blog post by mae sander 2025.

Icelandic Noir

 Snow!

Siglufjördur, an isolated town in the extreme north of Iceland. An avalanche on the only road into town
can cut it off almost entirely during severe winter storms, and that’s the situation in the novel that I recently read..

Snowblind by Ragnar Jonasson seems to me more of a police procedural than a thriller. A young policeman, on his first assignment, must figure out the reason why a murder has occurred, and must discover many interrelationships among its people. It’s a pretty good read — lots of local color and winter darkness. The large number of Icelandic mystery writers is amazing.

Books and Flowers

I’ve reread two Icelandic mystery stories by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir. Good ones! 
The series now has four books, and the author will soon publish another one.

What is a monster? Claire Dederer devotes this entire book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, to an effort define this term insofar as it relates to gifted men — geniuses — creators — who are abusers, sexual predators, racists, antisemites, or worse. Men whose brilliant creations are stained in the eyes of the audience member who loves their work but becomes aware of the reality of the artist. One way she says it:

“I realized that for me, over the past few years of thinking about Polanski, thinking about Woody Allen, thinking about all these complicated men I loved, the word had come to take on a new meaning. It meant something more nuanced, and something more elemental. It meant: someone whose behavior disrupts our ability to apprehend the work on its own terms.” (p 46)

This is a terrific book, full of interesting insights into the consumers of great literature, art, film, and music who struggle with the sins of the artists. As a combination of memoir, literary criticism, and general observations about works of art, it's wide-ranging and readable. One very interesting theme is the contrast between men who create with women who create. Though  creative women and men can both be monsters, it’s never for the same reasons, and there are many examples to show the differences.

Another theme is how critics writing about the arts deal with the impact of a creative person's immorality or evil-doing on the audience for their work. The author tries to get to the heart of the claim that a critic can be objective and judge the art independent of its maker: “Authoritative criticism believes in the myth of the objective response, a response entirely unshaped by feeling, emotion, subjectivity.” (p. 73) Basically the author concludes that objectivity about art is a myth: a male myth. 

I enjoyed a lot of the varied accounts of authors/creators and their history:

• I enjoyed Claire Dederer’s insights about a number of creators that I haven’t thought about recently, such as Gertrude Stein, Doris Lessing, Jenny Disky, Sylvia Plath, Woody Allen, Richard Wagner, Picasso, and many more, and the varied ways their biographies might affect their audiences.
• I enjoyed it when she reminded me of the strange 1960s life of Valerie Solanis (1936-1988), author of the SCUM Manifesto, but better known for shooting Andy Warhol: in case you don’t know about Valerie Solanis, SCUM stands for “Society for Cutting Up Men.”
• I enjoyed her examination of the challenges to women who want to be both creators and mothers, and maybe do terrible things to their children (or maybe just abandon them, terrible enough). Or maybe abandon their art.
• I enjoyed her short biography of the little-known artist Ana Mendieta, whose death “makes a kind of parable about artistic silence.” A few weeks ago, I read Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez, thinking it was purely a work of fiction, but I checked up and discovered that it wasn’t simply fiction, but a fictionalized life of Ana, who was actually killed by her husband — also an artist. He was tried but let off, which is a scandal and clearly an example of an artist monster. I appreciated Claire Dederer’s insights about this particular example of the artist/husband who gets away with murder — and of a victim who was spectacularly diminished by her abuser.

The author presents the reader with many questions about those who love the works of genius/monsters, and those who justify the monstrousness. One possible explanation: “We want the asshole to cross the line, to break the rules. We reward that rule-breaking, and then we go a step further, and see it as endemic to art-making itself. We reward and reward this bad behavior until it becomes synonymous with greatness.” (p. 111) 

If you would like to read about fairness, this is not the book for you. The number of ways that society is unfair to women are unbearably numerous, from the unfairness to the victims of artists’ self-justified cruelty and violence to the unfairness to women artists. Even “cancelling” an artist for his vices isn’t very satisfactory. Quotes:

• “The very term ‘cancel culture’ is hopelessly non-useful, with its suggestion that the loss of status for the accused is somehow on a par with the suffering endured by the victim.” (p.133)
• “The violence of male artists is tied to their greatness. It’s an impulse. It’s freedom. The violence or self-harm of female artists can be a sign of sensitivity, a sign of lunacy, but it is rarely turned inside out to become a sign of creative and moral strength.” (p. 222)

In this review, I have hardly begun to explore the many-faceted content of this book. (It goes without saying that the author presents her own view of Lolita.) I’ll just leave you with this:

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of patriarchy.” (p. 221)

Next book:  Sojourner Truth by Nell Irvin Painter.

Gardens Around Me

Allium, about to bloom.

On the Road Again

It’s Saturday, and we left home at 8 AM.
Our destination is St.Louis. We are half-way there, in Indiana, at my sister’s house.

We arrived in time for a fabulous lunch.

Blog post and photos © mae sander 2024

February Videos, Murder Mysteries, and Other Reading

February has been so busy that I didn’t have time to write very many reviews. For today’s Sunday Salon (at Readerbuzz), I decided to say a few words about the books I’ve read this month, and the one streaming video series I watched. What is the Sunday Salon? It’s a place to link up and share what a group of bloggers have been doing during the week plus it's a great way to visit other blogs and join in the conversations going on there.

On PBS Masterpiece

A PBS Masterpiece Mystery: Magpie Murders (from 2022)
Two interlocking mysteries become strangely unified! Really entertaining.

Crime Fiction

Police Inspector Peter Diamond detects in Peter Lovesy’s novel Bloodhounds.
Notable: a mystery-reading society debates a vast list of classic crime fiction.
Then the crimes begin! Which member pulled off this locked room mystery?

Three novels by Icelandic Noir author Lilja Sigarðardóttir in one volume. 

I’ve read the first one, Snare, and it’s good. The focus is on the criminals.

I’ll be reading more.

Miscellaneous Reading

An early dystopian novel by Colson Whitehead: Zone One.
I’m still trying to get into this one, but it puts me to sleep.
Too bad, I liked Whitehead’s more recent books.

A fascinating essay by Japanese writer Tanizaki: In Praise of Shadows (1933).

Tanizaki described the impact of electricity on the shadowy traditional Japanese homes, as well as the effect of modern plumbing and other innovations. He wrote:

“I always think how different everything would be if we in the Orient had developed our own science. Suppose for instance that we had developed our own physics and chemistry: would not the techniques and industries based on them have taken a different form, would not our myriads of everyday gadgets, our medicines, the products of our industrial art—would they not have suited our national temper better than they do?” (In Praise of Shadows, p. 52)

Amusing and ostentatiously philosophical, food historian
Massimo Montanari presents A Short History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce.
I’ll have more to say about this one!

The history of Italian pasta has its roots in Roman, Greek, Arab, and Jewish cuisines in the Mediterranean region, which Montanari documents in detail. (He notes that pasta in China had an equally long but completely independent origin, with no influence on Europe.) The history of tomato sauce begins in Mexico long before the Europeans arrived there, and it reached Italy via Spain. The now-classic dish became totally Italian only in the 19th century. Very interesting food history! Montanari writes:

“In reality, products … never work by themselves. Cooking mixes them and puts them into play, making them interact. Basil is exquisite, but nobody eats basil by itself. Chili peppers are exquisite, but nobody eats just chili peppers. Pasta is exquisite, but nobody eats pasta without sauce. To be sure, cooking starts with ingredients but, above all, it relies on recipes. … Even the most autochthonous recipes, the ones based on ‘local’ products, are never so completely local as to exclude contributions from diverse origins.” (Montanari, p. 13)

A preachy warning? Literary Theory for Robots

Already Reviewed

Two Oz books, reviewed here: Wandering around in the Land of Oz

A book and a film, reviewed here: Reading and Watching

A book full of intriguing ideas, reviewed here: Algorithmic!
Watch out: I have another post coming about this book.

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

Grindavik, Iceland: Waiting for the volcano

The volcano near the small town of Grindavik, Iceland, is currently releasing a huge magma flow underground. No one can predict exactly where it will surface. Unfortunately, Grindavik is very threatened, and the inhabitants have been evacuated to safer locations. As of this morning they hope the eruption will be out to sea, but the people are still not allowed back home.

Our Visit to Grindavik 

In August, 2022, on the final day of our tour of Greenland and Iceland on the National Geographic Explorer, we took a bus tour of the area south of the Reykjavik airport before our flight back to the US. We spent a few hours in Grindavik: our schedule had featured a walk in the lava fields first, but we were stopped by the heaviest and most prolonged rainstorm I have ever seen!

Fish and chips, lobster soup, and a glass of water —
a good lunch before a long plane trip! That's why no alcohol for us.
The fish was fresh catch from the local fishing boats.

Adjacent to the restaurant dining room was an area where the fishermen were 
working on their nets.

We didn’t see the mountains because of the dark low cloud cover and the pelting rain.
This is the famous Blue Lagoon, which has also been closed because of the threat of volcanic eruption.
Some of our fellow passengers opted to bathe in the Blue Lagoon despite the weather: not us!

Grindavik is located on the Reykjanes peninsula near the Fagradalsfjall volcano (one of 33 active volcanos in Iceland). After eight centuries of dormancy, the volcano erupted in March 2021, August 2022, and July 2023, but these events were distant from populated areas. It’s hard to imagine how terrible it must be to have your home and entire town in such danger!

Photos © 2022 mae sander

Recent Reading and Watching

 A New Forbidden Iceland Detective Novel

Eva Björg Ægisdóttir's newly published mystery is titled You Can't See Me, and is the fourth novel of her Forbidden Iceland series. As a constant reader of detective fiction, I was surprised that the method this book uses to create suspense about a mysterious death. The chapters describe events taking place on a single day, narrated by several individuals, with alternating descriptions of a police search and discovery of a body a day later. These events take place at a very expensive and modern hotel where several generations of a very wealthy family are holding a reunion. It's not the typical hotel-mystery plot, though: it's something very different and unusual. Any further summary would spoil the effect in case you decide to read this very well-constructed mystery tale.

The author provides quite a lot of detail about the hotel, including the food and the beautiful architecture.  In the jaded opinions of the guests, there's always something to criticize, though it's clear to the reader that the surroundings and every detail are expensive and luxurious.

In the words of a hotel employee: "There’s a delicious smell coming from the kitchen. Apparently, the Snæbergs are quite traditional when it comes to food. This evening it’s fish and tomorrow leg of lamb. This might sound plain, but it’s not going to be served with your bog-standard boiled potatoes. On the contrary, the cod comes with a soy butter sauce, grilled tomatoes, olives and capers. The starters are beef carpaccio and tiger prawns. Then there are the desserts, of course. The chocolate lava cake they make here is something I could happily live on for the rest of my life. Only the best for our guests. Everything has to be perfect." (p. 108). 

In the words of one of the rather spoiled guests: "‘This all looks very tempting,’ Gestur says, surveying the breakfast buffet. He starts piling bacon, pancakes and cocktail sausages onto his plate. I help myself to scrambled eggs, bread, jam and fruit. But the moment we sit down and I take the first mouthful, I start to feel sick. Nevertheless, I force myself to eat some bread with a thick layer of jam, hoping the sugar will get my circulation going." (p. 187). 

The action here takes place in a hotel facing a stunning and very wild glacier and rugged landscapes in a remote part of Iceland, and I enjoyed the descriptions of the locale, as well as the characters' flashbacks to their lives growing up in various Icelandic towns. I especially recommend this book to readers who like an unusual setting in a country where rather few mysteries are located. 

Food that I ate in Iceland: a dessert buffet at a hotel in Reykjavik last year.
Probably not as luxurious as the food in the novel!

Interesting New Yorker Story

“The Kitchen God” by Hiromi Kawakami published July 3, 2023.

A very strange story. The narrator lives in an apartment building with numerous other women whose husbands are away most of the time. A kitchen god with three faces talks to her; some of the other women’s kitchens also have a similar kitchen god. And she’s a shoplifter for thrills. Here’s how she describes her feeling about shoplifting:

Just that morning, I had stolen a pack of plum chewing gum and an Extra-Large container of miso-flavored Cup Ramen from the convenience store in front of the train station. I was an old hand at shoplifting, a skill I had picked up in junior high. An Extra-Large Cup Ramen was a difficult target, however: the package rustled, and its size made it hard to squeeze into my bag.

Shoplifting always leaves me feeling disappointed. It’s not a “Damn, I’ve gone and done it again!” kind of thing. And it’s not that I feel let down once the excitement of the moment has passed. Or even that I wish I had ripped off something more valuable. Rather, it’s a vague, nonspecific form of disappointment.

The whole whimsical story is a little strange. Some of the strangeness is about Japanese women whose husbands work all the time, but most of the strangeness is just in the story. Strange all around, but I enjoyed reading it.

Light Reading

Reading now: another very amusing book by Jesse Q. Sutanto. 
(Previous books reviewed here.)

Moonrise Kingdom, a Film by Wes Anderson

We enjoyed it even more than we did a few years ago when it was new!

Snoopy the dog plays a role in this unusual movie, and unfortunately he dies in an unfortunate way.
Dogs are evidently often victims in Wes Anderson’s eccentric film world. (source)

There's also a kitten in a fishing basket, but it comes to no harm.

Blog post © 2023 mae sander

Shared with Elieen’s critters

And with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.