Week Thirteen: The Vinland Sagas

The introduction to The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red's Saga focuses on the ways in which the two sagas are similar in storyline, which I can agree with, but I found the biggest difference between the two was in style. The Saga of the Greenlanders was quite different than most sagas we've read in that it was straightforward and focused, whereas Eirik the Red used the same narrative structure and detail that prolong simple events, like a marriage proposal, to paragraphs or even pages.

These differences resulted in a change in my perception of the story; I try to visualize what I read, and while the events of the stories were congruent, I pictured very different scenes simply because of the style of storytelling. The Saga of the Greenlanders was a lot more vague and fleeting; I pictured the main characters to be a band of travellers who never really settle in a place. There were also a lot less characters to keep track of, as the saga did not go into the usual detail describing every persons' lineage. Eirik the Red's Saga had a lot more dialogue and detail, and ths made the characters seem more settled to me. Even when they are in Greenland, they seem more persistent in establishing farms, because of the details that are omitted in The Saga of the Greenlanders.

Looking beyond the stylistic events, I found these sagas very interesting because they describe the first Europeans in America. I thought their exchanges with the natives proved beyond a doubt that they were in fact in America. There is no way they could have imagined people as savages in a different continent who sound so similar to the Native Americans without having seen real Native Americans. I think this section was also interesting because I remember learning about Erik the Red and Leif Eriksson as these great Viking explorers when I was younger; but they seemed to take the backseat to other explorers, and I wonder why their names persisted above others who undertook the same feats as they did.