What Book Are You Currently Reading?

[thetank]

Illuminati facts and fictions by mark dice

[curupira]

"History of Japanese Culture", by José Yamashiro

This book is an excellent way to get a general view of Japanese culture, looked from the historical point of view, from its beginnings to our days.

[Tropico]

The Illiad (translated of course).

[Gaita]

[Azafell]

Kafka's letters titled "I was born to live in solitude"...A really special book.

[aimar]

Bartleby by Melville, too funny.

Also, how is a Morrissey autobiography a classic?
I used to respect penguin's authority, not anymore

[lei.talk]

...donated a volume
to the book-nook of our local ásatrú "church":

These days nearly everyone knows something about the old Norse gods, about Valhalla and Ragnarok, about Odin and Thor and Loki. The basis for movies, comic books and videogames — as well as a source for writers like J.R.R. Tolkien — they seem omnipresent. Yet almost everything we know about the myths traces back to a single work, an Icelandic handbook called the "Prose Edda", which was intended primarily as a guide for aspiring story-singers, known as skalds. Nancy Brown believes that "the most influential writer of the Middle Ages" wasn't Chaucer, or Malory or the writers of Arthurian romances but the author of the "Edda", a politically powerful Icelander called Snorri Sturluson ("son of Sturla"), who died violently but ingloriously in 1241. She has a good case for saying so.

Besides the "Prose Edda," Snorri wrote a massive compilation of 16 sagas about kings of Norway, now called "Heimskringla", or "The Orbit of the World". Scholars also increasingly credit Snorri with writing the greatest of the Icelandic saga-biographies, the "Saga of Egil Skalla-Grimsson", which follows the warrior-poet Egil's long feud with King Eirik Blood-Axe of York. And Snorri was an important enough figure to appear in a saga himself, though it isn't named for him. It is a part of the long sequence called "The Saga of the Sturlungs", some of which was written by Snorri's nephew.

Ms. Brown's "The Song of the Vikings" puts the works and the man together, trying to uncover Snorri's authorial and political ambitions, which seem on the face of it not to match. His life deserves to be better known, if only to show once again that great writers need not be nice guys.

Snorri grew up well-connected but poor. His mother frittered away his small inheritance, valued at 40 cows. But then he married a wealthy woman who brought him the estate of Borg (once the home of Egil himself). Snorri gained another estate by legal chicanery (the Icelandic national sport, judging from the sagas) and an enormous estate at Reykholt by a second relationship, this time with the richest woman in Iceland. Daughters by his first wife and three more acknowledged mistresses were married off tactically. By the time he was 40, Snorri was well on his way to what Ms. Brown believes was his ambition, to be "uncrowned king of Iceland".

Iceland, though, was a European anomaly. It had never had a king, and it didn't want one. It was, however, heavily dependent on Norway for wood and iron and everything else a sub-Arctic economy couldn't produce, and the kings of Norway didn't like Iceland's anomalous, purely political independence. In 1218, then, Snorri set off to Norway, with the aim, Mr. Brown suggests, of mending fences, flattering the king and becoming his skald.

He had the qualifications. The last section of his "Edda" demonstrates more than a hundred different skaldic verse-forms. In skaldic poetry, there is no nonsense about "free verse." According to Snorri's saga-biography, Egil was told one night by his enemy King Eirik that he could lift the bounty on his head by composing a poem in Eirik's praise before dawn — and that it had better be good. Egil managed to produce one, despite supernatural harassment. But if he had missed his alliteration on the "head-stave," or confused full-rhyme with half-rhyme (each obligatory in different places), Eirik wouldn't have accepted any excuses about a "daring breach of convention". The passing grade for skalds was 100%.

It seems, though, that Norwegian kings wanted taxes, not skalds. Snorri's trip was a failure, but even so, when he went home in 1220, he was suspected of being a cat's-paw for royal takeover, and his remaining 20 years — during which he must have written most of his great works — are a whirl of maneuvers, burnings, murders and double-crosses. In the end, Snorri's two sons-in-law came for him at his magnificent estate at Reykholt, which had fortified walls and a hot-spring bathing pool.

Snorri got no further than his cellar and when he was cornered could only say, "Mustn't strike, mustn't strike". Against descendants of the Vikings, that was never going to work. In an earlier battle, one of Snorri's killers, Gissur of Haukadale, had swung his ax so hard, the saga reports, that both his feet left the ground, like a modern tennis player serving. While Snorri was a skilled conniver and manipulator, he lacked the final readiness to fight it out that real godfathers need to have.

The "Sturlung Age" then got worse. Iceland had started off as a limited-suffrage democracy, in which all farmers had a right to attend the "All-Thing", or national parliament, as long as they were attached to a gothi, or chieftain. By Snorri's time this system had become an oligarchy of six powerful families, with Snorri's own Sturlungs among them, who divided up the chieftaincies, ran the churches and collected the tithes.

The fighting between them was marked less by battles — the iron-poor Icelanders were no longer well-enough armed for those — than by murders, ambushes and mutilations. One of Snorri's sons was blinded and half-castrated. When some of Snorri's allies attacked an old woman, local revulsion expressed itself in skaldic poems directed against Snorri. Twenty years after Snorri's death, the king of Norway was able to take over the now-demoralized country without resistance, appointing one of Snorri's killers as his jarl, or governor. Iceland didn't regain independence for nearly 700 years.

Ms. Brown's tribute to Snorri's works is well-deserved. We owe him a lot. It has to be said, though, that following the book's twists and turns doesn't make for an easy read. Most readers will find themselves referring continually to the diagram supplied of Snorri's many relations and relationships, but even that cannot keep up with all the shifts of alliance and enmity, including four men called Sturla, two Thorvalds, cousins and half-brothers, mistresses and sons-in-law and everlasting disputes about inheritance. Some say that the kreppa, the recent Icelandic credit-crunch, is yet another family saga. Perhaps that is why the modern economy became so dysfunctional.


By Tom Shippey

Dec. 13, 2012 3:53 p.m. ET

*

[Gaita]

Bartleby by Melville, too funny.

Also, how is a Morrissey autobiography a classic?
I used to respect penguin's authority, not anymore

You'd have to be a Morrissey fan to understand why.

[curupira]

I've bought these ones and I'm waiting them to arrive:

[Mason8]

I'm currently reading The book thief