Reddit reviews The complete sagas of Icelanders, including 49 tales

The Stuff the Canon misses

So like I said, the Canon leaves more out than it includes, and we’re going to talk about that a bit. There are plenty of these, left out either because they’re peripheral to the normal drive of Anglo-American literary studies, or because they look a little different from the stuff we’re used to calling “Literature.” This is, again, not a comprehensive list in the slightest, and it shouldn’t be taken as such.

Celtic literature

Ireland was very much on the periphery of the medieval world, as was Wales, except insofar as they both interacted with England. What that doesn’t mean is that there wasn’t literature being written! Wales’ biggest contribution to the literary world was its oral tradition, with the most famous, of course, being King Arthur, whose mythos didn’t get written down until much later. The Irish poets wrote vivid and beautiful poems, as well as long chronicles and epics. Here’s a nice sample from a very good translation of an Old Irish poem, “May Day”

>May Day! Delightful day!
Bright colours play the vale along.
Now wakes at morning’s slender ray
Wild and gay the Blackbird’s song

>Now comes the bird of dusty hue
The loud cuckoo, the summer-lover;
Branchy Trees are thick with leaves
The bitter, evil time is over.

While I imagine much of this gets studied in Ireland, at least in the states it often gets passed over. Ireland was not much of a political force, and in many ways its contact with the other textual communities of the Medieval world was limited. That’s why Irish literature from the period can be so weird and interesting! It’s not like anything else.

Norse Literature

While most of the Norse literature we have is in Icelandic texts from the 14th Century, that is not reflective of how old these texts are. Almost all of them are at least pre-christian, and stem from very old Oral Traditions. This collection of Norse sagas spans over 2000 pages (Also, I desperately wish to own it)! I have only read The Saga of Hrolf Kraki and some of The Saga of the Volsungs, but both were excellent, fascinating works (I’m a sucker for desperate last stands, and Hrolf Kraki has a doozy) that very few people in the USA would even know the names of. There’s also a fair amount of poetry, in genres ranging for advice poems that vaguely resemble Proverbs to mythic poems telling tales of the Norse gods. Also, if you read any of the major Norse works, you’ll almost certainly find things Tolkien stole for LOTR. It’s a good time if you’re a fantasy nerd like me

Arabic Literature

>I will make you content and die of grief. I will be silent, not grieving you with reproaches. / I knew you once when you wanted to be with me, but today you desire to avoid me. / Time has changed you, but then, everything tends towards change and passing away. J But, if in your opinion the right course of action is to break up with me, may God blind you to the right course.

Here’s just one Medieval Arabic poem I found that I though was both interesting and quite good, on just a cursory search through my school’s library. Unfortunately, I am neither a scholar of these works nor a specialist of any kind in Medieval Arabic or Islamic history. I can’t provide much of a narrative of them, but they existed, there were a lot of them. The famed One Thousand and One nights is the most well known in the west, but it is by no means alone, and was compiled starting in the 8th or 9th centuries. Unfortunately, this sort of stuff tends to get shunted into Middle East/Arabic studies departments, which often don’t interact a lot with the wider academic climate, and frequently suffer from limited funding and small numbers of students. This is something that I’ve wanted to study, but found it quite difficult to.

Byzantine Greek Literature

Poetry, both Christian and Secular, Epic, Chronical, Law, Rhetoric, Drama, everything you’d expect from Rome was kept well alive in the Byzantine empire. Much of it, particularly the emergence of vernacular Greek literature (As opposed to Attic Greek, which remained an elite language throughout Byzantine History) is painfully understudied, but it’s there, it’s interesting, and it’s important. Much of the contemporary study of Byzantine writing that does exist is in Orthodox and other religious circles, meaning it’s off the grid of many Secular thinkers, but the Byzantines maintained a culture that was unique, rich, and varied up until the fall of the empire, and even after, Vernacular Greek survived as a literary language up until today.

The Various Oral Traditions

Many of the people on the fringes of the Western World, the Norse, the Slavs, the Pre-Islamic Arabs and so on had limited written tradition, but that doesn’t mean they were without literature. Traditional recitation differs sharply in aesthetics and composition from what we think of as “Literature,” but it has been profoundly influential. Many of these texts were transmitted to us today, either because they were written down after the period you cited (See the Viking Sagas, above), or because it has continued in the form of folk practice. Traditional folk songs may not seem like familiar literature, but they can be fascinating and beautiful in ways we are completely unfamiliar with. Again, this is an area with which I have only a passing familiarity, but it’s a fascinating area of study.

”The West” and the problems with it.

So you might have noticed that I included some Eastern Mediterranean and Arabic stuff in the discussion above, and you might have been thinking “That’s not Western! /u/stormtemplar, you said this was about the Western Canon!” Well buckle up, because I told you I was gonna take on “The West” so here we go.

To speak of a “Western Literature” or “Western Literary History” is always fuzzy and problematic, but to talk about “Western Literature” in a Pre-Roman, Roman, and Early Medieval context in particular is a tad ridiculous. Most of the intellectual life and culture of the major European civilizations of the period was focused around the Mediterranean, particularly the Eastern Mediterranean. It’s easy to project the biases of today onto the past, but in, say, 200 AD, Egypt was the richest part of the Roman world, and Britan was a comparative backwater. Rome was the Northwestern-most of the great Mediterranean cities, almost every other major city in the Roman world was located in the East. Cultural production was mostly focused on the Mediterranean world, and insofar as the Mediterranean interacted with the wider world, it was much more tied to “The East” than it was to “The West.” The Greeks had a much greater cultural exchange with the Persians than the Germans.

Unfortunately, comparative studies of a Mediterranean literary culture are in their infancy, but this Southern/Eastern textual and artistic community was much richer and more vibrant than any Northern/Western one. The reason we see Rome as a “Western” civilization and not an “Eastern” or “Southern” one says as much about our biases as anything else. Arguably, modern day Turkey or Egypt have better claims to Roman heritage than, say, the English, at least in their Art and Literature.

In short, our understanding of a “Canon” say almost as much about us as it does about literature, and that’s from my Canon-favorable perspective. Many others would be happy to jettison the Canon as a concept completely, because it seems to say so little about literature and so much about personal bias. I have my issues with that school, but after writing this sort of answer, I understand where they’re coming from.

Cool beans. I've got the full five-volume set of English translations of the Icelandic sagas laying about the house, but I'm only part of the way through them. I'd be happy to help if I can.

Amazon link

Looks a wee bit pricey.