Re: Character description

Brian M. Scott wrote:
<peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
If you want my favourite example of what not to do, read a
couple of Icelandic sagas. Or rather, try to. Bit
characters show up all the time, in very annoying ways.

In the historical and family sagas a bit character may be a
significant figure in another saga and a very familiar
figure to the intended audience. Mostly, though, I think

Yes, that is much of the problem. Very minor characters being mentioned just by name, without any introduction or any hooks that my memory can use (or any hooks, I believe, that anyone's memory can use). Naked names. It is a storytelling issue, rather than a style issue, and means the stories really were aimed at a fairly specific audience: The people who lived at that time.

Modern fiction sometimes has a little bit of the same problem, in other ways, when references are made to contemporary phenomena that are very specific to the time of writing or to the culture the writer lives in. Or sometimes more than a little bit.

that it's just different story-telling conventions. Chapter
23 of 'Tristrams saga ok Isönd', the Icelandic version of
Tristan and Isolde, begins in a fashion that we'd find very
clumsy, though in this case it's not a matter of introducing
a bit character:

Nú skulum vér um Tristram þegja ok frá fóstrföður
hans nökkut segja, hinum kurteisa ræðismanni, er
víða fór at leita síns fóstrsonar, ok mörg lönd rannsakaði, ok var nú í vásum ok válkum, í straumum
ok stormum hafs ok sjófar ok meinlæti harðrar útlegðar, ok fekk hann þá engin tíðindi til Tristrams.
Now we shall be silent about Tristram and say something about his foster-father, that courteous
steward, who rode far and wide to seek his foster son, and ransacked many lands, and was now suffering the fatigue of bad weather and the tossing to and fro by the currents and storms of the ocean and sea, and the pains of hard exile,
and he got then no tidings of Tristram.
Even without the characteristic tense changes, which I've

Awkward, yes, and very intrusive, but still to me much less disturbing than my (few) attempts at reading Icelandic sagas have been.

retained in the interests of giving the flavor of the
original, this is by our standards a very abrupt, not to say
ham-fisted transition. [*]

Yes, but it is readable. The Icelandic sagas I've tried to read are borderline unreadable. And not because the subject matter doesn't interest me (I mean: viking age, sex, violence, revenge, manly men. *Yes* please!!!).

Then to see (nearly) the same thing done very well, and in
a somewhat similar style (and in the same setting), read
Bengtson's "The Long Ships".

I don't know about the Swedish original, but Meyer's English

I've read both the Danish translation, and the original Swedish, and one English translation...

[goes to check the name of the translator]

....

By Meyer. ISTR having read that the other translation is incomplete, only covering half of the novel, the first two "books" out of four. (The ones taking place in the West, in "Vesterled", and at home).

translation reads like a fairly close translation of an
Icelandic original, but with the transitions smoothed out,
the tenses made to conform to modern English practice, and

I have no quarrels with Meyer's translation. It is just about as good as it is possible to make it, I think.

I always get a feel that there is something *very* subtly awkward about the language - probably the sentence structure - when I'm reading a text translated from English to Danish, or from Danish to English or from Swedish to English, but not when reading a Swedish text translated to Danish (e.g. Bengtson or Jan Guillou). I've tried asking a couple of Danish-speaking people whose abilities with English match or (more likely) exceed my own, and they say there's nothing there, so perhaps I'm just imagining things.

One argument for me imagining it is that I actually can't read Swedish. I thought I could, but it extends only to television subtitles (and that's with English audial dialog) and to that one novel which I've read so many times that I know it by heart: "Röde Orm".

I always insist on reading English fiction (or fact) in the original language, avoiding translations like the plague, but since I can't do that with Swedish, the reason for me not noticing any awkwardness when reading Swedish translated into Danish is that I don't have an alternative to reading a translation. Thus it is a sort of wishful thinking.

I still prefer to assume that I'm just hyper-sensitive. That I'm picking something up that really does exist, but which is too subtle for most others.

the sentences built like Midwestern freight trains broken up
into manageable parts. The Magnusson & Pálsson translations
of Icelandic sagas are very similar, except that they keep
the awkward transitions.

The difference lies in how bit characters are introduced. Bengtson does it in a way that is right (note I'm not saying that there is only one way that is right). The Icelandic sagas do it in a way that is wrong, at least for those many of us who don't live in 13th/14th century Iceland.

[...]
One issue I'll have to cope with is the assumption that
standards of female attractiveness in the Viking age
differed radically from modern ones. That when a female
character is described as highly attractive, the modern
reader assumes she's quite well fed,

This one doesn't, unless 'quite well fed' merely means 'not
looking starved'. In fact, many of the women whom I
consider very attractive *would* be considered underfed in
many cultures and by many people in my own.

I don't necessarily go for the starved look, although I'd much rather have too-light than too-heavy.

when in fact that was't the case (I'm going with ibn
Fadlan on this one), so that is something I think I have
to point out, in some cases.

I'm not sure what you have in mind here, unless it's this
bit:

The Rus are a great host, all of them red haired; they are big men with white bodies. The women of this land have boxes made, according to their circumstances and means, out of gold, silver, and wood. From childhood they bind these to their breasts so that their breasts will not grow larger.

Ibn Fadlaan actually wrote only this:

Each woman wears on either breast a box of iron, silver, copper or gold; the value of the box indicates the wealth of the husband. Each box has a ring from which depends a knife.

The first passage was added by the 16th century Persian
geographer Amin Razi in an attempt to explain ibn Fadlaan's
observation, which he misunderstood: the 'boxes' were just
the large brooches that are a familiar part of the Nordic
woman's costume.

Okay. And thanks for clearing that bit up for me, by the way. I'm pretty sure I originally got confused by the "boxes", so I decided to just ignore the issue.

What about the "animals" and so on the men? I've read one interpretation that suggest they are tattoos. What do you think about that?

I don't like *all* the Rus being tattooed, but a large minority of them, that seems reasonable to me. It looks macho, the enduring-the-pain thing, and so forth.

Ibn Fadlaan also described the Rus in general in these
terms:

I have seen the Rus as they came on their merchant journeys and encamped by the Volga. I have never seen more perfect physical specimens, tall as date palms, blonde and ruddy; ...
This certainly seems to imply that they did not appear
undernourished.

The passage I'm going by is one that describes the slave girls of the Rus as looking like starved dogs, with their ribs sticking out.

It is quite possible, though, that it is an addiction of Michael Crichton in his "The Eaters of the Dead". The first few chapters are supposed to be faithful translations of the Arabic text (i.e. supposedly Crichton didn't add anything), with the rest of the story being entirely fictional, and I can't offhand recall where the description of the slave girls is.

When I re-read the story, I thought it was a fun idea to invent/exaggarate such a cultural difference. Scandinavians like their girls skinny, the Kelts like them having a medium build, and Middle Easterners prefer them slightly chubby.

Same kind of thing I've mentioned earlier, with the Scandinavians having a downright fetish for Irish slave girls. Taking something - something quite vague - and running with it.

Brian

[*] This was a wonderful excuse for doing part of my
'homework' for tomorrow evening's meeting of the local Þing.

You're welcome.

--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
.

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